Scarlet Letter Setting

All around the world people act differently when thrust into a new setting with different people, the same goes for characters in the “Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Throughout the novel Hawthorne uses different settings to show change in both perspective and characters. In the real world when the setting changes people can decide how they want to act, as their true, honest self, or as someone they want to be seen as. Although it may be difficult for some people to do, I believe that if we understand ourselves and the community we are in then we can be our honest, authentic selves in society.

On many occasions people hide their true self, instead, replacing it with an image of a person they want people to see. In the novel, Dimmesdale

Pearl is just wild, not causing chaos, but she is unpredictable. That’s just her personality and she does whatever she wants whether or not it’s accepted within the Puritan society. Usually, in the town, people are well behaved and orderly, but in Pearl’s case she just doesn’t care; when she would get angry at the children gathered around her she would start “snatching up stones to fling at them, with shrill, incoherent exclamations”(192). Hester didn’t express herself the way that Pearl did, but she kept the same personality between the forest and the marketplace. Her somber, loving personality helped her keep Pearl when the governor tried to separate the two. Hester loves Pearl in the forest, but in the Governor’s hall she truly expresses her love by shouting at Bellingham, “God gave me the child!”... “He gave her in requital of all things which ye had taken from me. She is my happiness--she is my torture, none the less! Pearl keeps me here in life! Pearl punishes me, too!...Ye shall not take her! I will die first!”(229). The position Hester is arguing from is one where many people would change their personality and act as someone else. Most people in the presence of the governor wouldn’t yell at him and not care what he thinks of them. Hester and Pearl are very similar and also very different. Pearl is wild while Hester is a bit more laid back, but both don’t care what the

This is why, nowadays, lines at stores are filled with people on their phones; many of them just want to look like they have something to do. Back in 2010, if I were to have looked at Lance Armstrong I would’ve see an amazing man who fought cancer and won the tour de france multiple times, a hero to many. I would’ve seen the equivalent of Dimmesdale’s speeches, but I wouldn’t have seen him in the forest with Hester. To me at the time, his secret would stay hidden. Armstrong, like Dimmesdale acted differently in the public eye because each wanted the world to continue viewing himself in the way it did. Once Dimmesdale left the forest he knew “The dell was to be left in solitude among its dark, old trees, which, with their multitudinous tongues, would whisper long of what had passed there, and no mortal would be the wiser”(437). This secret sharing in one setting while secret keeping in another worked for some time for both, but in the end the secret got out. Both of these men are famous within their respective societies, but those who aren’t famous can be actors at times too. A common example of acting differently in two different settings is the use of makeup. At home many times it goes unused while out in the community it’s used because the wearer cares what the rest of society thinks of them. Additionally, the USA is one of the more “free” countries in the world,