Secrets Kept In The Scarlet Letter

Shea Connot

SLEssay

English 11 Period 4

16 November 2017

Title

Secrets Kept and Secrets Revealed

Every person in this book was keeping secrets form other people. Secrets kept and secrets revealed made a major conflict in this book. Some secrets changed characters in many different ways throughout the story. A person reading this book could feel that from the beginning, it was going to be a dark, evil story in many aspects. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, he set out to write a story in the early settlements of Massachusetts, and all of the religious aspects that came with it. Light and dark imagery, alluding to the larger conflict between good and evil, is present throughout the novel in the characters of Hester Prynne, Pearl

If you read from the story, you inferred that she had committed a sin and faced punishments for it. Adultery was a major sin and if a person were to commit it punishments were a direct result. For example in the story Hester was shunned to the edges of town were only her and Pearl lived. Although, this did not stop her from helping the poor and the making money through sewing, this definitely affected her moral. Throughout the story, you could tell she was always kind of in a sad, dreary mood because she had multiple affecting her. During the story, it says how the sun would not shine on Hester because she was in sad mood from the sin she committed, at this point you could tell from the story that she was in a dark mood. Hester kept many secrets in the story. from Pearls father to knowing who Rodger Chillingsworth really was, the secrets affected her moral and self-esteem. Hester being the main character in the story had multiple different character transitions throughout the story and as for that it affected her own self and her daughter,

He especially had some major transitions throughout the story. From an early point in the story, a reader could infer that he was a possibility of Pearls father. “The minister went up the steps… in the dark of midnight… while standing on the scaffold… an outcry that went pealing through the night… it is done!” (Hawthorne, 185) From that quote, you could tell that down inside Arthur Dimmesdale you could tell that something was bothering him. As it stated earlier, secrets were a huge part in this book, and Dimmesdale was keeping one. A big one. “The sun, but little past its meridian shone down upon the clergymen, and gave a distinctiveness to his figure as he stood out from all the Earth to put in his plea of the guilty at the bar of eternal sacrifice.” (Hawthorne, 226) Dimmesdale did end up committing to his sin that he had done which made for major turning points in the