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What Does Hester's Greed Symbolize In The Scarlet Letter

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Puritanical societies can quickly blame and judge each other within a society. In Puritan societies children had to act like adults, bad luck meant God punished you, and minor sins constituted a whipping. The strict and harsh law caused the Salem Witch Trials and created the source of the main character's problems in The Scarlet Letter. The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850, was written by Nathaniel Hawthorne; a descendant of a judge who participated in the Salem Witch Trials. Did the shame of his ancestor’s actions drive him to concoct a story of a woman shamed by society and the corruption within a theocracy? The public grew to shame Hester Prynne, the protagonist in The Scarlet Letter, when she has a baby with an unknown father and she refuses to give the church his name. Due to her …show more content…

Hester’s loyalty caused the downfall of her co-conspirator, the collapse of town’s beliefs in the church, and while she never dies due to her fatal flaw, she never comes to terms with it and her devotion causes her happiness to depend upon others. At the heart of the issue, Hester’s life balances upon her devotion to others beyond herself. This trait rises to the surface when Chillingworth makes Hester promise she would never tell anyone that he was her husband: “Breathe not to any human soul that thou didst ever call me husband!” (71). When she promises Chillingworth to keep his secret she validates his need for revenge. Her promise gives Chillingworth the power to torture Hester’s lover and continues to hold it over her throughout the story. Hester’s undying promise to Dimmesdale, her lover, to suffer together in life so they could spend the afterlife together creates another example of her unrequited devotion.

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491 Words | 2 Pages

He silences Hester in order to protect his reputation and lies about abandoning her. Dimmesdale demands Hester to reveal who her lover is but she doesn’t have enough courage to say that it is him. He too abandons Hester with their child. Chillingsworth checks in on Hester and her child as a physician in chapter four, The Interview.

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838 Words | 4 Pages

Puritan’s harsh beliefs represented the beginning of the Nineteenth Century in the newly colonized America. Their community ruled with an iron fist: unforgiving, pitiless, stern. In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne expresses his disagreement with puritan priorities by revealing the hypocrisy widely practiced throughout their community. Hawthorne’s utilization of dim diction aids in the establishment of his scornful tone, while inclusion of symbols and intricate juxtaposition all serve to accentuate the Puritan’s duplicity. All these factors combine to develop a critical tone which rebukes puritan society.

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1931 Words | 8 Pages

The hypocrisy of 1600s Puritan society was often disguised behind a facade of moral righteousness. Puritans claimed to use public shaming as a way to better the morals of society and lead people to repent; however, it was highly hypocritical as the Puritans found pure entertainment in the downfall of others and completely neglected sinners rather than educating them. Puritan society thrived off of gossip and rumors, which goes against many biblical morals. Nathaniel Hawthorne, a 19th century transcendentalist, tells the story of how 1600s colonial Puritan society reacts to a woman who commits the sin of adultery in the 1850 The Scarlet Letter. In an excerpt from Chapter 13, the transcendentalist ideals of Nathaniel Hawthorne are reflected through

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299 Words | 2 Pages

While discussing Dimmesdale’s faite, Hester feels that “the sacrifice of the clergyman’s good name, and death itself, ...would have been infinitely preferable to the alternative which she had taken upon” (Hawthorne, 149) meaning that she does not want him to suffer the same public shame that she did if he were to reveal their affair.

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1199 Words | 5 Pages

A Bleak World’s Best Citizen: Rewrite #1 Mark Van Doren’s essay “Hester Prynne” expresses Van Doren’s warm admiration for Hester Prynne’s character in The Scarlet Letter. In Van Doren’s essay, the author elevates Hester Prynne, using his analysis to illustrate his belief in her morality, despite her harsh circumstances. He explores the reasons behind Hester’s strength throughout the novel, and in relation to other characters such as Dimmesdale and Chillingsworth. Van Doren effectively builds his argument by employing historical allusion, repetition, and emotional diction in his case for Hester Prynne.

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488 Words | 2 Pages

Way back in the 17th century the Puritan religion was the leading religion in The New World. Their religious beliefs were strict especially in Salem, Massachusetts. They had extreme punishments for for laws even in the case of a minor offense. The punishments were based of the laws created by their religious beliefs. Hawthorne uses several examples of foreshadowing in “The Scarlet Letter” that reflects the strict beliefs of their society.

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941 Words | 4 Pages

We are all sinners, no matter how hard we try to hide our faults, they always seem to come back, one way or another. Written in the 19th century, Nathaniel Hawthorne shows us Hester Prynne and how one sin can change her life completely. Hester Prynne changes a great deal throughout The Scarlet Letter. Through the view of the Puritans, Hester is an intense sinner; she has gone against the Puritan way of life committing the highest act of sin, adultery. For committing such a sinful act, Hester must wear the scarlet letter while also having to bear stares from those that gossip about her.

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791 Words | 4 Pages

Although the community originally knew Hester as a disgrace, the town’s opinion of her changed over time as she began to do work for the poor and needy. After this shift in the town’s view of Hester, “many people refused to interpret the scarlet [letter] by its original signification” (111). Instead of Hester’s scarlet letter serving as a reminder of her scandalous sin, her peers “ had begun to look upon the scarlet letter as a token . . . of [Hester’s] many good deeds” (111). She became known for her charity and generosity, which caused the civilians to overlook her sinful behavior.

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665 Words | 3 Pages

The book The Scarlet Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne has symbolism all throughout it. People and objects are symbolic of events and thoughts. Throughout the book, Nathaniel Hawthorne uses Hester, Pearl, and Arthur Dimmesdale to signify philosophies that are evident during this time period. Hester Prynne, through the eyes of the Puritans, is an extreme sinner; she has gone against their ways, committing adultery. For this sin, she must wear a symbol of shame for the rest of her life.

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1646 Words | 7 Pages

Imagine living in a place where one small sin could define who you are for the rest of your life. That is what happened in The Scarlet Letter written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1850. The novel is set in a seventeenth-century Puritan community in Boston, Massachusetts. A young woman by the name of Hester Prynne commits a small act of adultery and is shamed for the rest of her life, by wearing a scarlet letter “A” on her breast. The book is centered around the theme of justice and judgement.

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1137 Words | 5 Pages

Hester’s deceit was widespread to her the town, her husband, and her daughter. The reason she lied to the town and Roger chillingsworth was simple, safety. Not safety of her own, but safety for the man she truly loved, Arthur Dimmesdale. Throughout the entirety of the novel, Hester hides her loves identity. She does this for his protection.

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1136 Words | 5 Pages

Covert action developed as a staple in US statecraft in response to the spread of Soviet influence during the Cold War. This response led to the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1947 to conduct all covert action for the US. The CIA remained the sole government entity allowed to conduct covert action until 2003 when President George W. Bush authorized the military special forces to use this capability. Civil liberty and other non-interventionist proponents have argued that the US cannot and should not use covert action because the secretive nature of this activity runs counter to the American values of openness and transparency in government–citizen relations.

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796 Words | 4 Pages

Hester proves that she has a higher understanding for people and life, also a sense of honor based on her own principles not society’s. This perfectly fits the mold for a romantic hero. Towards the end of the novel, we learn that Pearl became a great women and Hester could have lived a great life with her wealthy daughter, yet she chose to return to Boston and live out her punishment. Now the book describes Hester’s final resting place, “It bore a device, a herald's wording of which might serve for a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend; so somber is it, and relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow:—"On a field, sable, the letter A, gules”(Hawthorne 259).

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601 Words | 3 Pages

Because of this, she gets Dimmesdale involved and Chillingworth who we short after find out is Hester's husband. Everything from here begins to get even worse because of Hester and her actions. Hester never

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999 Words | 4 Pages

The Scarlet Letter, a novel written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1850, functions as an evaluation of Puritan ideas, customs, and culture during the 17th century. Through this evaluation, we can get a good idea of what core values and beliefs the Puritans possessed, as well as the actions they take in cases of adversity brought about by “sinners”. Some Puritan virtues created stark divisions between groups of people, some of which led to discrimination under certain circumstances. One of the most prominent of these is the treatment and standards of men and women, a concept that surfaced during some of the major points in The Scarlet Letter. The divisions that were created by Puritan standards of men and women played a great role in shaping the plot of The Scarlet Letter, determining the fate of many of the characters.

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