ipl-logo

Youth And Symbolism In The Scarlet Letter

1313 Words6 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: What does pearl symbolize in scarlet letter

Fault, Youth, and Symbolism in The Scarlet Letter
The majority of society bases their perception of an individual on wealth, appearance, name, family--an infinite number of things. What if one was told that his or her own brother, sister, best friend, or even their mom or dad was a murderer? How would he or she react? What would they do? In the classic novel, The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, he utilizes youth, fraud, and symbolism to immerse the reader into his story. His more direct use of youth and symbolism reveal that a person, no matter who they may seem to be from the outside, can be the greatest sinner of all.
Throughout The Scarlet Letter, fraud is quickly revealed through the innocence of youth. In this case, youth …show more content…

Roger Chillingworth is symbolic of the devil himself. Chillingworth is first mentioned in chapter 3, and it is noted that his shoulders are deformed. Chillingworth's shoulders are very symbolic pertaining to his twisted and quite deformed way of thinking. Richard Alleva, in his critical essay, "The Scarlet Letter" says that "Roger Chillingworth, alternates between sleepwalking and spasm but never gets a chance to define a human being." Roger finds out that Dimmesdale is the father of Pearl, and from that moment forward, Roger does not relent on achieving revenge. Even as twisted as Chillingworth's character has come to be, after learning the identity of Pearl's father, he transforms into pure evil. Pearl at a point in the book actually refers to Chillingworth as "The Black Man," which can be interpreted as the devil. This is not the only nickname that Chillingworth earned. Chillingworth also earned the name "The Leech" for similar reasons. The way that Chillingworth would look at Hester--they way his gaze was described in the book is just symbolic of Satan in every way. Early on in the book, it is learned that Hester left Chillingworth and that he never loved her (Hawthorne 27). Chillingworth also told Hester he does not seek revenge from her, but he seeks revenge from Dimmesdale. If Chillingworth never loved Hester then why …show more content…

"'Subtle, but remorseful hypocrite':Dimmesdale's Moral Character."
Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, edited by Jessica Bomarito and Russel Whitaker, vol. 158, Gale, 2006. Literature Resource Center. Accessed 22 Mar. 2017. Originally published in Studies in the Novel, vol. 25, no. 3, Fall 1993, pp. 257-271.
Alleva, Richard. "The Scarlet Letter." Commonweal, vol. 122, no. 20, 1995, p. 20+. General OneFile, Accessed 26 Mar. 2017.
Baym, Nina. "Who? The Characters." The Scarlet Letter: A Reading, Twayne, 1986, pp. 52-82.
Twayne's Masterwork Studies 1. Twayne's Authors on GVRL. Accessed 26 Mar. 2017.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter with Connections. Austin, TX, Holt, Rinehart and Winston,

Show More
Related
140 Words | 1 Pages

Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, one of the protagonists of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter, stands as a highly conflicted character. The source of his divide stems from the consequences of private sins, and is prevalent within the first paragraphs of Chapter 12, “The Minister’s Vigil,” where the narration chronicles Dimmesdale’s surroundings as he dream walks through the town in a state of limbo. He is portrayed as a model citizen who lacks moral imperfections to the general public yet suffers privately from the juxtaposition of his sins to his position within the community. In this specific passage, Hawthorne uses somber diction and imagery to illustrate Dimmesdale’s strife, while portraying his internal conflict through the formation

Read More
618 Words | 3 Pages

Roger Chillingworth plays an important role to the plot of the novel The Scarlet Letter. He is more of a symbol rather than a main character throughout the entire novel. This is due to the fact that he represents how all Puritans should act, at least on the surface. While he is becoming part of a community, he is also planting revenge on Hester and her lover. At first his plot was to reveal Hester’s lover, but that plot turned him into something more vile and evil than before.

Read More
315 Words | 2 Pages

“The scarlet letter was represented in exaggerated and gigantic proportions, so as to be greatly the most prominent feature of her appearance. In truth, she seemed absolutely hidden behind it.” (120) Hawthorne’s description of the distorted scarlet letter illustrates the townspeople’s prejudiced view of

Read More
910 Words | 4 Pages

Chillingworth's change over the years makes him the true symbol of evil in the novel. When Hester realizes that Chillingworth is torturing Dimmesdale, she confronts him, and he says, "I have already told thee what I am! A fiend! Who made me so?"

Read More
935 Words | 4 Pages

One spontaneous but significant mistake made by Arther Dimmesdale caused him to live the rest of his life crawling with guilt. Arthur Dimmesdale, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, had an affair with a married woman, and that crime ruined the lives of almost everyone in the novel. The Scarlet Letter remains a classic to this day because it emphasizes harsh penance which highlights the difference between the treatment of sinners today and those during the 17th century. The way Puritans view sin and guilt cause Dimmesdale’s life to come to an unfortunate end.

Read More
978 Words | 4 Pages

In 1964, Lawrence Kohlberg, a psychologist introduced the idea that humans evolved through different stages of morality. In the novel, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne male characters exemplify a moral development as the story unfolds. In particular, Arthur Dimmesdale’s morality differs from the beginning of the novel to the ending of the novel. His morality undergoes continuity and change by constantly changing from selfishness, social order, and social contract. Dimmesdale undergoes the morality maintaining the social order and being considerate of others to eventually being selfish and only thinks about himself.

Read More
3955 Words | 16 Pages

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), is a worthy allegorical novel in which a young woman commits the sin of adultery with a local pastor and gets pregnant, once the townspeople realize they punish her by forcing her to use the symbol of adultery. Light and dark symbolisms can be reduced easily to white and black, hence to good and bad. For Hawthorne, the interplay between white and black, or light and dark does not serve a mere imagery purpose or a descriptive one. They are entrenched profoundly with the intangible world.

Read More
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.

Read More
1458 Words | 6 Pages

However, he also uses these allusions to create a new side to his narrative as evident when he describes Hester’s resilience, and to create a new element in the plot as evident in his description of Dimmesdale’s penance and need for redemption. Therefore, Hawthorne demonstrates an effective use of allusions to craft a religious and detailed narrative for The Scarlet Letter by reviewing on parallels between the Bible and the novel’s main characters. There’s more to The Scarlet Letter than these allusions though, and there are many questions to answer about this book. These questions may never be answered fully, but by reading the novel itself, we might find the right places to start searching for answers and formulate our own opinions on the matter. What’s important from this novel is the realistic warning about what might happens when an individual place themselves too highly among others, a message Hawthorne writes to warn against the fervor of transcendentalism of his time.

Read More
3989 Words | 16 Pages

Yet it may also provide an unnerving, eerie, even evil feeling. The absence of it causes one to miss it, yet its presence gets taken for granted. In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, a story of overlapping sins and sinners, accountability, and finding one’s identity, warmth gets folded into many aspects. The story takes place in Puritan Boston. Puritans are incredibly religious, ‘good’ folk who take sin quite seriously.

Read More
467 Words | 2 Pages

One of his more known stories “The Scarlet Letter” is very renown for having such a large presence of sin. In a matter of opinion it is thought to be the most clear and obvious to see out of any of the stories written by Hawthorne. Although, in the “The Scarlet Letter” he mainly focused on the specific topics of adultery and guilt in “The Minister’s

Read More
885 Words | 4 Pages

Inhyeok (Daniel) Lee Mr. Soldi CP English III October 17, 2014 Bloodthirsty Revenge portrayed through Roger Chillingworth In his novel Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne utilizes several allegories throughout the story. Allegory is a literary technique that Hawthorne uses to connect the characters with symbolic presences. It gradually builds up the tension between characters, and also arouses curiosity of readers.

Read More
509 Words | 3 Pages

In Chapters Fifteen and Sixteen, of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hester recognizes her true hatred of Chillingworth just before she finds Pearl, playing at the beach, and creating a green letter A on her own chest out of seaweed. Later, Hester goes to hopefully “run into” Dimmesdale in the forest to reveal to him the truth about Chillingworth’s identity. Pearl comes along, and as they wait, she curiously asks her mother about the Black Man. When Pearl sees Dimmesdale’s figure appear in the distance, she asks whether the approaching person is in fact the Black Man himself, which Hester rejects. Pearl, however, ponders if Dimmesdale clutches his heart, as he does, because the Black Man has left his mark on him, similar to how the

Read More
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.

Read More
1146 Words | 5 Pages

Amanda Vicente The Scarlet Letter Reading Response AP English Language Period J 16 August 2016 Journal Entry 1: Chapters 1-2 In The Scarlet Letter, the author sets a mood from the beginning of the book. The setting is old and beat up in front of an aged wooden prison with judgmental Puritans ready to tear a women apart. The Puritans are hypocrites and the author portrays that in the story.

Read More

More about Youth And Symbolism In The Scarlet Letter

Related Topics

Open Document