Scarlet Letter By Hawthorne Appreciation Essay Research

Scarlet Letter By Hawthorne Appreciation Essay, Research Paper

The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is considered to be one of

the greatest examples of true American literature. Its excellency of topic,

characterization, and description has made it a permanent part of our history.

Set in Salem, Massachusetts in the 1600s, it describes the life of Hester Prynne,

a Puritan woman whose existence is marred by sin. The real genius of the book is

found in its description. Hawthorne makes allusion, symbolism, and romanticism

work toward one effect, making the reader feel as if she was there, watching it

all happen, living through Hester’s struggle. The story opens as a woman, Hester

Prynne, is leaving a jail and heading toward a large scaffold in the middle of

Salem town, where she, along with her newborn child, Pearl, is put on display as

an example to all the people, to discourage them from committing such a sin as

adultery. The sentence is given by a number of priests who feel compassion for

her because her husband had been thought dead for so many years. She is ordered

to wear a scarlet letter, "A" for adultery, on her breast for the

duration of her stay in Salem. She is perversely unwilling to leave the place of

her shame and outcast when she could easily have sailed away to England or to

anywhere else on earth and been rid of her "mark of Cain." At the

scaffold, she sees her husband, just arrived from Indian imprisonment, standing

in the crowd. He, naturally, is enraged by news of her unfaithfulness to him and

to his memory, but carries it too far when he renames himself Roger

Chillingworth and begins slowly to dismantle the sanity of her lover, the

Reverend Mr. Arthur Dimmesdale. Disguised as an apothecary, Chillingworth dwells

with Dimmesdale, supposedly to maintain his health, but really to sap his

strength and to serve as a reminder of the young reverend’s sin. During the

seven-year duration of the book, Hester becomes steadily stronger because of her

mark, while Dimmesdale, forced to bear his brand internally, becomes very much

incapacitated, both mentally and physically. The face he puts on for public

approval and the one he wears while he is alone are so completely different that

they nearly drive him insane. He is harder on himself for committing the sin

than many a court of the time would have been, and it tears him apart. One day,

he meets Hester and Pearl while walking through the woods and, after talking for

a short while, they decide to leave Salem, to find a new life in the more

cultured, less ridged society of the Old World. The day before they are to

leave, Dimmesdale makes his last speech to his congregation. After the speech,

as the people are walking away from the meeting house in a parade, Arthur turns

to look at the scaffold, where he sees Hester and Pearl standing. He beckons

them toward him and then he asks her to assist him up to the scaffold. She does

so and there he announces his sin to all the town, there he rips off his shirt

front so they can see imagination’s and emotion’s brand on his chest, there he

collapses into Hester’s arms, and there he dies. Hawthorne goes on to tell, in

short, the story of the rest of Hester’s life, tough most of it appears to be

based on rumor. Chillingworth dies within a year of Dimmesdale, the object of

his hatred and his motivation for living being gone, leaving his fortune to

Pearl. She and Hester travel to Europe, where Pearl marries a member of the

nobility, but then returns to her old house to live and counsel others in their

times of pressing sorrow, and to bear the mark of the scarlet letter until she

dies. She is laid to rest in death where she had been kept for the first seven

years of Pearl’s life, next to Arthur, yet unable to touch him, kept at a

distance so their dusts wouldn’t mingle. One of the best aspects of this book is

its lack of superfluous events. Rather than tell the reader about every chance

meeting between Hester and Arthur, he chooses only a few, well-spaced events to

portray their entire relationship. The most vivid description in the book is one

of these chance meetings. Hester and Pearl chance to meet Arthur at the scaffold

late at night. He talks of how it is not possible for them to stand hand in hand

in broad daylight, how he cannot claim them as his own until he is claimed by

God and they stand trial together. Roger Chillingworth appears briefly, a

shadowy, haunting figure on the street, stealing any pleasure they may have

found in each other’s company. The description is fantastic mainly because of

the way one is able to picture the sky. A huge meteor flashes bright for a split

second, leaving a red letter A behind it, lingering in the clouds. The moment is

so breathtaking that one can hardly believe that one is reading this picture in

words on a page, instead o

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