The Scarlet Letter Essays (1394 words) - English-language Films

The Scarlet Letter 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