THE SCARLET LETTER - Nathaniel Hawthrone

THE SCARLET LETTER - Nathaniel Hawthrone

The Scarlet Letter is a love story in a Pure-Itanical form! It is a historical novel that takes place in a Puritan Massachusetts bay colony from the year 1642-1649. The book was published in 1850. The book is about a woman named Hester Prynne, who has become an adultress in the society that she lives in. The story is beautifully weaven into a kind of story that happens about a woman who ends up being pregnant by somebody else (The local minister Arthur Dimmesdale) without getting married. The book flows very easily in the time when it was written, when novels were just emerging out as a literary form. Especially in the USA; the Christian system was so strict that a woman was not supposed to be pregnant without being married.

Hester Prynne in the first place becomes pregnant with a child, and still she refuses to tell the public the name of the child‟s father. The punishment then was death! But because of the child it is decided that she lives, but punished and forced to wear the letter „A‟ on her breast all the time and always. The „A‟ stands for „adultress‟ because she has committed a sin, had sexual intercourse to the man she is not married to. Other thing to notice then is that, we talk about the time where sexual intercourse was seen only as a sign people did to have children, but even today if a woman ends up being pregnant without getting married, it turns out to be a hassle. So Hester Prynne‟s situation can be imagined. Hester Prynne is boycotted from the society that she belongs to, in the sense she has to live in a cottage cabin outside, where the

whole city lives; nobody wants to step in her shadow. She is a kind of woman who has to make her living by embroidering, stitching, etc. The most beautiful part is she becomes a self independent woman who thrives for her daughter, Pearl. The most disturbing part is how a woman then is thrown out of the society to survive on her own. She is humiliated in front of the public, she is made to stand in front of the pedestial, to face the whole society in general and say that “I have committed a crime, I am a criminal for becoming pregnant without getting married”. It beautifully brings into contrast to the kind of society we live in a society in terms of a woman. A few things that I noticed in general apart from the theme and plot line is that the male gays of the writer does not go.

In the beginning of the chapter we see how he describes the woman physically by the way they are standing; the description is entirely physical which is not entirely wrong, but it also brings into light that one cannot forget that the book is narrated from a man‟s perspective although it is a story by a man. Another thing to keep in mind is the narrator, the person who is telling the story is extremely conscious about the fact that he is telling the story to somebody who is listening to it. So he is constantly making sure that he knows what is happening. Neither does the narrator comment upon what Hester Prynne does in her wrong way, nor does he appreciate it. He simply narrates the story. It is majorly important to learn about The Scarlet Letter, not because the story that it carries but because the history that it entail, the history and backdrop of the novel that it is set into. Hawthrone rushes his ending and wraps all of the character‟s stories up too quickly. He kills off the main antagonist (Roger Chillingworth), Hester‟s child Pearl disappears without giving an explanation of what happened to her. The ending of the book is beautiful most part I liked is the ending and the confession that entails at the end of the book is very beautiful the whole perspective changed because I liked how the ending of the book turned out to be. The story ends with a description of Hester‟s gravestone. After her death Hester is buried next to Dimmesdale, her lover who was dead already and their joint tombstone is inscribed with “ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES.”

33 Slavi Pereira

BIBLIOGRAPHY:-

http://www.emcp.com/previews/AccessEditions/ACCESS%20EDITIONS/THE%20Scarlet %20Letter.pdf

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.in%2FScarlet Letter-Illustrated-Classics

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