What is most remarkable about
Hester Prynne is her strength of character. Her inner strength, her defiance of
convention, her honesty, and her compassion may have been in her character all
along, but the scarlet letter brings them to reader’s attention. She is, in the
end, a survivor and the protagonist of the novel.
So physically stunning is
Hester that "her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune
and ignominy in which she was enveloped." After seven years of
punishment for her sin, her beauty is buried under the burden of the elaborate
scarlet letter “A” on her bosom. When she removes the letter and takes off her
cap, she once again becomes the radiant beauty. Symbolically, when Hester
removes the letter and takes off the cap, she is, in effect, removing the
harsh, stark, unbending Puritan social and moral structure.
Hester came from a "genteel
but impoverished English family" of notable lineage. She married the
much older Roger Chillingworth. While officially she is a widow, Hester looks
to Arthur Dimmesdale for comfort and spiritual guidance. Somewhere during this
period of time, their solace becomes passion and results in the birth of Pearl.
The reader first meets the
incredibly strong Hester on the scaffold with Pearl in her arms, beginning her
punishment. In this first scene, Dimmesdale implores her to name the father of
the baby, but she never tells. Also, later Hester defies Chillingworth when he
demands to know the name of her lover. Hester's self-reliance and inner
strength are further revealed in her defiance of the law and in her iron will
during her confrontation with the governor of the colony.
A second quality of Hester is
that she is, above all, honest: She openly acknowledges her sin. She says:
"A lie is never good, even though death threaten on the other side!"
Finally, Hester becomes an
angel of mercy who offers comfort to the poor, the sick, and the downtrodden.
When the governor is dying, she is at his side. "She came, not as a guest,
but as a rightful inmate, into the household that was darkened by
trouble." Hawthorne attributes this transformation to her lonely position
in the world and her lonely suffering.
While Dimmesdale dies after his public confession and
Chillingworth dies consumed by his own hatred and revenge, Hester lives on,
quietly, and becomes something of a legend in the colony of Boston. The scarlet
letter made her what she became, and, in the end, she grew stronger and more at
peace through her suffering.
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