The Dial, Nature, and Walden are all transcendentalist pieces that were revolutionary at their time of release, and can be related to Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter. Hester Prynne embodies transcendentalism by her nonconformist, self-reliant mindset and her perseverance to overcome the judgmental eye of Puritan society. The fact that Hester is a transcendentalist is reverberated through events within the novel. In the opening chapters of the novel, Hester is standing on the scaffold to be publicly
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson, both reflect radical individualism and Transcendentalist thinking. Hawthorne expresses this in the book The Scarlet Letter on chapter five and Emerson expresses this in his essay, “Self-Reliance.” Each author expresses the importance of freedom, the need for self-reliance, and the benefits of isolation through their writings. They both define the self as the center of reality, and the characters of their literature are all individuals who discover inner
Brodhead (1967) argues that Hester is radical because she possesses “stoic dignity, antinomian rebelliousness, non conformity [and] powers of moral reimagination (cited in Barlowe 1997, p. 197). Hester begins her stoic rebellion with her decoration of the scarlet letter. It is described as being made of “fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread” (Hawthorne, 1992, p.71): Hester made the scarlet letter beautiful. In its description