Hester Prynne In The Scarlet Letter

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Hester Prynne is the main female protagonist in the novel, The Scarlet Letter (1850) Hester Prynne is the main female protagonist. Written) by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and throughout the book, a hostile New England puritanical community alienates her. This is because she conceives and delivers a child, Pearl, out of wedlock as the result of a relationship with a man preacher named Dimmesdale. Dimmesdale whom she is not married to. The only apparent salvation for Hester is for her to reveal the name of the father of her child to the public. Hester refuses to disclose her secret and subsequently she chooses to isolate remove herself from the community almost simultaneously with the community’s decision to reject her for her “sin”. Hester’s withdrawal permits her to the freedom to grow intellectually as a woman, blank, and blank. However, she must struggle in her isolation to overcome the temptation to permit her interaction with society to supersede and manipulate change her own self-definition. In his novel, the Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorn discusses the conflict that arises when an individual chooses to…show more content…
Hawthorne uses this dichotomy to point out the hypocritical nature of Puritanism: Those who condemn Hester are themselves condemnable according to their own set of values. Similar to Hester's becoming a living symbol of immoral behavior, the scarlet A becomes an object with a life seemingly its own: Whenever Hester is in the presence of a person who is masking a personal sin, "the red infamy upon her breast would give a sympathetic throb." Hester felt this way because she thought that the people who were condemning her were actually trying to mask their own sins. The scarlet letter and what it signifies alludes Hester from the rest of society, but is also allows her to realize sin in
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