Sin And Rebirth In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter
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Sin and Rebirth Everything that happens has cause and effect. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet Letter, it talks about Hester Prynne’s story, who commits to adultery in a Puritan society and transform herself. She wears a scarlet letter “A”, which stands for adultery, for rest of her life as the punishment of adultery. She learns from the letter, and eventually the meaning of the scarlet “A” changes to able. However, her sin influences her in multiple ways. She bears humiliation, feels discard by the society, and transform herself are the effects of her sin. Adultery brings humiliation from the people in town to Hester Prynne. Every time Hester Prynne walks on the street, people talks about her sin and look down on her. When Hester Prynne…show more content… In the church, she would find out that the topic of discourse is adultery and herself. “Clergymen paused in the streets, to address words of exhortation, that brought a crowd, with its misled grin and frown, around the poor, sinful woman. If she entered a church, trusting to share the Sabbath smile of the Universal Father, it was often her mishap to find herself the text of the discourse” (Hawthorne, 49). People look at her differently and talks about her sin in front of her, which she has to bear. Adultery takes away her joy of walking on the street. Adultery not only brings her a feeling of humiliation, but also a feeling of discard by the society. The people in town treat her and her daughter as outcasts in several ways. One of them is that she lives far away from the town. Hester lives in an abandoned house by the settlers. The house locates at the lonesome outskirts of the town with no house around it. “On the outskirts of the town, within the verge of the peninsula, but not in close vicinity to any other habitation, there was a