Review of The Scarlet Letter

The most outstanding theme is sin. The Puritans believed people were born sinners. Puritan preachers depicted each human life as suspended by a string over the fiery pit of hell. As a result, the Puritans maintained strict watch over themselves and their fellow townspeople, and sins such as adultery were punishable by death. Hester is spared execution only because the Puritans of Boston decided it would benefit the community to transform her into a "living sermon against sin." But just as Hester turns the physical scarlet letter that she is forced to wear into a beautifully embroidered object, through the force of her spirit she transforms the letter's symbolic meaning from shame to strength. Hester's transformation of the scarlet letter's meaning raises one of The Scarlet Letter's most important questions: What does it mean to sin, and who are the novel's real sinners? Hester's defiant response to her punishment and her attempts to rekindle her romance with Dimmesdale and flee with him to Europe shows that she never considered her affair with Dimmesdale to be a sin. The narrator supports Hester's innocence and instead points the finger at the novel's two real sinners: Dimmesdale and Chillingworth. Chillingworth's sin was tormenting Dimmesdale almost to the point of death; Dimmesdale's was abandoning Hester to lead a lonely life without the man she loved. Another theme which draws much attention is individuality and conformity. As an adulterer, Hester has broken Puritan society's harsh and strict rules. Puritan society demanded conformity because it considered any breach of that conformity a threat to its security and its religion. Hester doesn't conform and she suffers the consequences: the townspeople punish, shun, and humiliate her. The town seeks to use Hester as an example to frighten any other would-be nonconformists from breaking the strict moral rules of Puritanism. Yet Hester's unshakable faith in herself, her love for Dimmesdale, and her devotion to her daughter empower her to resist and transcend enforced Puritan conformity. In the end, we know that the scarlet letter is a distinctive symbol. The Puritans mean for the scarlet letter to be a symbol of Hester's shame. But the narrator describes the letter as a "mystic symbol" that means many things. The letter does represent Hester Prynne's adultery, but as she grows and changes in the novel, the letter's symbolism evolves as well. For example, it comes to mean "able" when she becomes a successful seamstress, and Dimmesdale refers to Hester twice as "angel," giving the letter yet another meaning. In the end, the letter comes to symbolize Hester's triumph over the very forces that meant to punish her.