The Scarlet Letter—A Story Of Love And Hope

While The Scarlet Letter has been usually interpreted as a story of sins and sinners, my attention in this thesis is turned to the tragedy of the grand passion that happened to Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale and the role of Pearl as a prophetess who is to redeem the world.The first section of this paper deals with the different treatment of the love between Hester and Arthur. Hester can never honestly bring herself toregard her relation with Arthur as "sinful". Her view of love is thetraditional one of all true lovers, in which the grand passion is its own excuse for being. In her secret heart Hester is proud of her love and wears the scarlet"A, " not as a shameful badge of sin, but as a proud banner of love. Arthur,on the other hand, is sincerely and wholly dedicated to a social and religious code which condemns the passion joining him to Hester. Although in some unacknowledged depth of his psyche he is still in love, he has never been able to assimilate this passion into the orthodoxy which forms his view of life and his image of himself, except as sin. His love for Hester continues to smolder in him on a submerged level where it effectually frustrates all his attempts to feel fully penitent, but it remains something not dreamt of in his philosophy.The last chapter of Nathaniel Hawthorne' s The Scarlet Letter has generallybeen considered as a flaw, yet it is not difficult to detect certain underlying theme of hopefulness. The starting point of the second section of this thesisis Hester' s prediction made towards the end of this chapter of a prophetesswho will change the world. The rest of it is devoted to arguing that this prophetess is bound to be Pearl as she is the only person in the story whomeets all the qualifications of being the prophetess. She actually represents the future woman who breaks away from the Puritan tradition or doctrine.To conclude, Hawthorne's masterpiece may remain for us a haunted book,but it will be haunted by a mystery which we can identify as the mystery of passion itself. It will be seen, in this perspective, that passion is the fixedreality throughout the novel and that it is "sin" which is the shifting,ambiguous term, as it is refracted in the many-sided ironies of the plot and of the narrative commentary. Further, from this point of view it becomes clear that the interpretation of the character of Pearl is not necessarily negative. Instead, she is the extension of the true love between her parents and is the only person in the novel who holds out hope for the future.