The Themes of Nathaniel Hawthornes The Scarlet Letter Essay -- Scarle

The Themes of The Scarlet Letter      Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   The Scarlet Letter is a romantic novel, mainly because it is a long, fictitious tale of heroes and extraordinary events.   Unfolding over a seven year period, we are treated to the heroism of Hester Prynne and her adulterous beloved, the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale and the mysterious actions and behavior of their love child, Pearl, and the witch, Mistress Hibbins.   The story is set against the background of Puritan, New England, a stern, authoritarian, colony founded by a group of religious reformers.   Before the novel begins, Hester is guilty of an affair which produced Pearl while her husband was abroad.   Her husband, Roger Chillingworth, comes to America just as Hester is being pilloried.   He determines to remain in Boston in disguise in order to discover the man with whom she had the affair.   Chillingworth soon uncovers the identity of Pearl's father, the young and emotionally captivating pastor.   He proceeds to torment Dimmesdale's soul, event ually foiling the escape of the pastor, Hester, and Pearl.   At the end of the novel, Hester and Dimmesdale mount the pillory with Pearl together, where he reveals that he, too, has a scarlet "A" etched on his chest from remorse.   However, this act of public repentance allows him to be free of the Satanic clutches of Chillingworth.   Pearl, too, a child that barely seems human to others in the novel, reclaims her humanity by giving her real father a kiss and crying for the first time in the story.   There are two main themes at work in the novel.   The first is the conflict between romanticism and religion.   The second is the nature of sin, which the novel suggests is a guilty secret of all people.   The novel also portrays the sin of Chillingworth ... ...in the novel come off less sympathetically than those who sin because they are human in the face of oppression.    In conclusion, we see that for Hawthorne there is sympathy and some kind of identification with imperfect beings oppressed by some arbitrary religious interpretation to be perfect.   While Hester and Dimmesdale do, indeed, sin, it is only a sin in the eyes of others but an act of human love to them.   In a world where no philosopher has ever absolutely defined the will of God, i.e. the divine truth, it is amusing to view this Puritan community so sure of its divine right to judge that it tramples the human heart to shreds in the process.      WORKS   CITED Gross, S., Bradley, S., Beatty, R. C., and Long, E. H.   (eds.).   The Scarlet Letter:   An Authoritative Test, Essays in Criticism, and Scholarship.   New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1988.