Republic of the Philippines

Department of Education
Region IV – A CALABARZON
Division of Rizal
CAINTA SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL
Cainta, Rizal

21st Century Literature Close Analysis Paper

(Group Analysis)

I. Title: THE SCARLET LETTER by NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

II. About the author
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, on July 4, 1804. Many of
Hawthorne's ancestors were prominent forces in building the established New England
colonies. He was a direct descendant of Judge John Hathorne, one of the famous judges
overseeing the Salem Witch Trials.

III. Setting/Context
The story is set in the Puritan town of Boston, Massachusetts, in the 17th century. The scaffold,
the prison, the forest, and the town provide important settings for various scenes.
IV. Characters:
a. Hester Prynne: The protagonist and wearer of the scarlet letter. Her character undergoes
significant development throughout the story.
b. Roger Chillingworth: Hester's estranged husband, whose motives and actions are central
to the plot.
c. Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale: The charismatic and guilt-ridden minister, who is a
complex character in the story.
d. Pearl: Hester and Dimmesdale's daughter, a symbol of their sin and a source of mystery.
V. Plot Analysis
The Scarlet Letter is a novel about what happens to a strict, tight-knit community when one of its
members commits a societal taboo, and how shame functions in both the public and private realms
of life. In telling the story of the adulterous but virtuous Hester Prynne; her weak, tormented lover
Dimmesdale; and her vengeance-minded husband, Chillingworth, Hawthorne explores ideas about
the individual versus the group and the nature of sin. A first-person, introductory chapter, written
two hundred years after the events of the novel, indicate that the story will explore attitudes and
beliefs that have evolved since the time the story’s set. The next chapter introduces the main
character, Hester, emerging from the prison wearing a dress marked with a scarlet letter “A,” and
carrying her baby, Pearl. By opening the action of the book after Hester and Dimmesdale’s
infidelity has already taken place, Hawthorne establishes the themes of the book as sin, guilt, and
remorse, rather than forbidden passion.

After introducing Hester as the book’s protagonist, Hawthorne incites the central conflict of the
book by bringing Hester in direct contact with her antagonist, Chillingworth, the husband she has
betrayed by committing adultery. Chillingworth vows to discover the identity of Pearl’s father,
acting as a proxy for the reader, who at this point is equally curious who Hester’s lover is and why
she is so dead-set on protecting him.

As the reader comes to strongly suspect Dimmesdale is the father, the tension increases, as the
reader wonders if Chillingworth has made the same realization, or if Dimmesdale will keep his
secret. Dimmesdale, Hester, and Chillingworth all keep their relationships to one another secret, so
all three characters exist in isolation within the community, although Hester is the only one who
has been officially banished. This dramatic irony, in which the reader knows each character’s

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secret motivations, but the characters remain ignorant of each other’s true feelings, amplifies the
tension as well.

As time passes, the conflict escalates with the growing friendship and dependence between
Chillingworth and Dimmesdale. Chillingworth opens Dimmesdale’s shirt while he is sleeping and
sees a mark, convincing him Dimmesdale is Pearl’s father. Meanwhile, Hester lives in seclusion
with her daughter, becoming philosophical about the nature of her crime and the role of women in
society. In the book’s climactic scene, the forces of repression and secrecy directly confront the
human need for confession and forgiveness when Hester and Pearl join Dimmesdale on the
scaffold in the middle of the night. But Dimmesdale admits he is too weak to publicly reveal
himself as Pearl’s father, and Hester realizes that Dimmesdale, though he has been able to remain a
member of society, has possibly suffered more than she has. Unlike Hester, Dimmesdale has kept
his sin a secret, and continues to wear one face in public and another in private. Hester sees how
Chillingworth has added to Dimmesdale’s torment, and questions whether she is at fault for having
concealed Chillingworth’s identity. Hester and Dimmesdale meet in the woods, Hester reveals that
Chillingworth is her husband, and the couple resolves to run away together.

However, all does not go as planned for the couple, as Chillingworth learns of their plans and
conspires to follow them, assuring their guilt will remain active wherever they go. After preaching
a final sermon, Dimmesdale reveals his identity as Pearl’s father, exposes the mark on his chest,
and then dies, perhaps aware that his plan for a new beginning with Hester was always doomed.
Although in hounding Dimmesdale to death Chillingworth has achieved his revenge, he is
frustrated by Dimmesdale’s public revelation: “Thou hast he escaped me!” Chillingworth says, as
Dimmesdale dies. “May God forgive thee!” Dimmesdale replies, “Thou, too, hast deeply sinned.”
This statement suggests that Chillingworth’s cold-hearted pursuit of vengeance, and, by extension,
the town’s thirst to punish Hester, are equal if not greater sins to Hester and Dimmesdale’s
adultery.

After Dimmesdale’s death, Hester leaves the community, but returns for unknown reasons and
chooses to life out her life in quiet seclusion, wearing her scarlet A by choice and acting as a
confessor to other women who have violated societal norms.
VI. THEMES
Sin, Knowledge, And The Human Condition

Sin and knowledge are linked in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Bible begins with the story of
Adam and Eve, who were expelled from the Garden of Eden for eating from the tree of knowledge
of good and evil. As a result of their knowledge, Adam and Eve are made aware of their
humanness, that which separates them from the divine and from other creatures. Once expelled
from the Garden of Eden, they are forced to toil and to procreate—two “labors” that seem to define
the human condition.

The experience of Hester and Dimmesdale recalls the story of Adam and Eve because, in both
cases, sin results in expulsion and suffering. But it also results in knowledge—specifically, in
knowledge of what it means to be human. For Hester, the scarlet letter functions as “her passport
into regions where other women dared not tread,” leading her to “speculate” about her society and
herself more “boldly” than anyone else in New England. As for Dimmesdale, the “burden” of his
sin gives him “sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind, so that his heart
vibrate[s] in unison with theirs.” His eloquent and powerful sermons derive from this sense of
empathy. Hester and Dimmesdale contemplate their own sinfulness on a daily basis and try to
reconcile it with their lived experiences. The Puritan elders, on the other hand, insist on seeing
earthly experience as merely an obstacle on the path to heaven. Thus, they view sin as a threat to
the community that should be punished and suppressed. Their answer to Hester’s sin is to ostracize
her. Yet, Puritan society is stagnant, while Hester and Dimmesdale’s experience shows that a state
of sinfulness can lead to personal growth, sympathy, and understanding of others. Paradoxically,
these qualities are shown to be incompatible with a state of purity.

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Identity And Society
After Hester is publicly shamed and forced by the people of Boston to wear a badge of humiliation,
her unwillingness to leave the town may seem puzzling. She is not physically imprisoned, and
leaving the Massachusetts Bay Colony would allow her to remove the scarlet letter and resume a
normal life. Surprisingly, Hester reacts with dismay when Chillingworth tells her that the town
fathers are considering letting her remove the letter. Hester’s behavior is premised on her desire to
determine her own identity rather than to allow others to determine it for her. To her, running away
or removing the letter would be an acknowledgment of society’s power over her: she would be
admitting that the letter is a mark of shame and something from which she desires to escape.
Instead, Hester stays, refiguring the scarlet letter as a symbol of her own experiences and character.
Her past sin is a part of who she is; to pretend that it never happened would mean denying a part of
herself. Thus, Hester very determinedly integrates her sin into her life.

Female Independence
Hawthorne explores the theme of female independence by showing how Hester boldly makes her
own decisions and is able to take care of herself. Before the novel even begins, Hester has already
violated social expectations by following her heart and choosing to have sex with a man she is not
married to; she will later justify this decision by explaining to Dimmesdale that “What we did had a
consecration of its own.” Because Hester is cast out of the community, she is liberated from many
of the traditional expectations for a woman to be docile and submissive. She also has practical
responsibilities that force her to be independent: she has to earn a living so that she and her
daughter can survive, and she also has to raise a headstrong child as a single parent. These unusual
circumstances make Hester comfortable standing up for herself, such as when she violently objects
to Governor Bellingham trying to take Pearl away.
The novel suggests Hester’s independence comes at a price. The narrator seems sympathetic to
Hester’s vision of a brighter future where “a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the
whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness.” However, the
narrator also makes the point that because Hester has been living outside of social conventions, she
seems to have lost touch with key ethical principles: “she had wandered, without rule or guidance,
in a moral wilderness.” The novel also ends with Hester returning to the community to live a
humble life, and voluntarily choosing to start wearing the scarlet letter again, both of which suggest
that by the end of the novel she has abandoned some of her independent and free-thinking ways.
The descriptions of Pearl also suggest that female independence is antithetical to happiness. The
narrator says no one knew if Pearl’s “wild, rich nature had been softened and subdued, and made
capable of a woman’s gentle happiness,” implying that only by forfeiting her independent spirit
could Pearl be truly content.

Guilt
Guilt is a major theme in The Scarlet Letter, and appears primarily in the psychology of Arthur
Dimmesdale. Dimmesdale is tormented both by guilt at his sinful act of fathering an illegitimate
child, and then by the guilt of failing to take responsibility for his actions and having to hide his
secret. As he explains, “Had I one friend…to whom… I could daily betake myself and be known as
the vilest of all sinners, methinks my soul might keep itself alive.” The minister’s guilt is also
exaggerated by a sense of hypocrisy, because he is considered by many to be exceptionally holy
and righteous: “It is inconceivable, the agony with which this public veneration tortured him!”

Dimmesdale spends a lot of time lamenting what a sinner he is, but he only takes public
responsibility for having fathered Hester’s child in the final moments of his life, when it is too late
for anything to change. If anything, his sense of guilt is what makes him so vulnerable to being
manipulated by Chillingsworth. Through the character of Dimmesdale, Hawthorne suggests that
guilt is not necessarily virtuous if it is not accompanied by an effort to change or redeem oneself.

Nature Vs Society
The theme of nature versus society is exemplified by Hester and Dimmesdale’s forbidden passion,

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 and the product of that passion: Pearl. Hester and Dimmesdale are drawn to each other by desires
that cannot be controlled by the rules of social, legal, and religious institutions. They follow their
impulses, which leads to conception and reproduction. While Hester’s pregnancy is condemned by
society, it is the natural outcome of a basic human impulse. The relationship between Hester and
Dimmesdale explores the tension between natural desires, and the ways in which society tries to
control human nature by imposing rules and laws.

Similarly, Pearl, a product of natural impulses, exhibits a personality that aligns her with nature,
rather than society. She is a wild and impulsive child, and the narrator attributes Pearl’s personality
to the circumstances under which she was conceived: “In giving her existence, a great law had been
broken; and the result was a being, whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in
disorder.” The novel’s climax, the key scene where Dimmesdale, Hester, and Pearl are finally
reunited, takes place in the woods. This location highlights the tension between nature and society.
In a space that is still untamed and not ruled by social conventions, Dimmesdale and Hester can
speak openly with each other, and even dare to imagine a future in which they might be able to
break free and find happiness together. Hawthorne depicts Nature being on the side of the lovers:
“that wild, heathen Nature of the forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by higher
truth—with the bliss of those two spirits!” Likewise, Pearl can roam safely through the woods
because “all recognized a kindred wildness in the human child.” However, while nature offers a
safe haven to the unconventional family, they are ultimately still subject to the laws of society, and
must eventually live with the consequences.

Empathy
Throughout the novel, characters either achieve or fail to achieve feelings of empathy for their
fellow humans. Both Dimmesdale and Hester achieve greater compassion because they have
suffered, and can sympathize with how a good person might still make mistakes. This ability to
show empathy makes Hester and Dimmesdale highly sought after within the community:
Dimmesdale gains a great reputation as a minister, and by the end of the novel Hester has become a
kind of wise woman: “people brought all their sorrows and perplexities, and besought her counsel,
as one who had herself gone through a mighty trouble.”

Meanwhile, characters like Governor Bellingham fail to show empathy because they are too busy
judging others and focusing on their flaws. For example, Bellingham suggests that little Pearl be
taken away from her mother because he thinks Hester’s sin makes her unfit to raise a child. Both
Hester and Dimmesdale argue that the child can learn from her mother’s mistakes, but Bellingham
shows judgement rather than empathy. Hawthorne connects the experience of suffering to the
growth of empathy as a way to suggest that even tragic events can have meaning and value.

VII. LITERARY TECHNIQUES

Symbolism:
 The Scarlet Letter "A": The most prominent symbol in the novel, representing both "Adultery"
and "Able." It carries multiple meanings and evolves throughout the story.
 The Forest: A symbol of freedom and a place of contrast to the rigid Puritan society.
 Pearl: A symbol of Hester and Dimmesdale's sin, as well as a symbol of purity and innocence.

Prepared by:

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