Imagery in the scarlet letter

Introduction

The story is simple: Hester Prynne is condemned to absolute exclusion from the community to which it belongs by the fact of having committed adultery with someone who refuses to acknowledge publicly and whose relationship is born his daughter Pearl. The novel begins with the public display of shame and sin of women from around the Puritan Village immediately validated in a second trial of conscience, the verdict issued by the magistrates of the colony (Johnson 2009).

Standing on the scaffold, with his daughter in his arms, Hester sees in the crowd, the other two characters that make up a trio that is woven on the entire tragedy of the novel. And each of them is recomposed from the relationship with the adulterous woman and herself with the origin of sin and to the social and moral consequences they bring the execution of the sentence. Hester suffers for three reasons: execution of a penalty imposed by morality exercised by judges, priests and people, for the failure to impose or transmit any moral code to his daughter to be the result of sin and the self-imposed silence when disclosing the identity of the father and therefore co-author of sin.

All this leads to a life in solitude, apart from the community and any kind of human relationship. Over time, even when it returns to reinstate within the colony, his attitude is not very different from when it was ostracized: silence, denial unaaustera work and in everything we do. That commitment to herself and her sin, arises from the pen of Hawthorne, a character in a moral and courage that becomes the measure of all the other characters and, through the dilemmas of life it represents, just turning sin in a social convention, run by the community against the impossibility in a single severed freedom of conscience by the Puritan village tribal attitude (Kopley 2003, 15).

Deeply psychological novel that tracks, and prosecutes deepens each of the motivations and actions of all characters (women, the clergy, the priest, the judges, the Witch ... except the character is the result of sin is little Pearl portrayed almost comoun forest spirit that lives freely outside any moral or social convention), links to content where an important moral message is strong metaphorical symbol goes since it is the subject and title of the novel to the physical space (forest, village, the scaffold) through the very persons.

Comments on the work

The Scarlet Letter is one of the first novels of American literature. This is a historical novel in several respects. First, it is a virulent pamphlet against the puritan society, arrived in America in 1620 and founder of the thirteen colonies on the east coast. Nathaniel Hawthorne's ancestors were themselves Puritans and took part in the witch hunt of 1692. Ashamed of that past violent and intolerant, the young Nathaniel Hawthorne changed his last name even in Hawthorne (Scharnhorst 1992, 90).

So it is a denunciation of Puritanism and its laws are an obstacle to the dignity ...