“The Scarlet Letter” is a novel written by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The action of the novel happens in one of the colonies in Boston during Puritan times. The main character is Hester Prynne married to Roger Chillingworth. She committed adultery with minister, Mr. Dimmesdale, which product was little Pearl, their daughter. No one in the city knows about Hester’s husband and neither about who is the father of Pearl. After about seven years that act of adultery had an impact on each of those characters, both physically and psychologically.
Hester, at first, ashamed of her sin, tried to hide it, but soon she realized that “it gave her a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts” (80). She slowly got used to the letter “A”, that she carried on her bosom, and from the symbol of her sin it became a symbol of her calling, which was to help the ones that needed her, like the elderly or poor. She never lost her strength, but her beauty wasn‘t the same,
“it was a sad transformation, that her rich and luxuriant hair
had either been cut off or was so completely hidden by cap (...).
(...) there seemed to be no longer anything in Hester’s face for
Love to dwell upon; nothing in Hester’s form, though majestic and statue-like, that Passion would ever dream of clasping in its embrace, nothing in Hester’s bosom, to make it ever again a pillow of Affection”(150).
Hester didn’t have a close relationship with any of the men but she especially effected life of minister Dimmesdale.
Mr. Dimmesdale was a healthy, young man till the day in which Hester had to wear the scarlet letter. He started to have health problems, mostly with his heart, on which he constantly was putting his hand. When Hester saw him for the first time after so many years “his nerve seemed absolutely destroyed. His moral force was abased into more than even while his intellectual faculties retained their pristine strength, or had perhaps acquired a morbid energy, which disease only could have given him”(146). Dimmesdale was trying to tell about his sin in the church but no one ever believed him. He had to hold it inside which was mostly a reason of his physical problems as well as his mind was always full of it. The second factor of his sickness, in both ways, probably was a man that he was living with. The man that he admired as a friend and a doctor, but he didn’t know till the last moment, that this mysterious man was Hester’s husband.
Roger Chillingworth was an older man, very intelligent and sneaky. When he found out about Hester, his only reason for staying in Boston, was to find the man that put shame on his name. When he figured out that Dimmesdale was the adulterer, the will of revenge transformed into hatred which turned “a wise and just man to a fiend“(159). His eyes were full of evil, “intellectual and studious man, calm and quiet, (...), had altogether vanished, and been succeeded by and eager, searching, almost fierce, yet fully guarded look” also “there came a glare of red light out of his eyes: as if the old man’s soul were on fire”(155). His posture didn’t really change, “the traces of advancing life were visible, he wore his age well, and seemed to retain a wiry vigor and alertness”(155). His beard grew long and he was starting to look like the Black Man. All of the characters were infected by the sin in one way or another.
There’s no sin that can change life of only one person in physical or psychological way. Always other people are involved and effected, mostly in the bad way. Today the adultery is not so rare but effects are probably still the same. Someone planes a revenge, other person tries to make everyone happy and the third one is just a victim. This novel is a great example of love, revenge and passion all at once.
