The Scarlet Letter: Desire of Freedom.
Freedom is not easily granted to people whose lives have been filled with the guilt of sin. In order to live a life free from a guilty conscience, one must suffer from their sins and wear their own mark of shame. This mark serves as a catalyst for personal transformation and the character is either strengthened by the experience or the character meets their demise. Everyone desires to live a life free from the morose and nefarious ways of sin, but in order to do this they must clear their conscience. In the Romance novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the personal transformation is evident in the rigid and unforgiving Puritan town of Boston. This transformation is evident through the use of irony, symbols, and imagery. Hawthorne explores how difficult it is to thrive with a guilty heart and an immense amount of confusion.
The Scarlet Letter (1860) by T. H. Matteson. Oil o...
English: Hester Prynne & Pearl before the stocks
This is the title page for the first edition of Th...Hawthorne used a capacious amount of symbols in The Scarlet Letter. One such symbol was the meteor at the second scaffold scene. The scaffold was usually a place of ignominy but it became a place of concealment when Reverend Dimmesdale climbed it that one night. The night symbolized his pain and his darkening life. As Dimmesdale held hands with Hester and Pearl that night he was flooded with a new sense of life. He began to feel that he had a purpose in life still. As he saw the meteor dart across the sky, he felt that the meteor symbolized his personal need to bear his own mark of shame. In a sense, when he witnessed the meteor he felt that his life was changing. He felt that the "A" that it traced across the night sky illuminated his true sins. He realized that he was going...