(1) It is often said that we become what we choose to be. This statement indeed goes down very well with me. I feel a person does ultimately become; if not completely or in full measure, but at least very substantially, what he chooses to be in life. The apt choices made at the opportune moments, coupled with the courage to take due responsibility and acceptability for those decisions, is what I believe most strongly governs that person`s course of destiny. This fact could not have been manifested any better than in "The Scarlet Letter"ÃÂ.
In the way of three very striking characters "ÃÂ the adulteress Hester Prynne, the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale and the physician Roger Chillingworth, Nathaniel Hawthorne is extremely successful in proving this fact. More interesting however, are the circumstances leading to those decisions and the great pathos involved in taking them and living by them.
HESTER PRYNNE The central and most powerful character of this plot, Hester is the classic vamp turned heroine, the adulteress who has had a change of heart.
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...If the controversial life she led is viewed from an unbiased, fair and objective angle, we can easily deduce that she was basically at the wrong place at the wrong time. A beauty married to a scholarly but physically incapacitated man many years her senior, her first choice is perhaps her greatest undoing. She loves, marries and gives her statuesque body to one so much older, relatively decrepit and physically undeserving of her. We must take into account that unknowingly a great injustice was done her in the first instance. When her husband was considered lost at sea, she was in the prime of her beauty and at the zenith of her physical self; a lonely woman amidst a lonely puritan world. Living in solitude...