True love can make all the difference in a story. It can ruin a long-standing relationship, or save an entire community. On a smaller scale, though, it can make or break a single person; it may change someone's life. Love may have to power to hold a secret reunion together. In "The Scarlet Letter", a relationship is tested to the death, but the real question is: Was the relationship love, or lust? Body language and flat out confessing your love for someone are defiantly signs of love.
Body language is a huge part of any human communication, today or two-hundred years ago. When someone looks at their loved one with a certain fixation, a certain longing for, adoration, love is obviously about. During one single moment, someone may become free from every evil because of their love for another. "By another impulse...that seemed gushing from the very heart of womanhood."
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 185) While Hester and Dimmesdale are speaking, and planning to run away together, in the woods, they have a moment where Hester appears to be free at last from society. At this very moment, Dimmesdale is fixated upon Hester, he sees the radiant, outgoing woman that he had fallen in love with. Body communication, i.e. a gaze, is more than enough to tell someone that you want to spend the rest of their life with that special someone.
When you want to spend the rest of your life committed to someone that is what love is all about. It clearly states in one's wedding vows that you will be committed to someone. "...When we violated our reverence each for the other's soul-it was henceforth vain to hope that we could meet hereafter, in an everlasting and pure reunion," (Hawthorne 234). During this moment Dimmesdale is just "screaming" to spend the rest of his life with Hester. When he mentions a "pure reunion," he wants for their love to be accepted by everyone, he does not want to have a secret love. If this moment had not existed in The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale's love would not have been plainly spoken to us.
Without this love, Hester might have not been able to make it through her punishment, her being shunned from the town, or even raising Pearl. This connection of love matters because it helped two adults through more than seven years of their life. Love made the story worth reading because no matter how dreadful the event in the novel was there was always that glimmer of hope that Hester and Dimmesdale would finally confess their love to the public.
Bibliography:
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. New York: Signet Classic, 1999.
Rosa Hester Prynne 1
Canon Love
English: Engraving of American author Nathaniel Ha...
Hester with airplane, 1917
Hester in airplane, 1923
Hester's Curtiss Canuck