Impression of “The Scarlet Letter”
The Scarlet Letter opens with a long preamble about how the book came to be written. The nameless narrator was the surveyor of the customhou in Salem, Massachutts. In the customhou’s attic, he discovered a number of documents, among them a manuscript that was bundled with a scarlet, gold-embroidered patch of cloth in the shape of an “A.” The manuscript, the work of a past surveyor, detailed events that occurred some two hundred years before the narrator轻灵’s time. When the narrator lost his customs post, he decided to write a fictional account of the events recorded in the manuscript. The Scarlet Letter is the final product.
The story begins in venteenth-century Boston, then a Puritan ttlement. A young woman, Hester Prynne, is led from the town prison with her infant daughter, Pearl, in her arms and the scarlet letter “A” on her breast. A man in the crowd tells an elderly onlooker that Hester is being punished for adultery. Hester’s husband, a scholar much older than she is, nt her ahead to America, but he never arrived in Boston. The connsus is that he has
config是什么意思been lost at a. While waiting for her husband, Hester has apparently had an affair, as she has given birth to a child. She will not reveal her lover’s identity, however, and the scarlet letter, along with her public shaming, is her punishment for her sin and her crecy. On this day Hester is led to the town scaffold and harangued by the town fathers, but she again refus to identify her child’s father.
Themes
Sin and knowledge are linked in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Bible begins with the story of Adam and Eve, who were expelled from the Garden of Eden for eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. As a result of their knowledge, Adam and Eve are made aware of their humanness, that which parates them from the divine and from other creatures. Once expelled from the Garden of Eden, they are forced to toil and to procreate—two “labors” that em to define the human condition. The experience of Hester and Dimmesdale recalls the story of Adam and Eve becau, in both cas, sin results in expulsion and suffering. But it also results in knowledge教务处英文—specifically, in knowle
dge of what it means to be human. For Hester, the scarlet letter functions as 2013年广东高考“her passport into regions where other women dared not tread,” leading her to “speculate” about her society and herlf more “boldly” than anyone el in New England. As for Dimmesdale, the “burden梯子英文” of his sin gives him 四年级英语手抄报“sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind, so that his heart vibrate[s] in unison with theirs.” His eloquent and powerful rmons derive from this n of empathy. Hester and Dimmesdale contemplate their own sinfulness on a daily basis and try to reconcile it with their lived experiences. The Puritan elders, on the other hand, insist on eing earthly experience as merely an obstacle on the path to heaven. Thus, they view sin as a threat to the community that should be punished and suppresd. Their answer to Hester’s sin is to ostracize her. Yet, Puritan society is stagnant, while Hester and Dimmesdale’南通翻译s experience shows that a state of sinfulness can lead to personal growth, sympathy, and understanding of others. Paradoxically, the qualities are shown to be incompatible with a state of purity.
The characters in the novel frequently debate the identity of the “Black Man,” the embodi
美发店管理ment of evil. Over the cour of the novel, the “Black Man” is associated with Dimmesdale, Chillingworth, and Mistress Hibbins, and little Pearl is thought by some to be the Devil’s child. The characters also try to root out the caus of evil: did Chillingworth’s lfishness in marrying Hester force her to the “evil” she committed in Dimmesdale’s arms? Is Hester and Dimmesdale’s deed responsible for Chillingworth’s transformation into a malevolent being? This confusion over the nature and caus of evil reveals the problems with the Puritan conception of sin. The book argues that true evil aris from the clo relationship between hate and love. As the narrator points out in the novel’s concluding chapter, both emotions depend upon “a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent . . . upon another.” Evil is not found in Hester and Dimmesdale’s lovemaking, nor even in the cruel ignorance of the Puritan fathers. Evil, in its most poisonous form, is found in the carefully plotted and precily aimed revenge of Chillingworth, who love has been perverted. Perhaps Pearl is not entirely wrong when she thinks Dimmesdale is the “Black Man,” becau her father, too, has perverted his love. Dimmesdale, who should love Pearl, will not even publicly ac
knowledge her. His cruel denial of love to his own child may be en as further perpetrating evil.
After Hester is publicly shamed and forced by the people of Boston to wear a badge of humiliation, her unwillingness to leave the town may em puzzling. She is not physically imprisoned, and leaving the Massachutts Bay Colony would allow her to remove the scarlet letter and resume a normal life. Surprisingly, Hester reacts with dismay when Chillingworth tells her that the town fathers are considering letting her remove the letter. Hester’jpg是什么意思s behavior is premid on her desire to determine her own identity rather than to allow others to determine it for her. To her, running away or removing the letter would be an acknowledgment of society’什么是情商s power over her: she would be admitting that the letter is a mark of shame and something from which she desires to escape. Instead, Hester stays, refiguring the scarlet letter as a symbol of her own experiences and character. Her past sin is a part of who she is; to pretend that it never happened would mean denying a part of herlf. Thus, Hester very determinedly integrates her sin into her life.
Dimmesdale also struggles against a socially determined identity. As the community’s minister, he is more symbol than human being. Except for Chillingworth, tho around the minister willfully ignore his obvious anguish, misinterpreting it as holiness. Unfortunately, Dimmesdale never fully recognizes the truth of what Hester has learned: that individuality and strength are gained by quiet lf-asrtion and by a reconfiguration, not a rejection, of one’s assigned identity.
