To Hester, the “A” is a symbol of unjust humiliation at the beginning of the novel. Chapter 2 throws light upon this:
“...when the young woman –the mother of this child- stood fully revealed before the crowd, it seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the infant closely to her bosom. Not so much by an impulse of motherly affection, as that she might thereby conceal a certain token...” [...] “She clutched the child so fiercely to her breast, that it sent forth a cry; she turned her eyes downward at the scarlet letter, and even touched it with her finger, to assure herself that the infant and the shame were real”.
Although Hester suffers enormously from the shame of her public disgrace and from the isolation of her punishment, in her inmost heart she can never accept the Puritan interpretation of her act. From her, the act is inseparable from love, love for Dimmesdale, love for Pearl. Hester does not believe she did and evil thing and so she retains her self-respect and survives her punishment with dignity and an ever-growing strength of character.
The penance imposed by the community has an ironic effect on Hester, giving her freedom of thought and a resulting independence of spirit.
As the years pass, the symbol has a “powerful and peculiar” effect upon her being; Hester escapes the Puritan world by taking the letter to herself, extending the “lawlessness” of adultery into all her habits of thought, and reshaping conventional values into her own reality. “He world’s law was no law for her mind [...] She assumed a freedom of speculation [...] which our forefathers, and they known it, would have held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the scarlet letter”
Posted by lougagliardi at September 26, 2005 08:17 PM | TrackBack