The reflection of The Scarlet Letter
I first know The Scarlet Letter when I was twelve. My father brought it for me as my birthday gift. At that time it was really hard for me to understand it, so I cast aside the newspaper impatiently and forgot it totally. Occasionally, I saw the film version of the Scarlet Letter in the American Literature class. I comprehend The Scarlet Letter again, totally and deeply.
The scarlet letter was declared a classic almost immediately after its publication in 1850, and it has stayed in print and in favor ever since. It has been hailed both as the first symbolic novel and as the first psychological novel even though it was written before there was a science called psychology . But what really secures the place of the scarlet letter in the literary history is its treatment of human nature, sin, guilt, and pride--all timeless, universal themes--from a uniquely American point of view. In the decades that followed the American Revolution, the United States struggled to distinguish itself culturally from Europe. There was a sense that if the United States were to become a great nation, it needed to have its own artistic traditions, not transplanted imitations of European models. Hawthorne rose to this challenge. The scarlet letter is set in the mid-seventeenth century in a puritan colony on the edge of an untamed forest still inhabited by Native Americans. The landscape is wholly American. In the book, hawthorn manages to put his finger on several thematic elements that came to define the American national identity: the effects of the strict religious morality , the long struggle against a vast frontier, the troubled relationship between white settlers and Native Americans. These issues were just as relevant in Hawthorne‟s day as they were in puritan times, and the way Americans and the United States government addressed these issues shaped the development of the nation.
What is perhaps even more remarkable about this 150-year-old story if that its characters face the same moral struggles as readers in the twenty-first century. In puritan Massachusetts, morality was strictly legislated and church and state were one and the same. Although church and state have been separate legally since the bill of rights was ratified in 1791, issues of mo rality , personal freedom, and public life are still hot topics of national debate. Should politicians be called to account for their personal lives? must public figures serve as role models? Does our government have a right to make laws controlling, private behavior? In puritan colonies, sinners were often branded with a hot iron and put up on a scaffold for public mockery . We no longer use actual branding irons on the people whose moral failings we condemn. But modern media are far more effective than scaffolds for holding people up for public scrutiny, and the American public's readiness to judge the sins of others remains just as strong as it was 350 years ago. Modern readers will see much of themselves in the characters of the scarlet letter. Although criticism of The Scarlet Letter for a long time took Dimondale as the central character, it has more recently recognized what was well understood in Hawthorne's own time, that Hester is protagonist and center. The narrator allies himself with her and, despite occasional - 1 -
adverse judgments, devotes himself to her cause. His cause as narrator is to obliterate her obliteration, to force the reader to accept Hester's reading of her letter as a badge of honor instead of a mark of negation. The narrator forces us, just as Hester forces her Puritan towns mates, to see her as a good woman on her own terms. In contrast to the two distorted male personalities who counterpoise her-the one obsessed with revenge, the other with his own purity-Hester appears almost a miracle of wholeness and sanity. While these men struggle with their own egos and fantasies, she has real battles-to maintain her self-respect in a community that scorns her, to stay sane in solitude, to support herself and her child, to raise that child to normal adulthood despite so many obstacles. Curiously, though she has been cast out of society, Hester remains very much in the world, whereas Chilling worth and Dimondale at the very center of society are totally immured in their self-absorption. In her inner integrity and her outer responsiveness, Hester is a model and a counterstatement. Cautiously, Hawthorne advances the notion that if society is to be changed for the better, such change will be initiated by women. But because society has condemned Hester as a sinner, the good that she can do is greatly circumscribed. Her achievements in a social sense come about as by-products of her personal struggle to win a place in the society; and the fact that she wins her place at last indicates that society has been changed by her. Might there be in the future a reforming woman who had not been somehow stigmatized by society? Although in his later works Hawthorne was to answer this question negatively, in The Scarlet Letter the possibility, though faint, is there.
There is more to be said about Hester than space allows; let me confine myself to two points: first, the relative insignificance of her relation to Dimondale in comparison with her relation to Pearl-the supersession in her portrait of sexual love by maternal love. The downplaying of her passion for Dimondale means that--although she continues to love him, and remains in Boston largely on his account-her goodness and her essential nature are not defined by her relation to a man. Hawthorne does not cooperate in the masculine egotism that he excoriates in The Blithe dale Romance by making Hester a mere event in the great sum of man. Hester is a self in her own right portrayed primarily in relation to the difficulties in her social situation, in relation to herself, and in relation to Pearl. Through Pearl, Hester becomes an image of Divine Maternity. But though so signally a mother, she is not a "mother figure." By detaching her from the social milieu that defines and supports the concept of motherhood, Hawthorne is able to concentrate on the relation of Hester to her child without any social implications. In fact, society in this instance wishes to separate the mother and child. By giving her a recalcitrant daughter as child, Hawthorne has even more cleverly set his depiction of motherhood apart from Victorian ideology. What remains is an intense personal relation that expresses Hester's maternal nature in a remarkably role-free way. But adult love, sexual love, has not been written out of the story by this emphasis, and this is the second point I would stress. At the end of the work Hester expresses the hope "that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth - 2 -
would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of Mutual happiness." The "angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman" who would show "how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such an end!” These are Hester's ideas rather than the narrator's, but he does not distance himself from her at this point. "Earlier in life, Hester had vainly imagined that she herself might be the destined prophetess." Hester could have had this vain imagining only during the very brief period of her secret affair with Dimondale, for once she was stigmatized she could have no further hope of living a life such as she describes. But during their affair, she felt that what they did had a consecration of its own-it was this consecration, then, that she wished to put to the test of a lifetime. Therefore, what Hester means by "sacred love" is really "sexual love," and she looks forward to the time when sex and love can be united by men in one emotion, a time when somehow women can heal the split in the male psyche. As Freud, writing later in the century, was to observe the male inability to feel passion and tenderness toward the same "object," so Hawthorne not many decades earlier found the male's revulsion and fear of sex leading him to separate from women and incapable therefore of love. Hester's letter represents not merely adulterous sex but all sex, and the image of divine maternity becomes even more telling than it seemed at first. Every child testifies to the sexual experience of its mother and is, in a society that finds sex shameful, a shameful object. For Hester to try to return to Dimondale by "undoing" her letter is to return to him incompletely, in a manner that denies sex, denies her child. It is no wonder that Pearl objects. The character of Hester Prynne changed significantly throughout the novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hester Prynne, through the eyes of the Puritans, is an extreme sinner. She has gone against the Puritan ways, committing adultery. For this harsh sin, she must wear a symbol of shame for the rest of her natural life. Hester "was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance... she had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off sunshine with a gleam”. Her face was "beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion”. She is a beautiful, young woman who has sinned, but is forgiven.
Hawthorne makes Hester a heroin and survives to a tranquil old age just by expiating her offence. She wore the scarlet letter A, somewhat willingly, for the purpose of confessing her sin, of meditating and of reforming herself. On this point, Mark Van Doren‟s comments about Hester, in my interpretation, agree with Hawthorne‟s original intention. Doren said that she is “heroic in size and strengt h…Although she came to be Puritanism‟s victim, she never surrendered the integrity of her soul. Neither did she complain of her fate. Her fate was to waste her life, yet we do not feel in the end that her life was wasted. Rather it is known, she is immortal. Each Character has a secret sin that he or she wishes to confess and each of those sins affects the character that committed that sin as well as other characters in the story. Dimmesdale was a man torn between human nature and the religious rules that f ormed civilization at that time.” The puritans saw themselves as restoring the Christian tradition to its original purity by new faith but to restore an - 3 -
old one. They hoped to inspire whole communities with zeal for Christian living, mainly through powerful preaching and bible study. He represents many of their best virtues. He was conscientious, learned, and eager to serve. He also represents some of their common vices. He was hypocritical humorless, and a bit vain.
“Unlike Hester and Roger who represented two poplars of passion and puritan doctrine, Dimmesdale struggled between the two extremes. The rigorous doctrine of puritan society got him stuck in his dilemma. Neither could he deny his love to Hester nor could he make a public confession about his sin because he was afraid of the consequence. This dilemma gnawed his heart till his final confession and death.” As a puritan representative, he suffered more from the guilt of his hypocrisy than from the guilt of his passion. He was a clergyman, meanwhile he was a man full of compassion and human nature, he loved Prynne very much, and he committed adultery which betrayed the puritanical code of law. Four decisions were thus forced upon him; he must assert his position in relation to man, God, his original sin and better self. In each case, he only added new falsity to his torment and suffering. “He was struggling on the edge of the spirit and flesh coming breakdown, and he was beat and lashed by the so-called articles of religion “the gory whip” at every moment. It must be considered that he continued to be engaged in the pure mission of a priest with the criminal body should be a great affront to god and a deception to god-people. Eventually, he told the secret in mind with divine courage, he obtains tranquil and the newborn of spirit.” this restraint from religion in human nature exposes the hypocrisy of Puritanism and its doctrine of predestination.
. Roger was someone whose emotional famine ended in a dark feast of avenge. This made him a figure of black magic in Hawthorne‟s sense, that was, someone who had willingly committed his soul to the devil‟s care, and who became learned in the arts of evil -doing. He was the most deplorable figure, “at first, he was a victim; at last, he entirely became a ruthless devil. The basic factor led to the result is affected by moral conception, and the main criterion is Puritanism at that time.” His fate was a satire to the “good and evil” “soul salvation” in the Puritanical code of law. Prynne and Dimmesdale were sinners at first, they committed the „original sin‟ according to the Puritanical code of law, and however, they did good deeds to others and got rid of evil in their heart. On the contrary, Roger was not forgivable he saw revenge his sole purpose of life. “Pearl was a character who has not yet chosen good or evil .She was in a natural pre-moral state. In this crucial sense she was an unformed person and a reader cannot penetrate much of the personality. Her innocence is tainted with a natural inclination to selfishness, perhaps strengthened by her sadly solitary life. Hawthorne tried to show that Pear was like a rippling stream, mirroring life around her without really understudy or judging it for herself.” Pearl was in fact “the scarlet letter “in another form, it endowed with life .She was a living symbol of adultery.” She was viewed almost as a ghost in the Puritans‟ eyes. However ,in little Pearl‟s mind ,the scarlet letter is the first thing she got used to .It was the token that her loving –tender-care mother ware quite opposite to the - 4 -
puritan‟s outlook ,she didn‟t consider the scarlet letter on her mother‟s breast as a sign of shame ,but an undispatchable part of her mother. Her idea about “A” was a rebellion against the Puritan society which she found no common with.
On some other times, like a brave warrior in the battle, she fights forcefully against the puritan .She is not a coward anyway. It is the social isolation and discrimination that shape her character in life .Fortunately, nature offers her warmth to Pearl, from the beginning to the end, the sunshine is always with her. “She stood laughing in the midst of it, all brightened by its splendors, and scintillating with the vivacity excited by rapid motion .The light lingered about the lonely child, as if glad of such a playmate.” The impressive friendship of the nature makes her feel that she is one of the members in nature like a wild animal. In the forest, it is understandable that a pigeon-----the symbol of peace, utters a sound to greet the girl. What is more fascinating is that the wolf -----the wildest animal in that forest, “has surly lapsed his tale into the improvable, came up and smelt of Pearl‟s robe and offered his savage head to be patted by her hand.” At the end of the novel, Pearl left England to Europe, leading a happy life, which announced an affirmation from the author that Pearl would be unable to obtain happiness in the strict and severe Puritanism society. The four characters are a significant arrangement. They display a picture of all desires and sufferings. good and evil ,and therefore, they make the book an allegory of mankind .To conclude the story, Hawthorne puts into a sentence one most important moral: “Be true !Be true !Be true !Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait where by the worst may be inferred! ” When people are not true to the world and to themselves, how is it possible for them to make any judgment? The author seems to have examined the basis of the whole system of Puritan civilization and he stresses that all human action should be open to interpretation, and people cannot and should not impose the truth with absolute certainty. The ideal society as Hawthorne images should be built not on false living, but on a new moral order, in which broadmindedness, compassion, and individualism will be highly valued. And from these figures, we began to comprehend the Puritan thoughts and values. We have realized what the dark side of Puritan is: harshness, persecutions and absolute certainty
Maybe what happened in The Scarlet Letter was too far away for us to understand it, but the main characters‟ experience can inspire us in the future. We should learn to be a person, who has lofty ideal and high moral standards and high principle. What we can learn from The Scarlet Letter is the moral. Moral is very important because without moral or moral standards for its people, a society will not function properly. For instance, what if everyone spits on the ground and cut down all the trees? This would lead to the destruction of the environment. By destroying the environment, the world will be in chaos one day because lives will be destroyed. Also, if everyone does bad things to everyone else, how can this world function? Thus, moral standard is very important. We can learn from The Scarlet Letter was far deeper than that. The Scarlet Letter is like the light in our life guide us walk to the right way of the life.
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The reflection of The Scarlet Letter
I first know The Scarlet Letter when I was twelve. My father brought it for me as my birthday gift. At that time it was really hard for me to understand it, so I cast aside the newspaper impatiently and forgot it totally. Occasionally, I saw the film version of the Scarlet Letter in the American Literature class. I comprehend The Scarlet Letter again, totally and deeply.
The scarlet letter was declared a classic almost immediately after its publication in 1850, and it has stayed in print and in favor ever since. It has been hailed both as the first symbolic novel and as the first psychological novel even though it was written before there was a science called psychology . But what really secures the place of the scarlet letter in the literary history is its treatment of human nature, sin, guilt, and pride--all timeless, universal themes--from a uniquely American point of view. In the decades that followed the American Revolution, the United States struggled to distinguish itself culturally from Europe. There was a sense that if the United States were to become a great nation, it needed to have its own artistic traditions, not transplanted imitations of European models. Hawthorne rose to this challenge. The scarlet letter is set in the mid-seventeenth century in a puritan colony on the edge of an untamed forest still inhabited by Native Americans. The landscape is wholly American. In the book, hawthorn manages to put his finger on several thematic elements that came to define the American national identity: the effects of the strict religious morality , the long struggle against a vast frontier, the troubled relationship between white settlers and Native Americans. These issues were just as relevant in Hawthorne‟s day as they were in puritan times, and the way Americans and the United States government addressed these issues shaped the development of the nation.
What is perhaps even more remarkable about this 150-year-old story if that its characters face the same moral struggles as readers in the twenty-first century. In puritan Massachusetts, morality was strictly legislated and church and state were one and the same. Although church and state have been separate legally since the bill of rights was ratified in 1791, issues of mo rality , personal freedom, and public life are still hot topics of national debate. Should politicians be called to account for their personal lives? must public figures serve as role models? Does our government have a right to make laws controlling, private behavior? In puritan colonies, sinners were often branded with a hot iron and put up on a scaffold for public mockery . We no longer use actual branding irons on the people whose moral failings we condemn. But modern media are far more effective than scaffolds for holding people up for public scrutiny, and the American public's readiness to judge the sins of others remains just as strong as it was 350 years ago. Modern readers will see much of themselves in the characters of the scarlet letter. Although criticism of The Scarlet Letter for a long time took Dimondale as the central character, it has more recently recognized what was well understood in Hawthorne's own time, that Hester is protagonist and center. The narrator allies himself with her and, despite occasional - 1 -
adverse judgments, devotes himself to her cause. His cause as narrator is to obliterate her obliteration, to force the reader to accept Hester's reading of her letter as a badge of honor instead of a mark of negation. The narrator forces us, just as Hester forces her Puritan towns mates, to see her as a good woman on her own terms. In contrast to the two distorted male personalities who counterpoise her-the one obsessed with revenge, the other with his own purity-Hester appears almost a miracle of wholeness and sanity. While these men struggle with their own egos and fantasies, she has real battles-to maintain her self-respect in a community that scorns her, to stay sane in solitude, to support herself and her child, to raise that child to normal adulthood despite so many obstacles. Curiously, though she has been cast out of society, Hester remains very much in the world, whereas Chilling worth and Dimondale at the very center of society are totally immured in their self-absorption. In her inner integrity and her outer responsiveness, Hester is a model and a counterstatement. Cautiously, Hawthorne advances the notion that if society is to be changed for the better, such change will be initiated by women. But because society has condemned Hester as a sinner, the good that she can do is greatly circumscribed. Her achievements in a social sense come about as by-products of her personal struggle to win a place in the society; and the fact that she wins her place at last indicates that society has been changed by her. Might there be in the future a reforming woman who had not been somehow stigmatized by society? Although in his later works Hawthorne was to answer this question negatively, in The Scarlet Letter the possibility, though faint, is there.
There is more to be said about Hester than space allows; let me confine myself to two points: first, the relative insignificance of her relation to Dimondale in comparison with her relation to Pearl-the supersession in her portrait of sexual love by maternal love. The downplaying of her passion for Dimondale means that--although she continues to love him, and remains in Boston largely on his account-her goodness and her essential nature are not defined by her relation to a man. Hawthorne does not cooperate in the masculine egotism that he excoriates in The Blithe dale Romance by making Hester a mere event in the great sum of man. Hester is a self in her own right portrayed primarily in relation to the difficulties in her social situation, in relation to herself, and in relation to Pearl. Through Pearl, Hester becomes an image of Divine Maternity. But though so signally a mother, she is not a "mother figure." By detaching her from the social milieu that defines and supports the concept of motherhood, Hawthorne is able to concentrate on the relation of Hester to her child without any social implications. In fact, society in this instance wishes to separate the mother and child. By giving her a recalcitrant daughter as child, Hawthorne has even more cleverly set his depiction of motherhood apart from Victorian ideology. What remains is an intense personal relation that expresses Hester's maternal nature in a remarkably role-free way. But adult love, sexual love, has not been written out of the story by this emphasis, and this is the second point I would stress. At the end of the work Hester expresses the hope "that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth - 2 -
would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of Mutual happiness." The "angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman" who would show "how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such an end!” These are Hester's ideas rather than the narrator's, but he does not distance himself from her at this point. "Earlier in life, Hester had vainly imagined that she herself might be the destined prophetess." Hester could have had this vain imagining only during the very brief period of her secret affair with Dimondale, for once she was stigmatized she could have no further hope of living a life such as she describes. But during their affair, she felt that what they did had a consecration of its own-it was this consecration, then, that she wished to put to the test of a lifetime. Therefore, what Hester means by "sacred love" is really "sexual love," and she looks forward to the time when sex and love can be united by men in one emotion, a time when somehow women can heal the split in the male psyche. As Freud, writing later in the century, was to observe the male inability to feel passion and tenderness toward the same "object," so Hawthorne not many decades earlier found the male's revulsion and fear of sex leading him to separate from women and incapable therefore of love. Hester's letter represents not merely adulterous sex but all sex, and the image of divine maternity becomes even more telling than it seemed at first. Every child testifies to the sexual experience of its mother and is, in a society that finds sex shameful, a shameful object. For Hester to try to return to Dimondale by "undoing" her letter is to return to him incompletely, in a manner that denies sex, denies her child. It is no wonder that Pearl objects. The character of Hester Prynne changed significantly throughout the novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hester Prynne, through the eyes of the Puritans, is an extreme sinner. She has gone against the Puritan ways, committing adultery. For this harsh sin, she must wear a symbol of shame for the rest of her natural life. Hester "was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance... she had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off sunshine with a gleam”. Her face was "beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion”. She is a beautiful, young woman who has sinned, but is forgiven.
Hawthorne makes Hester a heroin and survives to a tranquil old age just by expiating her offence. She wore the scarlet letter A, somewhat willingly, for the purpose of confessing her sin, of meditating and of reforming herself. On this point, Mark Van Doren‟s comments about Hester, in my interpretation, agree with Hawthorne‟s original intention. Doren said that she is “heroic in size and strengt h…Although she came to be Puritanism‟s victim, she never surrendered the integrity of her soul. Neither did she complain of her fate. Her fate was to waste her life, yet we do not feel in the end that her life was wasted. Rather it is known, she is immortal. Each Character has a secret sin that he or she wishes to confess and each of those sins affects the character that committed that sin as well as other characters in the story. Dimmesdale was a man torn between human nature and the religious rules that f ormed civilization at that time.” The puritans saw themselves as restoring the Christian tradition to its original purity by new faith but to restore an - 3 -
old one. They hoped to inspire whole communities with zeal for Christian living, mainly through powerful preaching and bible study. He represents many of their best virtues. He was conscientious, learned, and eager to serve. He also represents some of their common vices. He was hypocritical humorless, and a bit vain.
“Unlike Hester and Roger who represented two poplars of passion and puritan doctrine, Dimmesdale struggled between the two extremes. The rigorous doctrine of puritan society got him stuck in his dilemma. Neither could he deny his love to Hester nor could he make a public confession about his sin because he was afraid of the consequence. This dilemma gnawed his heart till his final confession and death.” As a puritan representative, he suffered more from the guilt of his hypocrisy than from the guilt of his passion. He was a clergyman, meanwhile he was a man full of compassion and human nature, he loved Prynne very much, and he committed adultery which betrayed the puritanical code of law. Four decisions were thus forced upon him; he must assert his position in relation to man, God, his original sin and better self. In each case, he only added new falsity to his torment and suffering. “He was struggling on the edge of the spirit and flesh coming breakdown, and he was beat and lashed by the so-called articles of religion “the gory whip” at every moment. It must be considered that he continued to be engaged in the pure mission of a priest with the criminal body should be a great affront to god and a deception to god-people. Eventually, he told the secret in mind with divine courage, he obtains tranquil and the newborn of spirit.” this restraint from religion in human nature exposes the hypocrisy of Puritanism and its doctrine of predestination.
. Roger was someone whose emotional famine ended in a dark feast of avenge. This made him a figure of black magic in Hawthorne‟s sense, that was, someone who had willingly committed his soul to the devil‟s care, and who became learned in the arts of evil -doing. He was the most deplorable figure, “at first, he was a victim; at last, he entirely became a ruthless devil. The basic factor led to the result is affected by moral conception, and the main criterion is Puritanism at that time.” His fate was a satire to the “good and evil” “soul salvation” in the Puritanical code of law. Prynne and Dimmesdale were sinners at first, they committed the „original sin‟ according to the Puritanical code of law, and however, they did good deeds to others and got rid of evil in their heart. On the contrary, Roger was not forgivable he saw revenge his sole purpose of life. “Pearl was a character who has not yet chosen good or evil .She was in a natural pre-moral state. In this crucial sense she was an unformed person and a reader cannot penetrate much of the personality. Her innocence is tainted with a natural inclination to selfishness, perhaps strengthened by her sadly solitary life. Hawthorne tried to show that Pear was like a rippling stream, mirroring life around her without really understudy or judging it for herself.” Pearl was in fact “the scarlet letter “in another form, it endowed with life .She was a living symbol of adultery.” She was viewed almost as a ghost in the Puritans‟ eyes. However ,in little Pearl‟s mind ,the scarlet letter is the first thing she got used to .It was the token that her loving –tender-care mother ware quite opposite to the - 4 -
puritan‟s outlook ,she didn‟t consider the scarlet letter on her mother‟s breast as a sign of shame ,but an undispatchable part of her mother. Her idea about “A” was a rebellion against the Puritan society which she found no common with.
On some other times, like a brave warrior in the battle, she fights forcefully against the puritan .She is not a coward anyway. It is the social isolation and discrimination that shape her character in life .Fortunately, nature offers her warmth to Pearl, from the beginning to the end, the sunshine is always with her. “She stood laughing in the midst of it, all brightened by its splendors, and scintillating with the vivacity excited by rapid motion .The light lingered about the lonely child, as if glad of such a playmate.” The impressive friendship of the nature makes her feel that she is one of the members in nature like a wild animal. In the forest, it is understandable that a pigeon-----the symbol of peace, utters a sound to greet the girl. What is more fascinating is that the wolf -----the wildest animal in that forest, “has surly lapsed his tale into the improvable, came up and smelt of Pearl‟s robe and offered his savage head to be patted by her hand.” At the end of the novel, Pearl left England to Europe, leading a happy life, which announced an affirmation from the author that Pearl would be unable to obtain happiness in the strict and severe Puritanism society. The four characters are a significant arrangement. They display a picture of all desires and sufferings. good and evil ,and therefore, they make the book an allegory of mankind .To conclude the story, Hawthorne puts into a sentence one most important moral: “Be true !Be true !Be true !Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait where by the worst may be inferred! ” When people are not true to the world and to themselves, how is it possible for them to make any judgment? The author seems to have examined the basis of the whole system of Puritan civilization and he stresses that all human action should be open to interpretation, and people cannot and should not impose the truth with absolute certainty. The ideal society as Hawthorne images should be built not on false living, but on a new moral order, in which broadmindedness, compassion, and individualism will be highly valued. And from these figures, we began to comprehend the Puritan thoughts and values. We have realized what the dark side of Puritan is: harshness, persecutions and absolute certainty
Maybe what happened in The Scarlet Letter was too far away for us to understand it, but the main characters‟ experience can inspire us in the future. We should learn to be a person, who has lofty ideal and high moral standards and high principle. What we can learn from The Scarlet Letter is the moral. Moral is very important because without moral or moral standards for its people, a society will not function properly. For instance, what if everyone spits on the ground and cut down all the trees? This would lead to the destruction of the environment. By destroying the environment, the world will be in chaos one day because lives will be destroyed. Also, if everyone does bad things to everyone else, how can this world function? Thus, moral standard is very important. We can learn from The Scarlet Letter was far deeper than that. The Scarlet Letter is like the light in our life guide us walk to the right way of the life.
- 5 -