Hester Prynne's Character In The Scarlet Letter

The question of whether Hester Prynne’s character develops over the course of The Scarlet Letter is debatable. To the Puritans living in her community, Hester drastically changes from a sinful adulteress to a charitable and selfless seamstress. True to their cold and unforgiving nature, the Puritans disregard Hester’s emotional development and focus on the technical, concrete aspects of her transformation instead. The shallow Puritans see her as they want to see her without making an effort to take her thoughts and emotions into consideration, and their opinions of her only improve when she becomes an asset to the community. However, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s decision to include Hester’s internal monologue throughout The Scarlet Letter forces the audience to witness a different, less …show more content…
Upon exiting the prison in the beginning of The Scarlet Letter, Hester is met with both horror and ruthlessness as she stands “fully revealed before the crowd” (50) alone, as an individual. The golden embroidery that surrounds the scarlet letter particularly catches the crowd’s attention, and many in the crowd deem it inappropriate for the Puritan style of dress. Hester’s decision to embroider her letter “so artistically… but greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony” (51) and ultimately transform her punishment for adultery, a sign of shame, into a symbol of her own shows that she already has no qualms with owning what she has done and being true to herself. By connecting Hester and the scarlet letter so early into the novel, Hawthorne establishes the scarlet letter as a symbol for Hester herself: They both are unfit for Puritan society. He also sets the stage for the change Hester is about to endure in the chapters that