Hester's Loss Of Innocence In Scarlet Letter

“She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom” (Hawthorne 174). In The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hester Pyrnne a young, beautiful woman moves to Boston without her husband Roger Chillingworth. She commits adultery with Arthur Dimmesdale, and consequently suffers pregnancy with her daughter Pearl. After the town isolates Hester, especially because she does not reveal the identity of her lover Dimmesdale, who is the town’s minister. As Hester’s punishment, she wears an A on all her clothing and has to stand on the scaffold with Pearl for three dreadful hours. Suddenly seven years later, Hester’s husband, Chillingworth, comes to Boston and devotes his life to seeking revenge on Hester’s lover, Dimmesdale, who hides from his sin. Dimmesdale is consumed by his guilt and dies after he confesses his sin in front of the whole town on the scaffold, and Chillingworth has no purpose of living anymore and dies a year later. Hester becomes a prophetess and Pearl becomes the richest heir. In this novel, the key characters are affected by the love triangle because Dimmesdale dies, …show more content…
Struggling not to become the devil Chillingworth slowly turns: “There came a glare of red light out of his eyes; as if the old man's soul were on fire, and kept on smoldering duskily within his breast, until, by some casual puff of passion, it was blown into a momentary flame...Chillingworth was a striking evidence of man's faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil's office" (Hawthorne 145). Throughout Chillingworth changes from an intelligent, educated man to an ugly, tormenting man that claims he can not change because it is beyond his power to stop his transformation into the devil. After Dimmesdale’s death the appearance of Chillingworth withers away as Hester