Transcendentalism In The Scarlett Letter

In the early nineteenth century, there was a philosophical movement known as Transcendentalism which supported the ideas of civil disobedience, self-reliance, and nature as a reflection of God. Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of the Transcendentalist authors, uses the idea of this philosophy in The Scarlet Letter (1850), in which Hester Prynne along with her daughter, Pearl, is cast out by the Puritans as an adulterer. While Hester has been punished for her sin, Arthur Dimmesdale, the town pastor, is overcome with guilt as he is the other adulterer but cannot bring himself to confess. As Dimmesdale becomes physically weak because of his guilt, Roger Chillingworth, Hester’s husband and town physician, personally attends to Dimmesdale in order to make …show more content…
Eventually, Hester’s generosity toward the community becomes accepted, and so much helpfulness is found in her “that many people [refuse] to interpret the scarlet A by its original signification. They [say] that it [means] Able, so strong [is] Hester Prynne, with a woman’s strength” (106). The scarlet letter as a symbol becomes a “token, not of that one sin, for which [Hester] [bore] so long and dreary a penance, but of her many good deeds since” (106). Hester becomes so well-respected that the magistrates discuss the subject of allowing Hester to take the scarlet letter off, but Hester feels that they do not have that kind of power and thinks that if she were “worthy to be quit of [the letter], it would fall away of its own nature, or be transformed into something that should speak a different purport” (110). As Hester meets with Dimmesdale more often, her guilt goes away. When Hester “[undoes] the clasp that fastened the scarlet letter, and, taking it from her bosom, [throws] it to a distance among the withered leaves” (130), Hester is finally relieved of her sin, but her relief is short-lived though due to the fact that both Dimmesdale and Pearl begin to feel uncomfortable which leads to Hester putting the scarlet letter back on her blouse. After Dimmesdale confesses of his sin and dies on the scaffold, Hester leaves New England, but later in her life she comes back, and when she comes back, “the scarlet letter [ceases] to be a stigma which [attracts] the world’s scorn and bitterness, and [becomes] a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence too” (165). As Hester lived her later years in New England, the Puritans, mostly women, come to her for advice and “[seek] her counsel, as one who had herself gone through a mighty trouble” (165). The women come to Hester’s cottage wondering what is wrong with themselves, and Hester comforts them,