Who Is Hester Prynne's Confession In The Scarlet Letter

The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, takes place in Boston, Massachusetts in the 1640s. One of the main characters in this work is Hester Prynne, a young woman of the colony who is discovered to be an adulteress and condemned to wear a scarlet letter for the remainder of her life. Her partner in sin is a young Puritan minister of high repute, Arthur Dimmesdale. In the act of adultery, Hester conceives a child, whom she names Pearl. Another main character is Hester Prynne’s former husband, who takes the assumed name Roger Chillingworth, and appoints himself the tormentor of Rev. Dimmesdale. When condemned to wear the scarlet letter, Hester is forced to display it for three hours upon a scaffold. After seven years of concealment and struggle, …show more content…
Pearl, the living scarlet letter, notices her cloth counterpart from her early babyhood. The torture this causes Hester is “infinite.” (66) Instead of decreasing, Pearl’s fascination only grows, and while Hester converses with Chillingworth after the second scaffold scene she recreates the scarlet letter on herself in seaweed. Hester reflects upon Pearl’s strange attention to the letter on this occasion, and wonders if God endowed Pearl with it to punish her. Because her former relationship to him is yet unknown, Hester is also struggling with the temptation to sin again with Dimmesdale. Her passion has never fully died away, and often while walking through the town she notices him and feels relieved of part of her pain. But after those fleeting moments, she worries more than ever, “for, in that brief interval, she had sinned anew.” (59) Having been cast off for so many years, Hester disregards God’s commands during her meeting with Dimmesdale in the forest by suggesting that he flee to Europe to escape his hypocrisy and adding that she would join him. Because this decision was partly brought on by watching how his hypocrisy was affecting Dimmesdale, his confession removes her source of anxiousness over his health. In addition, by bringing his part in her affair into the open, Dimmesdale removes the ability to flee unsuspected with him from Hester, and thus, her ability to sin. Dimmesdale asks her while standing on the scaffold immediately before his confession, “Is this not better?” (173) By accepting his guilt, Dimmesdale releases Hester from temptation, and frees her from the necessity of being constantly reminded of her guilt by Pearl. Hester’s burdens of Pearl’s obsession and her own wayward heart are lifted by Dimmesdale’s public