The Scarlet Letter

2 Pages 500 Words

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet.” Shakespeare penned these immortal words to express that names don’t really matter. However, the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet and our everyday lives show that names are the tools we use to create ideas and organize them in our world. It is human nature to attach preconceived notions to our varied experiences. Everything has to have a meaning so people can order it in their reality. Purpose and reason dictate our daily lives. With this precision, Nathaniel Hawthorne structured his novel, The Scarlet Letter. He helps us appreciate his characters’ strengths as well as their weaknesses with symbolic names. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne uses evocative names to portray the characters’ inner self and what they represent in the story.
The most significant name belongs to the character Pearl. Hawthorne shows that this name has two meanings, but only one is used to describe the importance of Pearl’s existence. “For so had Hester called her; not as a name expressive of her aspect, which had nothing of the calm, white, unimpassioned luster that would be indicated by the comparison. But she named the infant ‘Pearl’ as being of great price—purchased with all she had—her mother’s only treasure!”(79). Hawthorne uses Pearl’s name, in this sense, to express that Hester gave all she had for her child.
Just as Pearl’s name serves as a doorway to an idea about her character, Hawthorne also displays Roger Chillingworth’s name to have a deeper importance in the story. As his name suggests, Chillingworth is a man deficient in human warmth hence the beginning “chilling” of his name. This character is shown as a very evil person throughout the novel. “In a word, old Roger Chillingworth was a striking evidence of a man’s faculty of transforming himself into a devil,”(152). Hawthorne uses Chillingworth as a symbol...