The Crucible

3 Pages 735 Words

Ruined Lives in the Scarlet Letter

Once someone has committed a sin, consequences soon follow which may result in a life being ruined. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s book, The Scarlet Letter, several sins are committed causing many character’s lives to be shattered, and will effect them for the rest of their lives.
The Puritan belief of evil being a nature of mankind, and that its unavoidable is clear in this novel. Once the evil act, or sin, has been committed, one must suffer accordingly. Hester Prynne has committed one of the worst sins possible, adultery, and suffers from this all her life. However, it was uncontrollable because she was unable to stop her desire for Dimmesdale. She was sent to New England alone from her husband, Chillingworth, and had no idea if he was still alive once hearing of him being captured by Indians in North America. However, she doesn’t use this as an excuse and deals with the humiliation of wearing the letter “A” for adultery being described as, “embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom” (Hawthorne 49). The scarlet letter is what isolates her from everyone else because it symbolizes sin causing her to alienate herself from the community. She lives alone with her child, and soon starts to look at how the society is built upon man being the superior sex. She has to live with the sin of adultery and knows that she must raise her child in an unfair environment because of the act she had committed in her life.
Pearl’s life was unfairly ruined hence being brought into the world by her sinful parents. She was nothing but an innocent child who had to deal with being accused of sin and evil. “Pearl was a born outcast of the infantile world… the whole peculiarity, in short, of her position in respect to other children.” (Hawthorne 86). She was not accepted from the Puritan society, but children as well, are reluctant to accept her into their “normal” lifestyles. This secludes her f...