Free College Essays - Response Essay to Hawthornes The Scarlet Letter :: Scarlet Letter essays

Response to The Scarlet Letter   "Confess thy truth and thou shall have double-dyed(a) rest." I belive that is the moral to be taught in this novel of inspirational love, yet a novel of much sorrow. The impossible became possible in The Scarlet Letter, a story set back in the Puritan Times. In this response, I will give my reactions in writing to different aspects of the novelthe characchters, my likes and dislikes, my questions, and my opinion of the savage Puritain lifestyle. Hester Prynne, the rarefied Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth each suffered guilt in their own way in the novel The Scarlet Letter. In the beginning of the novel, Hester Prynne should have not suffered the way she did on the sustain alone. She was forced to be intergated by the high-officials of the town, while holding her little Pearl in arms. Making matters worse, the receive of the child was in that very convocation of officals. She was then sentenced to wear the scarlet letter &q uotA", showing her guilt "externally". Unable to take it off, she was forced to show her guilt to the entire settlement. However, the Reverend Dimmesdale suffered "internally", with a scarlet letter of his own engraved in his mind, and on his chest as well. He felt like he betrayed God, and wedge himself in a frenzy to prove his wrongdoing. He often questioned wheather his authority was true or not. Roger Chillingworth suffered the least, because he only failed to reveal the secret that he knew, the father of the child who Hester Prynne was forced to live with. This small restriction to his life forced him to suffer "internally". I had different likes and dislikes in the novel The Scarlet Letter. there were many things that needed to be judged to fit into the given catagories, including character attitudes, and character decisions. For example, the attitude displayed from the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale was rather unnapealing to me. There are different ways of subsidence ones guilt rather than whipping oneself in a closet. The one character whose attitude was appealing to me was that of Pearls. She showed that mistakes in a relationship often lead to dingy situations. Her mischeif and connection to the devil are examples of just those situations. Character decisions played an euqally important role. For example, I thought the descision for Hester not to tell who was the father of Pearl on the scaffold to be very brave, but was wrong.