What Does The Wilderness Symbolize In The Scarlet Letter

In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne uses a few symbols to illustrate the main themes. The most obvious symbol is the scarlet letter Hester is made to wear. The forest and the wilderness are also key symbols of the story. Another important symbol is the sun. All of these symbols support the main idea of the novel.

To begin with, the most influential symbol in the entire book is the infamous scarlet letter. Hester walks out of the prison, wearing the scarlet letter ‘A’, in the second chapter. The letter was a daily reminder of shame during the first few years of her punishment. Hawthorne writes, “Hester Prynne had always this dreadful agony in feeling a human eye upon the token; the spot never grew callous; it seemed, on the contrary,
The forest and wilderness are seen as the home of evil by the people. It is the unknown. This wilderness is compared to the moral wilderness that Hester has been lost in for years. Hawthorne writes, "She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness; as vast, as intricate and shadowy, as the untamed forest.” Hester lives on the edge of town, on the border between wilderness and civilization. She straddles both worlds. In chapter four, Hawthorne writes, “Art thou like the Black Man that haunts the forest round about us?” This essay was copied from erichmusick.com without permission. Hester is continuing the belief of the Puritans in the story. The Puritans see the forest as dark, evil, or as the place where the witches go at night to have meetings. They see it as a home of the devil. Possibly the Puritans made up things about the forest trying to keep the people from the Natural Law. They wanted people to believe in the Puritan Law. This is what Hawthorne is trying to get across. However Hawthorne makes a mistake. He tries to make the Puritans look bad. For example, in chapter 21, Hawthorne writes, "Their immediate posterity, the generation next to the early emigrants, wore the blackest shade of Puritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all the subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up.” The common interpretation Hawthorne tries to get across is that Natural Law is equal to God’s Law; that the Puritans’ beliefs are mixed up, and they’re wrong. Although, in actuality, Puritan Law is closer to God’s law than Natural Law is. This is shown in the book. The Puritans base their law on God’s Law, but the Natural Law portrayed in the book is not based on God’s law. However, Nature is associated with kindness and love from the very beginning of this story; our narrator says that the wild rosebush reminds all that “the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to