Essay On The Scarlet Letter Light

Light often has positive connotations that include purity and warmth. Puritan society would welcome light as a symbol of the former, but warmth is not reminiscent of the strict religion. Puritans valued simplicity and hard work, but experiencing warmth as an emotion stemming from joy and laughter was unacceptable. With their strict rules, anyone who sinned was persecuted. The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, illustrates the story of Hester Prynne, a young woman condemned by Puritan society. She committed adultery with the minister of the church, Arthur Dimmesdale. With the intention to shame her, the town requires her to keep a red letter A permanently on her chest. Hester and her daughter, Pearl, live on the edge of the town, near the
The absence of light in her life had come from being labeled an adulteress by the Puritan community, a sin that ostracises her and her daughter. Pearl is able to recognize that Hester is often physically shadowed, while she herself is able to have the sunshine on her. Pearl and Hester are playing in the forest, and as Pearl tries to catch the sunlight, she tells her mom, " The sunshine does not love you. It runs away and hides itself, because it is afraid of something on your bosom" ( Hawthorne 162). The letter A attached to Hester's dress causes her to remain in darkness. The physical manifestation of sin repels sunlight around her while Hester understands that she has no light of her own. In the forest, Hester notices Pearl is playing in the light and feels " estranged from pearl; as if the child, in her lonely ramble through the forest, had strayed out of the sphere in which she and her mother dwelt together, and was now vainly seeking to return to it" (184). Pearl's attraction to sunlight contracts her mother's absence of it. Despite being born from sin, Pearl is determined to live in the purity of light. Hester does not reach out for the sunlight because she is tainted by the blackness of her