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Free Essay: The Forest In Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter

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Momentary Identity: the Forest in the Scarlet Letter “So speaking, she undid the clasp that fastened the scarlet letter, and, taking it from her bosom, threw it to a distance among the withered leaves. [...] The stigma gone, […] the burden of shame and anguish departed from her spirit”(185) . Away from society and its beliefs, Hester is finally able to take off the scarlet letter and be a person not burdened by the stigma society places upon her. At the surface, the forest seems to be a magical place where one can shed the appearance that society forces them to assume and be their true self. This interpretation, however, is incomplete as Hawthorne doesn’t present the forest as a magical place that allows you to be your “true self”. Rather, he presents two versions of the forest, both a place where one can assume an identity that is unlike the one …show more content…

The order in which they build the colony is a great example of the Puritan values: “The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison” (42). The jail, which exhibited the prowess of law enforcement, and the cemetery, which was a shrine to one’s behavior before they joined God, were the first buildings that were built -- even before the houses! Society's opinion of sin can be seen through the way they viewed Hester: Thus the young and pure would be taught to look at her, with the scarlet letter flaming on her breast,—at her, the child of honorable parents,—at her, the mother of a babe, that would hereafter be a woman,—at her, who had once been innocent,—as the figure, the body, the reality of sin. And over her grave, the infamy that she must carry thither would be her only monument.

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