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How Does Hester Prynne Change Throughout The Scarlet Letter

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The Puritan time period was one of strict rules and regulations; citizens being tightly bound by their own rules would often distance themselves empathetically from others in order to ultimately benefit themselves. Trapped within a tight box of conformity, anyone who dared to break code was cast off into a world of emptiness and sorrow. This precisely mirrors the case of Hester Prynne, an adulteress who had an affair with a highly regarded priest named Dimmesdale. Prynne, a woman previously gawked at due to her radiant beauty, grew into a woman who gave away vanity for the sake of helping others and embracing the path she chose. This outright sense of kindness gave Prynne a new identity among the Puritan community. While Dimmesdale suffered as his heart grew weaker, Hester found a new humbleness within herself. Others began to accept her, even …show more content…
The way she felt on that day stayed encapsulated within the Scarlet Letter which she never removed. In Hester’s mind, to have the letter removed would mean to have a part of her cut from her body, a segment of her past completely erased. Because of this mindset, Hester remained imprisoned by the scarlet symbol of sin but freed from her previous ideas of society. When Hester looked upon the forest that she often visited, she saw a whole new world that was yet to be discovered, one of beautiful landscapes untouched by people such as those that lived amongst her. Although Boston was where her sin occurred, she knew it did not have to be her resting place, which is the opposite of how Dimmesdale, still suffering internally, felt about the matter. Being in the forest made her question the strict society that she grew up with, and without the Scarlet Letter, Hester’s many revelations about the world she lives in would simply not have come at

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