Light And Darkness In Scarlet Letter

Words: 899
Pages: 4

In Hawthorne's intricately woven tale The Scarlet Letter, his characters create a parallel theme with the Biblical story of Original Sin. The infamous witch trials had taken place more than hundred years earlier, the events still hung over the town and made a long lasting impression on the young Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Scarlet Letter is a book based on sin, guilt, conflict between emotions and intellect, nature of evil, discrimination, and puritan society in Boston from the seventeenth-century. The Scarlet letter is a gothic, psychological romance not a historical fiction. The scarlet a is the punishing scaffold of light and darkness;color imagery; the settings of forest versus village. The scarlet letter also show how religion was a big part of everyday life for the puritan society. Nathaniel Hawthorne uses scaffold scenes and the symbols of light and darkness to signify hidden truths and dark secrets. The first scene that uses the scaffold of light and darkness is when the main character stood alone on the platform humiliated, with onlookers passing …show more content…
Here, her daughter Pearl doesn't know the true meaning of the Letter, yet still manages to reproach her mother. This shows Pearl insight into what is really going on in her life and the life of those around her. (“The Scarlet Letter index” 2008). "All at once, as with a sudden smile of heaven, forth burst the sunshine..." (Chapter 18, Page 197). This occurs immediately after the main character removes the A from her chest and lets down her hair in the forest. Never before had the sun radiate down upon main character while in the forest. The main character and her lover have just made their plans to escape to Europe, so it is almost as if the heavens are approving of their plan; the main character is being gazed upon in a good light for the first time since her public