On The Scarlet Letter

The Scarlet Letter (1850), Nathaniel Hawthorne's representative work, is an allegorical romance, which is rather pure and simple in the literary form with its allegoncal figures and the persisting unity of imagery. But the meaning of the work is rather complicated and profound, and the final theme is ambiguous. The ambiguity comes from the author's ambivalent feeling toward puritanism of seventeenth century's New England and romantic tendencies of his own age. As a whole, The Scarlet Letter is a work deeply colored by the Puritanic pessimism about the dark side of human existence-that is original sin. But we, readers of the twentieth century, who appreciate the heroine as "a new woman" and feel deep sympathy with her romantic view of life, find in this book more positive value and more light than the author intended there to be. In this article, I analyze various problems of The Scarlet Letter from the points of view of the principal characters, Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, Roger Chillingworth, and Pearl, and show how these problems are connected with one another, and what is the author's attitude toward these problems. After that, I try further to seek the final theme that we can find in this romance of Puritan legend