红字The Scarlet Letter.doc

The Scarlet LetterIn the novel The Scarlet Letter Hawthornes character Arthur Dimmesdale descends from his priestly celibacy into immorality through his elicit love affair with Hester Prynne. Hester refuses to give the name of her lover up and through her secrecy the descent of Dimmesadele begins. Although in the book Hester is the only one convicted of this crime, due to her inability to hide her pregnancy; Dimmesdale constantly condemns himself. Throughout the years after the discovery of Hesters affair, the priest continues to spiral downwards into ultimate guilt-filled depression. He continues to grow ill and with the help of Roger Chillingworth continues to be haunted by his sin. His own lashings only contribute to this deterioration. A victim of love and human weakness, the priest loses his life to shame. Dimmesdales repentance and suffering make him the ultimate tragic hero. His actions condemned by society and his faith, Dimmesdale tries to receive an equal punishment, one as severe as his lovers, through his own remedies. Yet his efforts prove worthless and even destructive. His only door out is confession.In the named movie The Scarlet Letter, Hester reunited with Dimmesdale. They together with Pearl moved outside the community and lived happily ever after. Comparing with this end with the original end in the novel, I prefer the original end. Because sometimes the tragedy more impressive. Dimmesdales confession at the end of the novel, on the scaffolding, his grief is released and his supreme satisfaction allows the ultimate release; death. Dimmesdales affair was truly an act of love, yet the strict Puritan society in which he lives in and the rules in which he lives by did not allow him to openly express his sin without fear of total reprimand and disapproval of the people. His hidden sin presses upon his back, and the weight of his pain is too much. In facing his responsibility and confessing, it is easy to see Dimmesadle as the tragic hero of Hawthornes The Scarlet letter. Destroyed by Chillingworth lie and guilt, Dimmesdale dies in Hesters arms, and some see a scarlet A on his chest. Destroyed by his single-minded quest for vengeance, Chillingworth bequeaths his vast estates to Pearl, who leaves America to live abroad, depriving America of all she represents. The book ends with an allusion to Andrew Marvells poem The Unfortunate Lover, in which the lover lives on in story. So does Hester Prynne, perhaps the first fully realized female character in American fiction, whose meanings continue to attract new readers.Although criticism of The Scarlet Letter for a long time took Dimmesdale as the central character, it has more recently knowledge what was well understood in Hawthornes own time, that Hester is protagonist and center. The narrator allies himself with her and, despite occasional adverse judgments, devotes himself to her cause. His cause as narrator is to obliterate her obliteration, to force the reader to accept Hesters reading of her letter as a badge of honor instead of a mark of negation. The narrator forces us, just as Hester forces her Puritan townsmates, to see her as a good woman on her own terms. In contrast to the two distorted male personalities who counterpoise her-the one obsessed with revenge, the other with his own purity-Hester appears almost a miracle of wholeness and sanity. While these men struggle with their own egos and fantasies, she has real battles-to maintain her self-respect in a community that scorns her, to stay sane in solitude, to support herself and her child, to raise that child to normal adulthood despite so many obstacles. Curiously, though she has been cast out of society, Hester remains very much in the world, whereas Chillingworth and Dimmesdale at the very center of society, are totally immured in their self-absorption. In her inner integrity and her outer responsiveness, Hester is a model and a counterstatement.As its title suggests, the book is about labeling, about the Puritan and later the American desire to eliminate ambiguity, to get the meanings right. The tale shows that even so simple a label as the first letter of the alphabet is full of burgeoning meanings dependent upon changing contexts. After Hesters competence and usefulness to the community become evident, some think the letter stands for able. When an A appears in the sky at Governor John Winthrops death, they think it stands for angel. Since historical Puritans convicted of adultery were made to wear the letters AD on their sleeves, critics have noted that these are Dimmesdales initials and concluded that the A also represents Arthur. Anne Hutchinson of the Antinomian Controversy is explicitly mentioned in the text, so the letter also represents Anne and Antinomian. Readers may well conclude that the A can mean almost anything, even America, where we still struggle to rein scribe the labels that others put on us.Bruce Granger states that “even though Arthur Dimmesdale does not move down center until late in the action, The Scarlet Letter is finally his story and, what is more important, that he is a tragic hero Hawthornes allegorical romance centers on a good mans struggle with and eventual victory over the guilt he experiences after committing lechery.” (Granger, 1). In the end this holly sinner steps out from behind his lies and deception, even against the grain of the Puritan soci