Questioning the power of love, as well as toying with human emotion Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter on struggle of a convicted sinner in a Puritan community. Hester Prynne, a woman who originated from Europe, is subject to a world of drama when she is convicted for adultery in a Puritan colony. Hester is a young beautiful woman who was married once before, but because of a complication in her travel to America is separated from her husband, Roger Chillingworth, for three years. Due to this separation Hester has an affair with an initially unknown lover, which results in a child. When she is convicted, the adulterer is subject to various punishments, enforced by the town superiors who ironically contain Hester’s lover, Arthur Dimmesdale. The purpose of the various punishments given to Hester is not fulfilled when her reaction proves to be unchanged. Hester’s vacant reaction sparks an attitude of malevolence and empowerment affecting her own personality.
The concluding chapter serves to answer whatever questions the reader may have after the final scaffold scene. As is his fashion, Hawthorne lends his customary ambiguity and vagueness to many of the questions by citing various points of view or options related to incidences without anointing any one of them as true. One such incident involves what people actually saw when Dimmesdale exposed his bosom on the scaffold. He presents several possible versions of the spectators at the scaffold that day including that some saw no letter on Dimmesdale's chest. He attributes this last version to the loyalty of friends to Dimmesdale
Hawthorne explains that the moral of the story, gleaned from an old manuscript of testimony of people who had known Hester, is based on "the poor minister's miserable experience, and he states a kind of moral for us: "Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait by which the worst may be inferred." This often quoted moral about being...