The Sanctity Of The Heart
In The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne, the Reverend Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth, find themselves in the guise of isolation, guilt, and bitter evil; these being their faults. The inner purpose of the story deals with the way in which these characters deal with their faults and how their faults are directly linked to violating the sanctity of the human heart by falling to social conform.
By denying the passion that the heart naturally releases and suppressing feelings, actions, and thoughts in fear of social rule, these characters fall. If an emotion is deliberately conformed from the truth in order to hide an imperfection, by that action, it will not be fully conveyed. Leaving out ...
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wife. He sends his wife to America, to the Puritan colony of Massachusetts, with instructions to live quietly until he arrives. Due to "grievous mishaps by sea and land," and over a year's captivity by Indians, his intended arrival was delayed. He finally arrives to discover his wife, Hester Prynne, being publicly exposed as an adulteress. Not wanting to be associated with her sin, he announces himself as a physician, and takes the new name Roger Chillingworth from the original Roger Prynne.
Two sins control his destiny as well as the destiny of others. His initial sin was marrying a wife a generation younger than him. Hester's unhappiness, due to a mismatched matrimony, leads her to become an adulteress. After Chillingworth arrives in Massachusetts and sees his wife holding the child of another man, he slowly evolves from a man capable of love, to a man capable of (what Hawthorn depicts as) the greatest sin in the novel: Violating the sanctity of the human heart.
By denying ...
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instinctive emotional response to the situation. He was disappointed that his hope of gaining his wife's affection upon arrival was destroyed and he hated the man who had gained that affection. "Although his anger was understandable and forgivable, it became a fatal sin when he nourished it.”
Hester, because she lived in Puritan times where sin is not so easily accepted, has been isolated, separated from the community. She was able to leave whenever she wanted, but from this quote, Hawthorne tells us that she does not leave because she is feeling guilty,
But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost ...
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"The Sanctity Of The Heart." Essayworld.com. July 23, 2008. Accessed December 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Sanctity-Of-The-Heart/87216.
"The Sanctity Of The Heart." Essayworld.com. July 23, 2008. Accessed December 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Sanctity-Of-The-Heart/87216.
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