Free College Essays - The Power of a Single Act of Iniquity in Hawthornes The Scarlet Letter :: Scarlet Letter essays

The Scarlet Letter  The Power of a Single Act of Iniquity          The world of Puritan New England, ilk the world of today, was filled with evil temptations. Some people were able to carry these temptations unfortunately, many others fell victim to the evil. A netherworldgle act of execration was sufficient to devastate a persons vivification. In The Scarlet Letter, Hester, Chillingworth, and Dimmesdale were each destroyed ment every last(predicate)y and physically by one diabolical act that mushroomed to pass their lives.   Hesters life was the one which most externally displayed the destruction inflicted upon it by wrong-doing. Physically, she stood on the scaffold of pillory, an infant on her arm, and the letter A in scarlet, fantastically embroidered with amber thread upon her bosom (The Scarlet Letter 66). Be go of the A, the entire biotic community knew she had guiltned, and she became a social outcast. In her attempts to pay penance for her sins, she lived a life of poverty, donating most of her income to charity. However, even the most lowly and wretched of the creatures in Boston, which she helped, not unfrequently insulted the hand that fed them (87). Furthermore she left behind her beauty and voluptuous dress for a dress of the coarsest materials and the most sombre hue (86). Hesters sin also harmed her mind and soul. The joy she found in knitting, like all other joys, she rejected it as a sin (87). Also, she suffered each clip she saw Dimmesdale. A mutual love remained between them, but they could not show the love. Even a brief encounter with Dimmesdale, the father of her daughter, would cause a deeper throb of pain for, in that brief interval, she had sinned anew (89). Moreover, at one point, she had begun to lose faith in the fact that her daughter was human. She began to trust the sayings of townspeople who had given out that poor little Pearl was a demon offspring (100). Hence her body an d mind suffered greatly for her sin of adultery. Roger Chillingworths life was also destroyed by his evil. The most noticeable of his changes was the abjection of his physical appearance. When he was first seen in the novel, there was a unparalleled intelligence in his features, as of a person who had so well-mannered his mental part that it could not fail to mould the physical to itself and contract manifest by unmistakable tokens (67).