stupid paper
"With the superstition common to his brotherhood, he fancied himself given over to a fiend, to be tortured with frightful dreams, and desperate thoughts, the sting of remorse, and despair of pardon; as a foretaste of what awaits him beyond the grave. But it was the constant shadow of my presence!—the closest propinquity of the man whom he had most vilely wronged!” (188). This quote represents the sin that is lying, and the punishment that can follow. Also, it is shown simple it may be, it too causes many long and short term problems. Throughout The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne uses a few key symbols to represent major themes in the book. The most obvious and well known is the scarlet letter that Hester is forced to wear and the scaffold that reoccurs many times in the novel show the sin and punishment that is present. To begin with, the most important and influential symbol in the entire book is the infamous scarlet letter, hence the title, The Scarlet Letter. In the second chapter, Hester walks out of the prison, wearing the ill-famed scarlet letter ‘A’. During the first few years of Hester’s punishment, the letter was a daily reminder of shame. Hawthorne marks, “…Hester Prynne had always this dreadful agony in feeling a human eye upon the token; the spot never grew callous; it seemed, on the contrary, to grow more sensitive with daily torture.”(90). As the story unfolds, though, this letter comes to mean other things to Hester and the people. Rather than bringing torture to Hester, it eventually becomes a symbol to some people meaning “able.” Hawthorne writes, “They said that it meant ‘Able’; so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman’s strength.”(178). Then a few pages later, “The scarlet letter had not done its office.”(182). The scarlet letter was meant as a punishment for Hester, and yet here we see that it hasn’t punished Hester. It was applied to her so she wud feel and show others her sin and how she is punished by it. She writes, “Thus, we