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Theme Of Irony In The Scarlet Letter

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Theme Of Irony In The Scarlet Letter
The novel titled The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, was a story full of tragic irony. Hester Prynne, throughout the story, makes a great effort to conceal secrets among others such as Arthur Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth. This effort is filled with hypocrisy because of the way they live their lives day by day. Some being idled for great doing, others shunning people of sin, when yet each of them have all committed sin of their own. Therefore, irony amongst this novel, is great in quality, as in quantity. Irony greatly describes the author’s style in writing. Irony is distributed greatly mostly by using, judgment, guilt, and sins. There are several types of irony used all through the story, including, verbal irony, …show more content…
Hester was a beautiful, young, strong, likable character and loving mother, who strived to live her life as morally as possible. She was loyal, obedient, and true. Although she had committed a great sin, she owned up to it and tried to still live her life as clean and worthy as she could possibly do. Even though she owned up to her wrong doings, Hester was still shunned by so many people, which was ironic being she was one of the most morally clean people living in the walls of the town. Hester could see others of sin through the flame in her house because she wore the scarlet letter. She had to wear the scarlet letter “A” representing adultery in the beginning, but then having other meanings, such as angel, and able. Reasons for the townspeople to change the name of the letter, was a great idle in the town Governor Winthrop, when he had passed on. Ironical because that letter should only have one meaning, in which it did, yet they still distributed it in other ways. Hester had a daughter named Pearl. Pearl was a beautiful child, but got called some horrifying names because of what her mother had done. Some of the names are as followed, devil spawn, demon offspring, etc. But, as we know, Pearl was not really from the devil but from Arthur and Hester. Making her not a devil spawn, yet showing irony throughout. Hester Prynne is not as bad as she may have seemed, they just were so hypocritical, that they had to

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