Hester Prynne, the Static Character that Changes
Hester Prynne remains a static character through her defiance of the Puritans
but dynamically changes how she expresses her defiance according to what she
puts her hope in two times throughout the novel. As she emerges from the prison,
Hester is introduced with an immediate portrayal of defiance toward the Puritans.
Hester gives a “haughty smile, and a glance that would not be abashed, looked
around at her townspeople and neighbours” (Hawthorne, 37). This defiance is
what stays the same about Hester until the very end of the novel. Despite her
unwillingness to conform, Hester does still change in the ways in which she
expresses her defiance and what she puts her hope in. She demonstrates her first
expression of her defiance during the first scaffold scene. When Dimmesdale
implores Hester to tell the people who her lover is, she shakes her head. Hester
proclaims that she will never tell who Pearl’s father is and that “my child must
seek a heavenly Father; she shall never know an earthly one!” (47). Dimmesdale,
recognizing her commitment to keeping him safe from his own judgment, says,
“wondrous strength and generosity of a woman’s heart! She will not speak!” (48).
Here Hester expresses her defiance according to the love and hope she puts on
Dimmesdale. She loves Dimmesdale to keep him safe from what she sees as unjust
punishment, and her hope is to see Dimmesdale continue to be a successful
minister.
This hope that she puts in Dimmesdale’s success shatters during the woods
scene with Chillingworth. When Chillingworth reveals to Hester that he knows
Dimmesdale is her lover and has been tormenting him, Hester’s hope in
Dimmesdale’s success cannot be fulfilled. Instead of submitting and repenting of
her sin, Hester devises a plan to get with Dimmesdale and escape Boston. The
fractured pieces of her previous hope which was born out of her love for
Dimmesdale reshape to create a new hope that they can live together as husband
and wife. Again, Hester expresses her defiance according to her hopes and this
time her defiance is even more dramatic. She says to Dimmesdale when she tears
off her scarlet letter, “Let us not look back… The past is gone! Wherefore should
we linger upon it now? See! With this symbol, I undo it all, and make it as it had
never been!” (138). With this new hope, Hester demonstrates a new, fiery defiance
that, though functionally different, is still fundamentally the same defiance from
the beginning of the novel.
Unfortunately for Hester’s plan of elopement, her hope is once again
shattered, but this time there is no hope of recovery. When Chillingworth foils the
lovers’ plan and Dimmesdale, atop the scaffold, dies after his confession, Hester’s
hope for a life with Dimmesdale in England ends in an instant. One might assume
that at this point Hester may demonstrate a true change, finally repent for what she
has done, and reconcile with the Puritans and God. But Hester’s defiance continues
to hold strong. After being absent for a time, Hester returns to Boston to restart her
life as an outcast, paying her penance. Never showing any signs of true repentance,
she lives exactly as she has been throughout the novel. In a final act of defiance,
Hester refuses to repent. She perfectly describes her new hope in the future when
she “assured [other wearers of scarlet letters], too, of her firm belief, that, at some
brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven’s own
time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation
between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness” (180). Her new
hope is in a future that is brighter for people like her. The narrator goes on to
mention that Hester had given up on her own happiness and concluded that a
woman less “stained with sin” could be the only woman to find the happiness that
she could not find (180). The last two hopes she had were hopes for her own
situation and involved Dimmesdale. But, with Dimmesdale gone, Hester’s hope
now resides with a brighter future where the relations between man and woman are
happy. Ultimately, despite changing what she puts her hope in, Hester only
changes how she expresses her constant defiance of the Puritans and God.
Work Cited
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Dover, 1994.