Being A Single Parent By Nathaniel Hawthorne - 1574 Words

Being a single parent is a difficult and stress filled task, but imagine being a single mother during the age of Puritanism, where even the thought of sex without going through the process of marriage first, was considered a sin that relegated even the highest of nobles to satan status. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, Hester Prynne is selected for this demanding role, and from the start nothing goes smoothly for the heroine. Though Hester herself is in fact married,she found herself falling for her local reverend, Arthur Dimmesdale, who held a mutual devotion to Hester as she did him. In the midst of their passion little baby Pearl was born, and Hester, whose husband has been missing for years, was forced into isolation in the woods for†¦show more content†¦In the final pages of the novel, Hester returns to the Puritan village, and settles back into her small cabin in the woods. The residents of the village still think of her in high regards, and even start coming t o her for guidance and wisdom, â€Å"women, more especially†¦came to Hester’s cottage , demanding why they were so wretched, and what the remedy! Hester comforted and counselled them as best she might. She assured them,too, of her firm belief, that, in Heaven’s own time, a new truth would be revealed,in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a suer ground of mutual happiness †(Hawthorne 273-274 ). Hawthorn indirectly depicts his connection between isolation in nature, and advances in thought at the end of the novel, by using Hester as a sort of example of the effect of nature on the human mind. All throughout the novel, Hester is seen mostly by herself, alone, pushed away by society because of her sin. Her isolation is a big part of her life, and it’s also exposed, by the author, several times, in the narrative that Hester is on her own. Her wisdom, and higher advances in thought also are evident many times in the novel, but one of the most notable examples of her having gained this progressive intellect, is at the end of the novel, when Hawthorne chooses to characterize Hester as the village s own ‘wise old woman’ who councils others