The Scarlet Letter

Term Paper Title	The Scarlet Letter
# of Words	596
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	2.38

The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne makes assertions as to the nature of certain characters in the Scarlet letter, that are not in accordance with the way they are developed.  Pearl, it is often told us is flighty but she is described as an ordinary girl.  Hester Prynne is described to have undergone violent changes but her personality hasn't changed at all.  Dimmesdale is able to keep his self-control in the book but he can't before it.  The author tells us some things and shows us others.
     The author often claims that Pearl is peculiar, but he rarely shows us anything out of the ordinary.  Hawthorne tells us that pearl is off-beat when he says, "�(the) perversity which all children have more or less of, and of which little Pearl had a tenfold portion of�."(103) Pearl isn't the Marilyn Manson of the 1600's she is an ordinary child with an ordinary amount of imagination that surfaces at all the wrong times. In the following scene Pearl tells the minister that god did not make her but she was plucked off a rose bush.  She's half right and the other half the author explains for me.  "This fantasy was probably suggested by the near proximity of the Governor's red roses; together with her recollection of the prison rose-bush, which she had passed in coming hither."(103) Pearl can't be expected to dispose of her imagination when issues adults think are serious arise.  It seems stranger that Pearl caresses the minister's hand than that she thinks she was plucked off a rosebush.  Pearl seems a perfectly normal child but the author denounces her as otherwise because Pearl's imagination involves the scarlet letter.
     Hester often remarks on how the Scarlet letter has affected her but it doesn't s...

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