Hester, the Wishy-washy Heroine
Throughout the course of a person's life, he or she encounters many things that will have a profound import on his or her life. These things may change a person or they may reinforce and strengthen a person's initial beliefs. The challenge may be small or large, good or bad, as may be the consequential actions and beliefs. Hester Prynne comes across many such obstacles in this novel The Scarlet Letter. These hurdles in her life transform not only herself and her own perceptions, but those of the people that she encounters.
Hester, the heroine, starts off as an obedient wife despite the fact that she doesn't love or pretend to love her husband Roger Chillingsworth(69). Then years later, in Boston, when her adultery is made public, she becomes a dutiful, restrained Sister of Mercy, for the most part. She works for the good of the poor, who often scorn her (78). She has a quiet strength about her while she goes on her acts of mercy. Her character becomes like the strongest steel forged in the burning fires of infamy and shame. Through her good deeds, her stature is elevated to the point that the magistrates and townspeople speak of having the scarlet letter removed from Hester Prynne's bosom (154-155). In the forest with Reverend Dimmesdale she becomes a passionate, loving woman again (179). It is as if a great weight has been lifted from her as she unbinds her hair and removes the scarlet letter from the front of her dress (185).
When Hester and Dimmesdale leave the forest, after she rebinds her hair and puts her token of shame back on, she becomes agitated and anxious, yet hopeful about her impending sojourn with Dimmesdale and Pearl to a new life (193). After Dimmesdale's confession, once again she is the scorned and outcast woman. Upon Roger's death and Pearl's subsequent inheritance Hester is accepted, if only through the prospect of a puritan son's possible future marriage to one of the richest heiresses in the New World. Hester and Pearl leave for parts unknown (237). What is known, however, is that Hester returns years later to live out her life as the scarlet letter clad Sister of Mercy (237-238). Her scarlet letter becomes "a type of something to be sorrowed over and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence too" (239). At the end of her life, her "A" and her life has taken on a noble aspect (240).
During Hester's marriage to Roger, she is a weak character. She marries him for comforts, not love. During the first scaffold scene she is brave in that she stick to her personal code of morals and ethics by not naming the father of Pearl and by bearing the shame alone. However, she is weak in the way that she deludes herself by thinking of her past to the point that she becomes in a state of extreme anxiety. Her vow to Roger is not only made from her sense of moral rightness, but from her fear. She stays in Boston to be by the man she loves, despite the shame, which is a strength, but she also stays from a fear of the unknown. It seems as if
everything Hester does is dually motivated from strength and from weakness. No one thing that she does is solely motivated by courage or by cowardice until the very end of the novel and her life. She goes back to Boston to make a further atonement for the sins that she has committed instead of living the rest of her life in ease.
Everything that happens to a person either changes her, breaks her, or makes her stronger. Many obstacles appear to block Hester's growth into a truly great person. She is in a constant state of wishy-washiness of weakness and strength. Eventually Hester becomes a truly heroic person by completely following the dictates and mandates of her own personal code.