《红字》中的原罪与象征意义

The Sin and Symbolism in The Scarlet Letter

Wang Na

English department Bo Hai Universtity

Ⅰ. Introduction

Hester Prynne, wife of an old man who had been absent in England for two years, because the mother of an illegitimate child in Puritan New England and was forced to wear the Scarlet Letter A on her chest as punishment for her adultery. Roger Chillingworth who was Hester’s husband, recently arrived in town after a year of residence away the Indians. He appeared suddenly when Hester stood on the scaffold that morning. Chillingworth also forced Hester to name the real father of her child but Hester refused, so Chillingworth decided to live in this town for a long time to find the real father of Hester’s child. He commanded Hester not to betray the relationship between them and she swore she would keep his secret. After she went out from the prison, she lived in a small house on the outskirts of town with his daughter, who was named pearl. She settled down to earn a living from needlework, an out cast from society and still wearing the scarlet emblem on her breast. Throughout Chillingworth extracts a promise from Hester that she would not reveal his true identity and embarks on his mission to fing the man with whom his wife had cheated on him. He soon suspected Dimmesdale and immediately began crashing Dimmesdale’s heart in order to punish him

for the sin he had committed with Hester, while at the same time, Hester had kept and raised pearl despite staunch objections by many of the puritan people . Eventually, Hester revealed Chillingworth’s symbolism is so successful in this novel. 。

Ⅱ. The biographical introduction of Hawthorn

Nathaniel Hawthorn was born in Salem in 1804.He was the second of three children of his family. Hawthorn’s father, a sea captain’ had died of yellow fever in Dutch Guiana, when he was four years old. His mother withdrew into the bedroom when she heard her husband was dead. So under the condition, Hawthorn spend his childhood being isolated from his mother and sisters. In few years, Hawthorn left Salem and entered Bowdoin college, in Maine. He made friends with Henery Wadsworth Longfellow and Franklin Pierce who became the fourteenth president of the United States. From 1825 to 1836, he lived in Virtual Solitude in this idle town, Salan. Because there was little in his own actual experiences as get to serve as literary material, Hawthorn gathered his material by observing and listening to others. During this period in Salem, Hawthorn had harvested the richness of his background. In the 1830s, he edited a magazine in Boston and afterwards worked at the customs office. Then he lived for a few months in 1841 at Brook Farm. In 1841 he married Sophia Peabody. Then they lived a very happy life and Hawthorn accepted two other political appointments. Hawthorn’s main works are: 1) Twice-told