红字中白兰的性格分析及其作者对她的态度

海丝特·白兰的性格分析（Hester Prynne）by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The character of Hester Prynne changed significantly throughout the novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hester Prynne, through the eyes of the Puritans, is an extreme sinner. She has gone against the Puritan ways, committing adultery. For this harsh sin, she must wear a symbol of shame for the rest of her natural life. Hester "was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance... she had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off sunshine with a gleam" . Her face was "beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion" . She is a beautiful, young woman who has sinned, but is forgiven.

Hawthorne makes Hester a heroin and survives to a tranquil old age just by expiating her offence. She wore the scarlet letter A, somewhat willingly, for the purpose of confessing her sin, of meditating and of reforming herself. On this point, Mark Van Doren’s comments about Hester, in my interpretation, agree with Hawthorne’s original intention. Doren said that she is “heroic in size and strength…Although she came to be Puritanism’s victim, she never surrendered the integrity of her soul. Neither did she complain of her fate. Her fate was to waste her life, yet we do not feel in the end that her life was wasted. Rather it is known, she is immortal.”⒄Each Character has a secret sin that he or she wishes to confess and each of those sins affects the character that committed that sin as well as other characters in the story.

性格分析2

Although criticism of The Scarlet Letter for a long time took Dimmesdale as the central character, it has more recently reacknowledged what was well understood in Hawthorne's own time, that Hester is protagonist and center. The narrator allies himself with her and, despite occasional adverse judgments, devotes himself to her cause. His cause as narrator is to obliterate her obliteration, to force the reader to accept Hester's reading of her letter as a badge of honor instead of a mark of negation. The narrator forces us, just as Hester forces her Puritan townsmates, to see her as a good woman on her own terms. In contrast to the two distorted male personalities who counterpoise her-the one obsessed with revenge, the other with his own purity-Hester appears almost a miracle of wholeness and sanity. While these men struggle with their own egos and fantasies, she has real battles-to maintain her self-respect in a community that scorns her, to stay sane in solitude, to support herself and her child, to raise that child to normal adulthood despite so many obstacles. Curiously, though she has been cast out of society, Hester remains very much in the world, whereas Chillingworth and Dimmesdale at the very center of society, are totally immured in their self-absorption. In her inner integrity and her outer responsiveness, Hester is a model and a counterstatement.

Cautiously, Hawthorne advances the notion that if society is to be changed for the better, such change will be initiated by women. But because society has condemned Hester as a sinner, the good that she can do is greatly circumscribed. Her achievements in a social sense come about as by-products of her personal struggle to win a place in the society; and the fact that she wins her place at last indicates that society has been changed by her. Might there be in the future a reforming woman who had not been somehow stigmatized by society? Although in his later works Hawthorne was to answer this question negatively, in The Scarlet Letter the possibility, though faint, is there.