Scarlet Letter Study Guide Flashcard Example #44970

Massachusetts

Boston, outside the jail

Cemetery, Prison

sweet morality/relief of sorrow

Sluggish servant-> Whipping
Heretics-> Scourging
Witches-> Death on gallows

Civil and religious laws carry equal weight.

Coarse. “Morally, as well….”

Branding and even death

Beautiful; tall; long black hair; and black eyes, elegant

Adultery> prison, plus scarlet letter

It’s really fancy and embroidered

Public shaming

her old house, childhood, parents, man w/deformed shoulder, and her new life

3 months at this time.

Eyes unaccustomed to sunlight

A man dressed in Indian attire who had deformed shoulders and a wise face

Misshapen scholar

Shushing gesture (finger to lips)

She’s on the scaffold for adultery

Dimmesdale

Death. Dimmesdale is merciful, basically. They don’t know if her husband is still alive. The man that did it is assumed to be the instigator of the adultery and tempted Hester.

Hester is very self-conscious and almost afraid of him. Hester knows Chillingworth’s arrival will certainly complicate things.

Governor/ really old clergyman

Hurry up and confess

A young, educated clergyman who was known to be expressive/eloquent, yet nervous

Dimmesdale is the husband of Hester’s illegitimate child. He asks her to reveal her father

because it’s Dimmesdale

Distraught

Hester is distraught. “As night approached, it proving impossible to quell her insubordination by rebuke or threats of punishment, Master Brackett, the jailer, thought fit to introduce a physician.”

Roger Chillingworth

Wilderness/England

Married

Hester never loved her husband.

no

Make Dimmesdale his

His identity

Satan

Sin

She wants her earthly punishment there/Dimmesdale is there

Isolated, lonely

Sewing

Wedding gowns

Plain/extravagant

Sews clothes for poor

Poorly

Others’ sin

She cost Hester so much, nearly everything.

Beautiful/inexplicable

Even before she can speak, she is grasping for the letter, as if she knows that this holds the secret of her birth, and that its power led to her own creation. Hester does not have the ability to tame her daughter; she simply gives in to the child’s inner nature. What is suggested, then, is that as long as Hester herself remains unsure about the moral consequences of her affair, so long as she lives in limbo between passion and duty, we could say, she will never be able to control Pearl. But once she makes peace with her sin, Pearl may truly become her child, a child of love.

Daughter of Satan

Deliver glove
dispute custody

Both symbolize Hester’s sin

Dimmesdale, Wilson, and Chillingworth

2-3 years

Elves and fairies and imps

he got ugly and evil

Challenge Hester’s custody

Dimmesdale finally interacts with Hester. Instead of standing idly by burdened by his secrets, he actually tries to help Hester keep Pearl. He uses his influence and skilled rhetoric to help Hester. Although still crushed by his sin, Dimmesdale becomes a more dynamic character.
“The minister,—for, save the long-sought regards of woman, nothing is sweeter than these marks of childish preference, accorded spontaneously by a spiritual instinct, and therefore seeming to imply in us something truly worthy to be loved,—the minister looked round, laid his hand on the child’s head, hesitated an instant, and then kissed her brow.”

Dimmesdale

Dimmesdale

Dimmesdale’s constant companion and doctor. He is successful as a doctor because he got gud

Dimmesdale

Dimmesdale looked frail, weak, and withdrawn. Dimmesdale gets into the permanent habit of placing his hand over his heart in pain.

“About this period, however, the health of Mr. Dimmesdale had evidently begun to fail. By those best acquainted with his habits, the paleness of the young minister’s cheek was accounted for by his too earnest devotion to study, his scrupulous fulfilment of parochial duty, and, more than all, by the fasts and vigils of which he made a frequent practice, in order to keep the grossness of this earthly state from clogging and obscuring his spiritual lamp. Some declared, that, if Mr. Dimmesdale were really going to die, it was cause enough, that the world was not worthy to be any longer trodden by his feet.”

Putting the hand over his heart.

“Now there was something ugly and evil in his face, which they had not previously noticed, and which grew still the more obvious to sight the oftener they looked upon him.”

Wise, saintly, providential doctor versus vengeful devil

The investigation of Dimmesdale’s heart

Dimmesdale is the main suspect and victim

Physician (“one who heals,” -laece O.E.). Other meaning is the literal leech worm that sticks to you and sucks yer blood

His and Hester’s affair

He’s afraid of the consequences. He’s famous.

She yells to Hester, telling her to run away before the Black Man gets her as he has already gotten Reverend Dimmesdale

That he had the letter “A” branded on his chest (we don’t know this for sure yet)

It skyrockets, and he is seen as a “miracle of holiness”

He scourges (whips) himself, fasting, not sleeping.

A period of keeping awake during the time usually spent asleep, especially to keep watch or pray.

on the scaffold Hester stood on 7 years earlier

Hester was attending the death bed of Governor Winthrop and measuring him for a robe. (Winthrop dies in 1649 so this gives us a time frame for the narrative)

that he will hold Hester and Pearl’s hand in public.

It makes an “A” shape

7 yrs. old

most perceive her as good, as they now interpret the “A” as Able instead of adulterer

She started looking like a proper Puritan instead of the wild, elegant creature from earlier days

She resolved to talk to Roger and try to get him to stop torturing Dimmesdale.

He’s gotten creepier, his face more twisted as well as his personality, and his shoulder

Pearl, insightful young girl that she is, warns her mother away from Chillingworth in Paragraph 23 of Chapter 10:

“Hester Prynne, likewise, had involuntarily looked up, and all these four persons, old and young, regarded one another in silence, till the child laughed aloud, and shouted–‘Come away, mother! Come away, or yonder old black man will catch you! He hath got hold of the minister already. Come away, mother or he will catch you! But he cannot catch little Pearl!'”

To stop torturing Dimmesdale.

That Chillingworth was her husband

He has made Dimmesdale feel uncomfortable. “He has felt an influence dwelling always upon him like a curse…an eye was working curiously into him, which sought only evil…the eye and hand were mine!” (141)

hates him

She continually asks what the letter means, why she wears it, and also why Dimmesdale always hold his heart over his chest. Hester is troubled by this because she doesn’t know if she should tell Pearl.

the forest. It’s the place for secrets; possibly where they first had a tryst.

Pearl declares that the sun will shine on her because she is innocent and too young for a letter of her own. Hester is a woman grown and the sun is afraid of the letter.

That he haunts the forest and offers his heavy-clad book to be signed in blood, which he then marks on the signer

She is a sinner

She thinks that the Black Man had inflicted his mark on Dimmesdale. Symbolic because in a way Dimmesdale did sign his book with his act of adultery with Hester, and his mark inflicted was his own punishment for it.

He’s miserable. “‘But, as matters stand with my soul, whatever of good capacity there originally was in me, all of God’s gifts that were the choicest have become the ministers of spirited torment. Hester, I am most miserable!'”

His emphasis on Dimmesdale’s ill health and weakness adds an oppressive burden on Dimmesdale.

The torture of Roger.

He jumps up and clutches his heart.

He could leave the settlement by sea and travel to England or another location in Europe

“But now, -since I am irrevocably doomed-wherefore should I not snatch the solace allowed to the condemned culprit before his execution? Or, if this be the path to a better life, as Hester would persuade me, I surely give up no fairer prospect by pursuing it.” (166) He decides to escape with her.

Hester throws away the token of her shame, her burden lifts and nature, which is free from human laws seems to bless.

She threw the scarlet letter on the ground

nature’s approval (168)

The loss of the burden that the letter brought brings forth the transformation in Hester.

She is lives outside of the society that rejects her.

That he had feared that people would see that Pearl looked like Dimmesdale

She sees the changes in her mother. She refuses to acknowledge any sign of joy.

She showed him no favor. Pearl symbolizes the unusual union between the two and is a reminder of their shame.

The Old World (Europe), it was more sheltering and concealing there than in America

through her charity work

He can say his speech and so the people can’t say he did not fulfil his duty as minister

The Black Man

inauguration of new governor

Roger Chillingworth is also going on the ship

He’s confident, healthier physical appearance than before

at the foot of the scaffold

Drained, pale, almost dead

She runs to him. and clasps his knees

The scaffold

It was self-inflicted, Roger gave it to him, formed by his remorse, or physical manifestation of Heaven’s judgement.

His death served as a lesson to show that even the mightiest priest is a sinner and must look to the mercy of Heaven.

He had preached about the glorious destiny for the Lord’s people gathered in this new land, but he knew he had no part in it himself.

Roger wants to destroy Dimmesdale’s soul completely, but can’t if he confesses and makes his peace with God.

They knew that they were damning their souls for eternity.