The Scarlet Letter

Arthur Dimmesdale gazed into Hester’s face with a look of hope and joy—yet there was fear and a kind of shock at her boldness in speaking what he had hinted at but did not dare to say.

But Hester Prynne had a naturally active and courageous mind. She had been outlawed from society for so long that she had become used to a freedom of thought that was altogether foreign to the clergyman. She had wandered in a moral wilderness, without rule or guidance—a wilderness as vast, dark, and complex as the untamed forest in which they were now together. Her mind and heart were at home in uninhabited places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods. For many years now she had looked at human institutions from this isolated point of view. She criticized it all with almost as little reverence as an Indian would feel for the ministry or the judiciary, the many forms of ritual punishment, the fireside around which families gathered, or the church in which they prayed. Her fate had set her free from all. The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not go. Shame, despair, and solitude had been her stern and wild teachers. They had made her strong, but they had often guided her poorly.