Red characters

Author: Hawthorne
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2000-12-01
Features: This is based on a love tragedy that occurred in Boston between 1642 and 1649: a young and beautiful woman, Hester Prynne, holding a three-month-old daughter—Pearl—in her arms, standing on the scaffold, waiting for the theocratic Calvinist (i.e., Puritan) regime to announce her judgment in public. So, who is the woman on trial? What crime has she committed? Hester Prynne is a kind and beautiful English girl who was unfortunately married to a deformed and hypocritical old man, wasting her youth. Two years before the story begins, she moved from Amsterdam (the capital of the Netherlands, a settlement where English Puritans fled abroad) to Boston, Massachusetts. During the journey, her husband was kidnapped and disappeared. In widowhood, Hester Prynne fell in love with the minister Dimmesdale and had a daughter. After the incident, the theocratic Calvinist (i.e., Puritan) regime used her as a specimen to admonish sin, punishing her to wear a red "A" (the first letter of the English word "Adultery") on her chest and endure a life of humiliation. Although minister Dimmesdale did not reveal himself publicly, he ultimately died due to the relentless pursuit and mental torment by Roger Chillingworth, Hester Prynne's husband.