The Scarlet Letter Notes 7

Chapter 17: The Pastor and His Parishioner

• 130: first encounter, Dimmes and Hester are like ghosts
• Hast thou found peace?—nothing but despair for dimmes, no faith in his “ruined soul”
• Hester’s interp: “You have deeply and sorely repented. . . Your present life is not less holy, in very truth, than it seems in people’s eyes” 131
• Did she betray Dimmes by not telling him about Chillingworth for so long?
• 134 “No golden light had ever been so precious as the gloom of this dark forest” not fallen or false, but true when it is just the two of them together
• “What we did had a consecration of its own”—can love make something wrong, right? Or at least better?
• 135: Hester vs. Dimmes—why can’t he function? Why is he so powerless?
• Is she right to hold him up and to agree to go with him? Will he be able to get out of it so easily? Has he suffered enough already? Has she actually repented?

Chapter 18: A Flood of Sunshine

• Why does Dimmesdale agree to go and to live a life of “sin”?
• 138 “The decision once made, a glow of strange enjoyment threw its flickering brightness over the trouble of his breast” feels joy again “O Hester, thou art my better angel! . . . risen up all made anew, and with new powers to glorify Him that hath been merciful!” Has God forgiven them?
• Why does Hester feel such relief when she flings aside the scarlet letter? (how is Able as confining as Adultery?)
• “All at once, as with a sudden smile of heaven, forth burst the sunshine, pouring a very flood into the obscure forest, gladdening each green leaf, transmuting the yellow fallen ones to gold, and gleaming adown the gray trunks of the solemn trees.” Little brook with a “merry gleam” 139
• does Heaven condone her removal of the A?
• The ray of light follows pearl - 140
• Pearl is gentler in the wilds than in civilized society—why?
• What does light symbolize?
• What is the relationship between the Puritan religious laws and nature (the wild landscape around them)