The Scarlet Letter Characters Analysis
Hester Prynne - She is a young married woman who moves to Salem, without her husband, who is still in Amsterdam finishing up arrangements for their new life in Salem. Hester doesn’t hear from her husband for an extended period and happens to form a relationship with the unmarried clergyman, Arthur Dimmesdale. Readers encounter Hester as she is publicly humiliated for being an adulterer. She is led onto a scaffold in the market with her newborn baby and spends the rest of her life with a red ‘A’ embroidered on her clothes. Hester never reveals the identity of her daughter’s father and bears all the hateful judgment of her community without complaint.
Roger Chillingworth - He is an old and disfigured man, who has studied Alchemy and Medicine for long decades in Europe. He gets trapped by a tribe of Native Americans as he attempts to rejoin Hester, and this causes him a long delay. He reaches Salem and finds out that Hester has been unfaithful to him. However, he understands immediately that she had never truly loved him, and so he does not reserve too great an ill feeling towards her. He believes the sin lies with the other man and bends all of his knowledge into discovering the man’s identity. He succeeds in uncovering Dimmesdale’s secret and begins to torture him by constantly reminding the priest of his sin.
Arthur Dimmesdale - He is a talented and intelligent priest, who is deeply appreciated and respected by the people of Salem. Dimmesdale refuses to publicly accept his guilt when Hester is shamed and instead allows himself to be protected by her silence. He performs great feats of charity for his flock, but he can draw any pleasure from his service because he is so certain that he is undeserving of it. Eventually, he begins to believe that he should flee back to Europe with Hester and his daughter, but he realizes that this would not free him of his conscience. He reveals to the townspeople an A marked out on his skin just before he dies on the scaffold.
Pearl Prynne - She is the daughter of Dimmesdale and Hester, and is raised in seclusion by Hester. Pearl is described as an elfish child, who seems to experience no vulnerability. She attacks the children from town whenever they approach her and doesn’t truly listen to her mother. Pearl spends a lot of time in nature and seems to feel most at home outside the limiting gaze of the Puritan society. We learn at the end, that Pearl finds love in marriage, and has children of her own, even as she retains a close relationship with Hester.