Joy is frowned upon in this community as well. Hester wears an “A” for her passion, but despite a theology that teaches that all people are innately, or by nature, evil, the community does not recognize that they themselves are sexual or passionate. The people of the community, like their harsh ancestors whose portraits hang in the governor’s mansion, gaze “with harsh and intolerant criticism at the pursuits and enjoyments of living men” (106). The religious society of Boston, even though it is located in the New World, on the edge of uncharted wilderness, has little other affinity with nature and the natural nor has the community acknowledged the full truth of the scarlet letter nor is it tolerant of the whole range of human faculties, from angel to adulteress, that the letter represents (Johnson 1995).

To get at the many meanings of the scarlet letter, it is useful to see, first, how it is represented in the community, and finally, to its specific relationship to Hester, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth. The scarlet letter, in addition, has many implied meanings. While the letter has many implied meanings, it also has particular and explicit meanings. One begins to see many human elements that the scarlet letter represents as the novel moves along. Shame and guilt were the inevitable consequences of unwed motherhood for well over three hundred years after the seventeenth century, the time of The Scarlet Letter. Her child is labeled the child of the devil. She has no friends and little confidence in her own goodness, and enjoys not even the simplest pleasures in life. The basic story of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is that of a woman rearing an illegitimate child alone.

The scarlet letter book pages