In Nathaniel Hawthornes The Scarlet Letter, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale commits a mortal sin by having an affair with a married woman, Hester Prynne. What does red symbolize in The House on Mango Street? The letter is a symbol of Hesters sin, a mark telling society to stay away because of the awful evil she has committed. The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread.". Symbolism is anything that stands for or represents something else. What does hester's scarlet letter come to represent in chapter 13? Hester is the public sinner who demonstrates the effect of punishment on sensitivity and human nature. The Puritan Setting of The Scarlet Letter. In the story of The Lottery by Shirley Jackson, what does Mr. Summers represent/symbolize in the town? What do the characters in The Pearl symbolize? Another example of this symbolism in the forest is when Hester removes her scarlet letter that she was condemned to wear. Pearl goes through a transformation. In an attempt to mitigate this guilt, Dimmesdale acts piously and accepts Chillingworths torture, causing him to suffer privately, unlike Hester who repented in the eyes of the townspeople. Not only does "A" manifest in various forms, but also it has changing meanings from "adultery" to "able", even "angelic" in the novel. However, the forest is also a moral wilderness that Hester finds herself in once she is forced to wear the sign of her guilt. All along, Hester felt there was this redeemable nature in her daughter, and here she sees her faith rewarded. He often uses a mirror to symbolize the imagination of the artist; Pearl is a product of that imagination. Because Pearl tells her mother so blatantly the sun, He stood on the scaffold hand in hand with Hester and his daughter, resting his weight on them for his energy and liveliness was gone. Pearl is the strongest of these allegorical images because she is nearly all symbol, little reality. That is what happened in The Scarlet Letter written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1850. The Scarlet Letter is a story that describes the life of an adulterer, Hester Prynne. What does Pearl believe about The Scarlet Letter? On a literal level, they represent the dangers that Puritans faced in the New World. It is a literal symbol of the sin of adultery. When Hester is finally able to come home from prison, she emerges from the prison door, proud and beautiful wearing an embroidered scarlet letter "A" on her chest as she carries a three month old baby "'But Ah', Interposed more softly, a young wife holding the child 'let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will always be in her heart" (49).