Hester Prynne, the protagonist in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, is ostracized from her community and forced to wear a cloth "A" signifying she has committed the sin of adultery. However, the novel is a condemnation not of Hester but of the community which has so harshly and hypocritically judged her. Hawthorne's novel portrays both the inhumane effects of the cruel enforcement of the morality of Puritanism, and the courage and love of Hester as she lives to transcend that inhumane cruelty. Hester is shown to suffer not because she is evil, but because her human frailties have been judged evil by a community which refuses to accept such frailty in its members. Ironically, her lover is the man who represents more than any other those Puritan values. In Hawthorne's view, Hester is far more human and moral than the others in the community because she accepts herself and her frailty, because she accepts responsibility for her actions, and because she emerges triumphant as a result of her steadfast character and her capacity for love and forgiveness. As harmful as this Puritan marking of Hester as a grave sinner is to her, she possesses a strength of character which allows her to transcend the social and moral judgment against her:
. . . The novel is a celebration of Hester Prynne's independence, of individual courage against collective cruelty, of the promptings of the heart against social repression. . . . Hester heroically refuses to reveal the identity of her lover. . . . She . . . [believes] that "the torture of her daily shame would . . . work out another purity than that which she had lost; more saint-like, because the result of martyrdom" (Bloom 83).
The message of the book is that she who is branded evil by a self-described Christian community may, in fact, be the most Christian member of that community. In a final great irony, Hester herself by the end of the book becomes a counselor to others, including the ...