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Essay Test: The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" is set in the early days of Puritan America. Hester Prynne, a seamstress, comes to the New World before her husband in order to prepare a place for them. During his absence, she develops a relationship with Arthur Dimmesdale, a rising minister in the newly founded Puritan community. Hester becomes pregnant. The novel is widely viewed to be a story about her trials and tribulations; however, critic Randall Steward argues that, "…Hester is not the protagonist, the chief actor, and the tragedy of the novel is not her tragedy but Arthur's. He is the persecuted one, the tempted one. He it was whom the sorrows of death encompassed…His public confession is one of the noblest climaxes of tragic literature." This review, controversial as it may be among Hawthorne's readers and very possibly a bit of an overstatement, has a lot of truth in it.
Obviously, Hester Prynne is the most obvious of the......

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Approximate Word Count: 911
Approximate Pages: 4 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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