My Favorite Part

      The Scarlet Letter is the first novel we read this year for our English class. It was about a woman, Hester Prynne, who has an affair with the town's minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, while her husband, Roger Chillingworth, is far away in London. This secret affair leaves Hester with a child, who she names Pearl, who becomes her one and only treasure after she is forced to wear the letter "A" to mark her as an adulteress. The novel displays the various emotional, moral, and physical effects the affair has on these characters. Hester eventually comes to lead a life of helping others, Chillingworth makes it his life's passion to seek revenge on the man Hester slept with, and Dimmesdale's guilt eats him up for so long, that it slowly and painfully kills him. The novel gave a very interesting point of view to what happened to adulterers back then, and how differently or in some cases similarly they would be treated nowadays.
      The novel had many twists and turns, as well as surprises in store for readers with the turn of every page. I think one of my favorite parts was when Roger Chillingworth finally discovers that Arthur Dimmesdale had branded himself with the same letter "A" that Hester had been forced to wear for the rest of her life. By that point, I think readers already suspect that Dimmesdale is the father of the child, but what Chillingworth discovers confirms those suspicions. It is also interesting to finally be able to connect why Dimmesdale constantly had his hand on his chest, and to know why he is doing that while some of the other characters, such as Hester do not even think twice about it. This part was my favorite part because although we realize that Dimmesdale was feeling guilty about what he had done and not taken the blame for, we did not realize the extent to which his guilt had tortured him, that he had to inflict physical pain on himself as some form of comfort or admittance.