Ch. 5 Scarlett Letter

In chapter five, “Hester at Her Needle”, Hester Prynne is finally released from prison, and although she is free to leave, she chooses to stay and live in a cabin on the edge of town. She remains alienated from everyone in town and earns her living by sewing beautiful pieces of work and selling them, although she is not permitted to sew veils for brides, because of her sin towards her own marriage. It is thought to be inappropriate for innocent and chaste brides to wear what Hester Prynne has created. Hester is an outcast, and is very lonely, for no one shows any kind of sympathy towards her. Although, through all of this, she does charity work and sews for the poor, who often speak badly of her later. Hawthorne’s purpose is to reveal Hester’s strength through her long and lonesome punishment as he often presents her as a martyr, whom not only accepts the punishments inflicted upon her by society, but also punishes herself as a way of repenting for her sin.
          Yet, despite all of this she still elects to stay, instead of going back to England, where very few would know of her sin. “She was free to return to her birthplace—or anywhere else in Europe—where she could hide under a new identify, as though she had become a new person.” Hawthorne uses this simile comparing her to a new person to show that she would basically be able to start her life over, but he believes that often people gravitate towards the places where their sins were committed and he uses allegory when stating “The chain that bound her here was of iron links, and galling to her inmost soul, but never could be broken.”, in which her cause for staying was like a chain that held her to the place.   His use of diction stating, “Here, she said to herself, had been the scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly punishment; and so, perchance, the torture of her daily shame would at length purge her soul, and work out another purity than that which she had lost; more saint-like,...