In Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne seems to intimate that what Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmsdale shared wasn't quite as sinful as is supposed. The real sin seems to lie in the marriage of Hester with Chillingworth. Similarly, "A Pair of Eyes; or Modern Magic" by Louisa May Alcott also portrays the marriage between Max Erdmann and Agatha Eure in a sinful light. Though Hawthorne takes the route of abandoning the marriage for infidelity, Alcott focuses on the union and examines what becomes of a decaying marriage: both authors concludes that a marriage derived out of anything less than love is doomed to failure. By doing so, Alcott derives a different reason for the failure of the marriage structure than Hawthorne's.
             Hawthorne manipulates the fact that beauty is something which is universally pleasant and the reader will sympathize with "beautiful" things. The notion of "beauty" seems to be a measurement of Hester's "goodness". Upon first mention of Hester, Hawthorne sets this precedence which will be applied throughout the novel. Upon emerging from the prison walls, Hester was "characterized by a certain state of dignity, rather than by delicate, evanescent, and indescribable race, which is now recognized as its indication. And never had Hester Prynne appeared more lady-like" (50). The emblem of her sin, the scarlet letter, is almost a broach: "She had in her nature a rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic, --a taste for the gorgeously beautiful, which, save in the exquisite production of her needle found nothing else, in all the possibilities of her life to exercise itself upon" (77). Even Pearl, the product of the sin, is described as "worthy to have been brought forth in Eden; worthy to have been left there, to be the plaything of angels" (82). An almost ethereal description of her "that there was an absolute circle of radiance around her"...