Love, sin, guilt, an illegitimate child, adultery, and a sick twisted husband seeking his own kind of twisted revenge on who he suspects the baby's father is, it sounds like a scene off the soap operas, but this soap opera is set in Puritan New England. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a novel that deals with people and how they respond to adversity in a Puritan village in New England.
             In the novel one of the women of the village named Hester Prynne becomes pregnant after she commits adultery with one of the men in the village but the child's father's identity is a mystery to every person in the town except for Hester and the man. As punishment for her sins Hester is ordered to wear a single letter, in scarlet, on the front of her dress. The letter A is her punishment because she is an adulteress and that single letter will remind her of her sins forever. While receiving her punishment from the town's elders she is told that the only way to relieve some of her grief is to give up the name of the child's father, to which she responds: "My child must seek a heavenly father; she shall never know her earthly one!" Hester is stubborn and she sinned, and she has carried not only the sign of her sin, but also the guilt and shame that the one simple letter can bring with her for years.
             When Hester named her baby Pearl she said it was because she was a "pearl of great price", and seven years after Pearl's birth she is still wearing the letter. Hester even moves into an isolated cottage outside of town so she can escape the ridicule that the townspeople are subjecting her to. Hester gave up her entire life for one act of passion and after seven years even the men that sentenced her to wear the scarlet letter would have let her take it off and bury it in the ground never to be seen again. Hester's sin obviously was not forgivable to herself and that is why she continues to wear the scarlet letter. She knows that she...