wear a scarlet letter "A" on her chest – "A" for "adulteress" - a sign of her sin, shame, and separation from the righteous people.
             However, by becoming isolated from the Puritanical town of Boston and all its prejudices, Hester is able to look at the people objectively and see much she was not able to see before. "Walking to and fro, with those lonely footsteps, in the little world with which she was outwardly connected, it now and then appeared to Hester that [the scarlet letter] gave her a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts (73)." The people of the town are so busy looking for each other's faults and covering up their thoughts and human passions, that they cannot see their own faults. Hester, who wears her "Cain's" mark of exclusion openly, does not have to worry about the opinion of others, and gains an intuition - an insight into the hearts of the people who threw her out.
             Hester's mark of shame becomes a mark of being different, a mark of nonconformity. Hawthorne suggests that Hester's "A" could mean "Able"(141), for her natural energy and for her strength as a woman. Even after the death of her husband and Dimmesdale, the man with whom she committed adultery, Hester does not take off the scarlet letter and return to live in the town. In the beginning of her punishment and solitary life, Hester has enough courage to beautifully decorate her letter, mocking her sentence. She shows her skill, and it seems like she takes pride in her token of isolation. When Hester is led back to the prison from the platform of the pillory, "it was whispered that the scarlet letter threw a lurid gleam along the dark passage-way of the interior (58)." Hester's mark becomes the guiding light throughout her whole life, because the scarlet letter keeps the people and their prejudices at bay.
             Pearl, the illegitimate daughter of He...