The symbol I chose is the Scarlet Letter. The scarlet letter is meant to be a symbol of shame, but instead it becomes a powerful symbol of identity to Hester. The letter's meaning changes as the story progresses. In the beginning, it was which intended to mark Hester as an adulterer, the "A". We can see this when Pearl says: "Mother," said little Pearl, "the sunshine does not love you. It runs away and hides itself, because it is afraid of something on your bosom. . . . It will not flee from me, for I wear nothing on my bosom yet!" This shows how negative a connotation the letter is supposed to give off. However, it eventually comes to stand for "Able." It seems to strengthen her. We can see this when it says in the book's final chapter: "But there was a more real life for Hester Prynne here, in New England, than in that unknown region where Pearl had found a home. Here had been her sin; here, her sorrow; and here was yet to be her penitence. She had returned, therefore, and resumed,-of her own free will, for not the sternest magistrate of that iron period would have imposed it,-resumed the symbol of which we have related so dark a tale. Never afterwards did it quit her bosom. But . . . the scarlet letter ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world's scorn and bitterness, and became a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, and yet with reverence, too." Finally, it becomes vague: the Native Americans who come to watch the Election Day pageant think it marks her as a person of importance and status. Like Pearl, the letter functions as a physical reminder of Hester's affair with Dimmesdale. But, compared with a human child, the letter seems insignificant, and thus helps to point out the ultimate insignificance of the community's system of judgment and punishment. The child has been sent from God, or at least from nature, but the let...