In The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hester Pryne and Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale had committed the horrible sin of adultery. Hester was open about what she did. There was no way for her to deny her sin, since the product was her daughter, Pearl. The only thing that she did hide was the identity of the child's father, the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale. Hester took all of the blame for a sin that they were both responsible for. Dimmesdale kept his sin hidden and this was torture to his soul. Therefore, Hester's honesty made her a symbol of strength and Dimmesdale's inability to be truthful to himself and to society made him a symbol of weakness.

When Pearl asks Hester if she has ever met the Black Man (the devil) she responds, "Once in my life I met the Black Man!

Pearl makes the reader constantly aware of her mother's scarlet letter, and at an early age, she fixates on the emblem. Pearl's innocent and intuitive comments about the letter raise questions about its meaning. Pearl can also symbolize the living embodiment of Hester's sin. Wearing the scarlet letter is not Hester's only punishment; she also has to deal with an unruly child. Pearl, who seemed intelligent beyond her years, would throw temper tantrums whenever Hester would be about to have a moment of happiness.

Can someone like Billy survive long in a world that's not nearly as good as he is? His downfall through the traps laid by Claggart follows the oldest theme of all: good versus evil. Billy represents the innocent whom evil will always seek to destroy. Billy is the eternal good guy who gets trapped in a world too complicated and treacherous for him to handle. "He had none of that intuitive knowledge of the bad which in natures good or incompletely so foreruns experience, and therefore may pertain, as in some instances it too clearly does pertain, even to youth."

By the end of the novel "Hester Pryne had no selfish ends, nor lived in any measure for her own profit and enjoyment, people brought all their sorrows and perplexities, and besought her counsel, as one who had herself gone through a mighty trouble."

I can understand how much Vere suffers because the more he sees of Billy, the more he loves him. By the end, he feels almost like Billy's father. He knows Billy is ultimately innocent, but his duty is to fulfill what's right for the good of the ship. The law demands that Billy must hang, and Vere knows he must uphold the law. Right after Claggart's death, Vere exclaims, "Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!"

Pearl symbolizes innocence because although she is the product of sin, she had no part in it and did no wrong. "That little creature, whose innocent life had sprung, by the inscrutable decree of Providence, a lovely and immortal flower, out of the rank luxuriance of a guilty passion."

Although the stories in the Scarlet Letter and in Billy Budd were quite different, the novels did have a lot in common. They were both written by brooding romantic authors, Hawthorne and Melville. Both books emphasized the human capacity for sin, and they both also questioned the true meaning of it. In both novels the reader sympathizes for the characters that have sinned. I think that these authors might have been questioning the rules that were really just made up by society. Who is to say whether or not what Hester, Dimmesdale, or Billy Budd did was wrong? In American society today I am pretty sure that none of them would have really been punished for

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Approximate Word count = 1825
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)