【正文】 ysis of the Heroine of the Scarlet Letter I Introduction Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804—1864), a novelist and short story writer, is an important figure in the history of American literature. He attended Bowdoin College (1821—1824). In the school his friends included Longfellow and Franklin Pierce, who became the 14th president of the United States. As is well known, whatever society it is, especially the class society, it is full of conflicts. Nathaniel Hawthorne who lived in the 19th century in America possessed a deeply Puritan consciousness and New England Transcendentalism. This kind of background determined that Hawthorne was a suspicious person. He realized that Puritanism had greatly suppressed the human nature and brought destruction to people’s life, but he could not get rid of such cultural traditions which influenced him imperceptibly. Hawthorne’s bestknown works include The Scarlet Letter and The House of The Seven Gables. Of the two famous works, The Scarlet Letter was very popular and widely read. It has been considered to be the most famous work of Hawthorne. This novel tells the story of Hester Prynne who has a baby after adultery with a young pastor and leads a new life. The heroine Hester of The Scarlet Letter possesses a dual character of rebellion and promise because of Hawthorne’s background and the Puritan munity of the day. The Scarlet Letter arouses more and more interests and attentions from generation to generation because of its poetic language, its fluent words and its keen psychological analysis, etc. As for the heroine Hester Prynne who suffered humiliation in this novel, some think that she possesses a courage which dares to rebel. Some hold that Hester is the weak who submits to fate. This paper attempts to analyze the promise and rebellion of Hester Prynne and the reasons of dual character of Hester Prynne. This thesis mainly consists of four chapters. The first chapter is an introduction. The second chapter mainly focuses on the dual character of Hester Prynne which includes promise and rebellion. The third chapter touches on the reasons of dual character of Hester Prynne from the perspectives of reasons of Hester Prynne’s promise and reasons of Hester Prynne’s rebellion. The fourth chapter is a conclusion. II Dual Character of Heroine Hester Prynne Hester Prynne’s Compromise. The heroine Hester Prynne was a young and beautiful woman. She had an affair with someone unknown to the munity she lived in. Because she had married to an old man Roger Chillingworth, Hester’s behavior was considered to be adultery. Under the pressure of the Puritan munity Hester presented her promise on one side. Firstly, it was such a munity that pelled Hester Prynne to wear a scarlet letter as punishment for giving birth to an illegitimate child. The first and most obvious is that Hester’s “A” stands for adultery which means women’s frailty and sinful passion. At the beginning of the novel, everyone around Hester saw that she was pregnant and that she gave birth to a child who then lived by her side. The child was a reminder of what she was and had done in public eyes. Hester obeyed people living in the munity and wore “A” on the breast of her gown. That means she had promised with the society on this matter. She felt ashamed of her behaviors. This can be seen in the way she wore “A” on her breast to show herself to the munity. She dressed in gray and dark color: There seemed to be no longer anything in Hester’s face for love to dwell upon。 and which was of a splendor in accordance with the taste of the age, but greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony. (Hawthorne 60) Nearly everyone in the munity realized the impertinence of what she had done to contradict the awful meaning of the scarlet letter. The munity revealed that it regarded human nature, especially passion, to be devilish when it forced Hester to wear “A” of scarlet as punishment. Hester was trying to change her reality, to make it prettier than it really is. Even though she did not take away the scarlet letter publicly when Chillingworth told her that the people in the town said she might seven years later. She did take it off privately in the forest. Her behavior and her child Pearl’s violent reaction to the removal of “A” seem to suggest that she has not admitted the truth of her passionate nature even seven years later. As her art does, “Like all other joys, she rejected it as a sin.” (83) She always believes that change should e from society, not within herself. As the narrator tells, “The scarlet letter had not done its office.” (99) In other words, Hester has been at odds with her fate for her whole lifetime. She longs for peaceful and free life and is full of love and tenderness in her heart. These things make it possible for her to survive the isolation and humiliation given by the munity and to have a happy and satisfactory life. Finally, Pearl is also a symbol of Hester’s re