ABSTRACT
It was the death of his mother that impelled Nathaniel Hawthorne to write The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne calls The Scarlet Letter a romance, a blending of the actual and the imaginary. In naming Hester Prynne's lover and husband Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth, Hawthorne invites one to consider how two men, described as unusually sensitive and perceptive, come to inhabit the identities. Dimmesdale was revered by his congregation, a man singled out for his intelligence, but, as a noontide perception gives way to a moonlight visibility, Hester defines a radical shift in perception. Dimmesdale, the pious young Reverend who has "done a wild thing", the favourite son of the Puritan fathers, appears in the eyes of the Puritans as Christ-like in his embrace of suffering, while Chillingworth appears as a fiend in seeking to worm his way into the minister's heart. Within this Christian world-view, Pearl is seen as a wild and unruly child.
