Scarlet Letter question

Question

The Scarlet Letter

Scarlet Letter question

1.While on the scaffold, Hester recalls her past and those who were a part of it. What is the relationship that Hester has with the "misshapen scholar"?

2. In chapter 3, the reader learns that the setting of The Scarlet Letter is in what New England town?

3. Why is the allusion to Daniel appropriate when the townsman converses with the stranger?

4. What four words does the stranger repeat that indicates he has taken a vow to find the father of the baby?

Asked by Cathryn L #471765 on 10/16/2015 9:07 PM

Last updated by Owen S #1063539 on 10/21/2020 4:14 AM

Answers 2

Add Yours

Answered by jill d #170087 on 10/16/2015 9:31 PM

The misshapen scholar was Hester's husband, her memory of the new life they were supposed to have started in the New World.

There she beheld another countenance, of a man well stricken in years, a pale, thin, scholar-like visage, with eyes dim and bleared by the lamp-light that had served them to pore over many ponderous books. Yet those same bleared optics had a strange, penetrating power, when it was their owner's purpose to read the human soul. This figure of tile study and the cloister, as Hester Prynne's womanly fancy failed not to recall, was slightly deformed, with the left shoulder a trifle higher than the right. Next rose before her in memory's picture-gallery, the intricate and narrow thoroughfares, the tall, grey houses, the huge cathedrals, and the public edifices, ancient in date and quaint in architecture, of a continental city; where new life had awaited her, still in connexion with the misshapen scholar: a new life, but feeding itself on time-worn materials, like a tuft of green moss on a crumbling wall.

Please ask your questions separately.