Critical evaluation of The Scarlet Letter as a love story.

      Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter is a good example of love story that includes the cause and effects of love relationship throughout the entire novel in different modes by depicting the different characters in different positions in their love relationship.Together with the illustrations of puritan life style in regard to the cause and reality of sin in contemporary society it focuses on the devotion and secrecy of love in its central part.

      While staring at the crowd from the scaffold, Hester spots her long lost husband, doctor, who sent her to Boston two years earlier while he stayed behind in Amsterdam. It was assumed that he had been killed in a shipwreck. Having just arrived, he learns why Hester is on the scaffold and vows to discover the identity of the man who has been her lover. Hester is questioned by the ministers John Wilson and Arthur Dimmesdale, who implose her to reveal the name of her child's father, but she refuses. Returning to her cell, Hester and her baby are extremely agitated and the jailer sends for a doctor. The doctor turns out to be Hester's husband, Roger Chillingworth. Providing medicine for Hester and her baby, Chillingworth takes place. Hester confesses that she has wronged him but nevertheless refuses to give Chillingworth her lover's name. She goes agree, however, to his request that she conceal the fact that he is her husband.
      After her release from prison, Hester moves to a small house on the edge to town, where she lives alone with her daughter, Pearl. As Pearl grows older, her behavior strikes the townspeople and at times, Hester herself as strange and unnatural. But when the townspeople try to have Pearl removed from Hester's care, the anxious mother visits governor Bellingham's home, hoping to enlist his help. During the visit, Pearl comes in to contact with the reverend Arthur Dimmesdale her father, though she has ever been told this. The usually hard- hearted child is tenderly attracted to Dimmesdale, a fact that does not go unnoticed by Roger Chillingworth, who has been acting as Dimmesdale's personal physician. One night Dimmesdale returns to the scaffold where, years earlier, Hester and Pearl had stood alone. Plagued with guilt, he mouths the stand; Hester and Pearl join him there. Pearl asks that he stand with them again tomorrow in public view, but he refuses.
      Hester plans to reveal to him that Chillingworth, Dimmesdale's physican, is in fact her husband. One day she tells Chillingworth that she must reveal his identity to Dimmesdale, as begs him to forgive the men. Chillingworth counters by saying that a higher power than himself is controlling his actions. Conviced now that Chillingworth will prove to be the end of Dimmesdale, Hester intercepts her love in the forest and reveals to him that Chillingworth is her husband. She further declares that her husband is intent on running Dimmesdale and urges him to escape the doctor's evil eye. Excited by thoughts of escaping to Europe with Hester and Pearl, Dimmesdale returns to town light of heart and full of reckless impulses. He is tempted to utter blasphemy (disrespect to God) and in one instance, to speak obscenely to a young girl, Frightened by this sudden change in himself, he run in to Mistress Hibbins, who has long been suspected of being of witch. Mockingly, she questions him about him trip through the forest and laughs when he attempts to deny any wrong doing. Returning to his room, he fears that he may have sold his soul to the devil. Dimmesdale burns the semon that he had intended to give during the ceremonies making the election of a new governor and, instead, stays up all night to draft another.
      Hester is horrified to learn that Chillingworth has booked passage on the same ship she was planning to take to Europe with Dimmesdale and Pearl. As she laments this turn of events, she warns Pearl not to except Dimmesdale to acknowledge their presence in public, throughout the novel, there is the suggestion that Pearl knows who her father is, but Hawthorne leaves it ambiguous at this point. Hester warns her daughter only that their friend the minister might not what to recognize them. But after delivering a brilliant sermon, Dimmesdale stumbles out of the Church with the procession. He stops at the scaffolding, where he summons Hester and Pearl to joint him. Chillingworth follows, a party to the sin because of the emotional torment he has visited on Dimmesdale. Ascending the scaffold, Dimmesdale escape Chillingworth's evil clutches by admitting to the crowd that he is Pearl's father. Declaring that everyone should now witness the symbol of his sisn, he exposes his bare chest to reveal as witness the symbol of his sin, he exposes his bare chest to reveal as witness later insist-a scarlet A 'imprinted in the flesh'. Following this revelation, Dimmesdale collapses and dies in Hester's arms, but not before he has received a kiss from is daughter Hester and Pearl leave for parts unknown.