When I first read the Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne I was confused at some parts with how the story is worded and the Old English styled language has always slowed me down at some points of stories of where it is at. And I’ve had to make guess as to what the author was trying to tell us. It was easier to read the second time around because I already knew what was going to happen and I focused more on the wording in the book and what things where supposed to mean, also just having read other stories with this type of language helped me to understand it better because I’ve been surrounded by it.
When reading the book I really had to pay attention because basically on every page there were parts of conversations or inner monologues that characters were having with themselves where you really had to look twice at to get a little bit of understanding. The difficult parts of the book where it was hard for me to understand it and I was forced to reread it where mostly when it was in Hester’s and Arthur’s points of view. I found that I had more trouble understanding Arthur than Hester and it’s probably because with Hester you been given most of the important information regarding her and with Arthur it doesn’t reveal much about him and his inner turmoil until he starts to acknowledge things with Hester and Pearl. When reading the novel I couldn’t understand why Arthur kept putting his hand onto his chest, know after having read the book I know he did that because it was his own inner Scarlett Letter that he didn’t want anyone to know about, I think he kept his hand there to make sure nobody could see it and because he could feel it within himself and to sort of reassure himself that it was there. I found it interesting that Pearl constantly points out the gesture that Arthur makes to her mother, it’s like she instinctively knows that he should be wearing a Scarlett Letter too and that he shared in the crime that her mother committed.
