The Scarlet Letter Test Guide

Part I: For 15 of the following 20 quotes, name the speaker and context and briefly comment on its (thematic, symbolic) significance to the novel as a whole. Number your paper according to the numbering below.

“The founders of the new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.”

“All at once, as with a sudden smile of heaven, burst forth the sunshine, pouring a very flood into the obscure forest, gladdening each green leaf, transmuting the yellow fallen ones to gold, and gleaming adown the gray trunks of the solemn trees.”

“There was no one place so secret, -no high place nor lowly place, where thou couldst have escaped me, -save on this very scaffold!”

“Thou knowest that I was frank with thee! That I felt no love nor feigned any.”

“Here, she said to herself, had been the scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly punishment.”

“She turned her eyes downward at the scarlet letter, and even touched it with her finger, to assure herself that the infant and the shame were real. Yes! – these were her realities.”

“It irks me, nevertheless, that the partner of her iniquity should not, at least, stand on the scaffold by her side. But he will be known!- he will be known!”

“I have sought, I say, to persuade this godly youth, that he should deal with you, here in the face of Heaven, and before these upright rulers…Knowing your natural temper better than I, he could the better judge what arguments to use.”

“The responsibility of this woman’s soul lies greatly with you.”

“Thou hast ascended to the pedestal of infamy on which I found thee. The reason is not far to seek. It was my folly, and thy weakness.”

“Though he were to step down from a high place and stand there beside thee, on thy pedestal of shame, yet better were it so, than to hide a guilty heart through life.”

7. “What should ail me, to harm this misbegotten and miserable babe? The medicine is potent for good: and were it my child, - yea, mine own, as well as thine, I could do no better for it!”

8. “Here, she said to herself, had been the scene of her guilt, and her should be the scene of her earthly punishment.”

9. “Hush, Pearl, hush! Thou must not talk so…He sent us all in this world. He sent even me, thy mother. Them, much more, thee! Or, if not, thy strange and elfish child, whence didst thou come?"

10. “And here, by a sudden impulse, she turned to the young clergyman, Mr. Dimmesdale, at whom, up to this moment, she had seemed hardly so much as once to direct her eyes, - “Speak thou for me!”

“Thou tallest of running a race to a man whose knees are tottering beneath him! I must die here! There is not the strength or courage left me to venture into the wide, strange, difficult world alone.”

11. “Wilt thou go with us tonight? There will be a merry company in the forest; and I wellnigh promised the Black Man that comely Hester Prynne should make one.”

“It was the scarlet letter in another form; the scarlet letter endowed with life! as if the red ignominy were so deeply scorched into her brain that all her conceptions assumed its form had carefully wrought out the similitude.”

“This idea was countenanced by the strong interest which the physician ever manifested in the young clergyman; he attached himself to him as a parishioner, and sought to win a friendly regard and confidence from his naturally reserved sensibility.”

13. “Come away mother! Come away or yonder old Black Man will catch you! He hath got hold of the minister already!”

14. “Wilt thou stand here with mother and me, tomorrow noontide?”

15. “Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all meteoric appearances, and other natural phenomena, that occurred with less regularity than the rise and set of a sun and mood, as so many revelations from a supernatural source.”

16. “Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the original feeling of hostility.”

17. “He betrayed me! He has done me more wrong than I did him!”

18. “Hereupon, Pearl broke away from her mother, and, running to the brook, stooped over it, and bathed her forehead, until the unwelcome kiss was quite washed off.”

19. “But in the sunny day, and among all the people, he knows us not; nor must we know him! A strange, sad man is he.”

20. “It was near that old and sunken grave, yet with a space between, as if the dust of the two sleepers had no right to mingle. Yet one tombstone served for both.”