Scarlet Letter Light+Dark Imagery

Sunlight, darkness, brightness, shadow; these are the things that, according to the Bible, God created on the first day of creation. Sunlight represents liveliness and merriment, and darkness represents death and sorrow. The Scarlet Letter has continuous examples of these, and most of them take place in two very important, but very different scenes in the midst of the novel. The market place is one of these settings that has sun shining down on it, …

…catch it. I am but a child. It will not flee from me, for I wear nothing on my bosom yet!” Everyone has a certain luster about them, and Hawthorne, when writing The Scarlet Letter, obviously believed that the luminescence of a person is a very important trait in learning about their essential qualities. What Hawthorne wants us to know is that dark places can leak in light, and light places can be somber anytime.