Loading Likes... When Hester first removes the scarlet letter while planning her escape with the minister in the woods she seems to miraculously transform from a wearied hag into a tremendously beautiful maiden. She takes her hair out from her hat, allowing its thick strands to fall upon her shoulders and the youth she once possessed seems to reinvigorate her as her womanly passions come flowing back in. Hawthorne writes, “Her sex, her youth, and the whole richness of her beauty, came back from what men call the irrevocable past, and clustered themselves, with her maiden hope, and a happiness before unknown, within the magic circle of this hour. And, as if the gloom of the earth and sky had been but the effluence of these two mortal hearts, it vanished with their sorrow” (536). I found the reinvigoration of Hester’s beauty as a result of the removal of the letter fascinating. This book was written within a Puritan society that would have condemned passion as sinful, and thus, I would have assumed that the blossoming of passions, as this scene demonstrates, would tamper Hester’s beauty. Instead it does the opposite. THis scene almost crafts the Scarlet Letter to be not just a stain on Hester’s virtue, but a weight that drains her of her life, when the punishment, if anything, should be guiding her towards godliness and repentance. I would be curious to know if this was Hawthorne’s intention to show Hester as sinful without the letter, but rather as free and youthful with a life in front of her due to the condemning connotations it attributes to their society’s punishments rather than to Hester’s wanton sinfulness.