Although the criticism of The Scarlet Letter has been centered on Dimmesdale for a long time, it is only recently that the well-known view of Hawthorne's era that Hester is the protagonist and the central figure has been re-recognized. The narrator made an alliance with her, but he devoted himself to her career despite occasional unfavorable judgments. As a narrator, his purpose is to erase the erased part of her and force readers to accept Hester's interpretation of her letter as a symbol of honor, not a sign of negation. The narrator compels us, just as Hester compels her fellow Puritans. From her own point of view, she is a good woman. In sharp contrast to her two twisted male personalities, one obsessed with revenge and the other maintaining her purity, Hester is almost a complete and rational miracle. When these men struggle with their own egos and fantasies, she faces a real battle-to maintain self-esteem in a community that despises her, to be rational in loneliness, to support herself and her children, and to raise the children to normal adulthood despite so many obstacles. Strangely, although Hester has been abandoned by society, she still lives in the world, while Chillingworth and Dimmesdale, who are at the center of society, are completely immersed in their own world. In her inner integrity and outer sensitivity, Hester is a model and a negative model.

Hawthorne cautiously put forward the view that if society is to become better, this change will be initiated by women. However, because the society has designated Hester as a sinner, what she can do is greatly limited. Her achievements in the social sense are the by-products of her personal struggle for social status; In fact, she finally won her position, indicating that society has been changed by her. Will there be a reformed woman who has not been branded by society in the future? Although Hawthorne answered this question negatively in his later works, this possibility exists in The Scarlet Letter, although it is weak.

As for Hester, space is limited, so I can't go into details one by one. Let me just talk about two points: first, compared with her relationship with Pearl, her relationship with Dimmesdale is insignificant-in her portrait, maternal love replaces sex. Her indifference to Dimmesdale means that-although she continues to love him and stays in Boston mainly for him-her kindness and essence are not defined by her relationship with a man. Hawthorne did not regard Hester as just an event in the whole human race, as he criticized in Carefree Love. Hester is an independent self, which is mainly described according to the difficulties in her social environment, herself and Pearl's relationship.

Through Pearl, Hester becomes an image of "holy motherhood" (1:56). Although she is such an obvious mother, she is not a "mother image". By separating her from the social environment that defines and supports the concept of motherhood, Hawthorne can focus on the relationship between Hester and her children without any social significance. In fact, in this case, society wants to separate mothers from children. By giving her a stubborn daughter, Hawthorne subtly distinguished his description of his mother from Victorian ideology. What remains is a strong personal relationship, which shows Hester's motherhood in a non-role way.

But adult love and sex are not written out of the story because of this emphasis, which is the second point I want to emphasize. At the end of the work, Hester expresses the hope that "in a brighter period, when the world is mature for it, a new truth will be revealed in God's own time, so as to establish the whole relationship between men and women on a more reliable basis of mutual happiness." "The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman", and she will show that "sacred love should make us happy and pass the truest test of a successful life!" (SL:263)。 These are Hester's thoughts, not the narrator's, but he is not far away from her at this point. "In her early years, Hester fantasized that she might be the prophetess who was destined to be." Hester could only have this illusory imagination during the short period of her secret association with Dimmesdale, because once she was branded, she would never hope to live the life she described. But during their relationship, she felt that what they did had its own sacredness-then, it is this sacredness that she hopes to stand the test of her life.

Therefore, what Hester calls "sacred love" is actually "sexual love". She looks forward to the day when sex and love can be unified in one emotion by men, and that women can heal men's spiritual division in some way. As Freud wrote in the later part of this century, he observed that men could not feel passion and tenderness for the same "object", so Hawthorne discovered decades ago that men's disgust and fear of sex caused him to separate from women, so he could not love. Hester's letter represents not only the sex of adultery, but all sex, and the image of divine motherhood becomes more convincing than it first seems. Every child has proved his mother's sexual experience and is a shameful object in a society that considers sex shameful. For Hester, trying to return to Dimmesdale by "canceling" her letter is to return to him incompletely, in a way of denying her children. No wonder Pearl objected.

What do people feel here-however opaque! -It is Hawthorne's tentative contact with the theme of men and their mothers. He believes that the relationship between men and their mothers is the most profound and important core in their lives. Scarlet's great liberation comes not only from its praise for a woman, but also from a woman as a mother (73-53).