The author of The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne, has different views of how one doesn't have to hold sin inside of them forever. At the start of this novel, Hawthorne chooses to begin his novel with a prison. This is an appropriate symbol for the punishment that the protagonists will suffer. The Scarlet Letter deals with the adultery sin of Hester Prynne and Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, the revenge of Roger Chillingsworth, and the towns people's attitude toward Hester and her daughter Pearl.
Puritans society believed that sinners should be punished for their sin forever; death was often the punishment. But Hester was released from prison but not the pain of sin. Sin can be categorized many ways, but most importantly, one should remember that bad things always develop from sin. This novel shows the reader that if sin is not released, long term suffering will continue.
Hawthorne uses Dimmesdale as a good example of how sin works on the mind. Dimmesdale committed adultery, but when his mistress, Hester became pregnant he remained quiet. Dimmesdale holds this huge secret inside of him, which does nothing but tear away at his heart and mind. This causes him to deliver pain on himself constantly and to age and become feeble very quickly. "But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghostlike, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime;and, still the more irresistibly, the darker the singe that saddens it." Chapter 5, Page 73. In the end of the novel he is ruined one way or another. He could have came out right away and admitted his sin, in which would have made Hester's punishment a whole lot less worse then what it was. .
Hester was punished for this sin in more than one way. She had to wear a scarlet Letter 'A' on her chest. She could not escape all of the towns people gossiping directed towards her.