2. The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Beginning in Chapter 18, the broken family's life together starts to look up. Its title, "A Flood of Sunshine", gives a connotation of life and redemption. Not only that, it seems as though there's a feeling of freedom and wildness. The woods surrounding the town has symbolized some kind of amorality, and the meeting of Pearl, Hester, and Dimmesdale in the forest in a new light signify their desire to remove themselves from the pressuring society they live in that views the woods so negatively. Pearl and her mother are compared often throughout the novel. Pearl, like Hester, is a denizen of wildness and freedom. In the woods, even a wolf lets Pearl pet its head. Then the narrator describes Hester, "She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness ... as vast ... as the untamed forest." Her sense of wandering and being outside the moral norms has ironically been combined with the preacher to create their wildly-spirited daughter, who is even compared to a nymph. They mending family decides to leave, and a great weight has been lifted of their (specifically Dimmesdale's shoulders).