The Scarlet Letter Blog Post Two

My first thought after finishing the book The Scarlet Letter  was what the last line could possibly mean. This line reads "ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES."(180). The reason I was so transfixed with this particular line is because it is what was written on Hester and Arthur Dimmesdale's gravestone, and also it says that it "might serve as a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend" (180) meaning that this line serves as a moral of this story. In order to understand this line, I began by looking up the two words that were unfamiliar to me on Thefreedictionary.com. These two words were "sable" and "gules". According to the website, sable is an adjective that means "Of the color black, as in heraldry, or mourning." and gules means " The heraldic color red". After looking up these words I then understood that this line means on a black field, the letter A shines red. What I took from this line being inscribed onto the gravestone was that even though Hester and Arthur Dimmesdale both had passed on into the afterlife, their sins would forever follow them there. This told me that the author's views on death are that what you do during life will follow you after you have died. This line truly does serve as a motto for the entire novel because throughout the story, Hester was plaqued by the pain of having to wear the scarlet letter and Arthur Dimmesdale was kept in constant misery by the pain hidden in his heart by the adultery they had committed. No matter what either of them did to try to escape their struggles, they were both eternally trapped by the sins they had previously committed.