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ersonal Life
    Hawthorne’s father, who is a well known ship captain died at sea and left his wife. Then his wife at the age of twenty-eight, with children aged 6 and 4 and an infant of a few month. She withdrew entirely from society, and permitted the habit of solitude to grow up to such a degree that she actually remitted a strict hermit to the end of long life. Hawthorne himself though that such an unhealthy and separated family atmosphere provided a morbid consciousness that paralyzed his powers. When Hawthorne after leaving the Bowdon College, he returned to his uncle’s old house in Salem. He devoted himself to reading and writing with less contact with the family members as well as outside world. One of his close friends Jonathan Cilley wrote:
I love Hawthorne. I admire him, but I do not know him. He lives in a mysterious world of though and imagination while he never permits me to enter (Rubinstein, 1988:82).
From his family and his friends provided clues to Hawthorne’s life were feelings of gloom and alienation.
B. Social and Cultural Backdrops of the novel
    The story in The Scarlet Letter was happened in Boston in the 1600’s. At that time, the puritans were prosecuted in England because they refused to abide by the rules of the Church of England, and then they left their home and came to American as permanent settlers. They were forced to settle in a new land far from homeland. The Pilgrim Fathers suffered terrible hardships during the first winter and half of them died. In order to survive, they had to fight against the natural disasters and endure loneliness in the new world.

Ⅲ. Four characters’ Loneliness in The Scarlet Letter

A. Hester Prynne’s Lonely Pursuer for Love
    Hester Prynne is the main character in the novel; she was an honesty and goddess woman.
Hester spent her happy childhood times with her parents, later; she grew up to be a beautiful young lady with an extremely passionate nature. She married with a handicapped scientist –Chillingworth. Chillingworth regarded himself as ‘a man of thought, the bookworm of great libraries-a man already in decay, have the best years to feed the hunger dream of knowledge’(Nathaniel, Hawthorne.1996: 29). In contrast, Hester was in her budding youth, and had ‘a figure of perfect elegance on a large scale. She had dark and abundant hair…and a face which, besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes’ (Nathaniel, Hawthorne.1996: 56). She had an impulsive and passionate nature, whereas the husband devoted himself wholly to seeking the so-called truth in books. Chillingworth did not have an eye for Hester’s youth and beauty. For the young and beautiful wife, passion and true love should be the basic principle and purpose of a holy marriage. The old and lonely husband was physically deformed. To make the matter worse, the husband indulged himself in alchemy and in medical research, totally neglecting his wife’s inner minds for much of the time. The unhappy marriage indicated that there was no mutual understanding and communication between her and husband. The parents did not know what Hester expected of her Mr. Right. Her marriage life was unromantic. The attitude of her husband made her loneliness too much. She need love from her husband, she was lonely.
When she settled alone in Boston, a place f