I love analogies and my English class read the Scarlet Letter a while back, I never wrote a blog post on it, so I thought this would be the perfect time to combine both.
Fruit can be a lot of things, and they can represent a lot of things but the connection I saw with the Scarlet Letter was the characters being fruit.
A banana for example, can be all brown- or almost black on the outside, but if preserved correctly, perfectly edible on the inside. Hester is just like this in the Scarlet Letter.
Hester has all of her secrets out for everyone to see, she doesn’t hide any of the ugly parts. The brown spots our on her, just like the letter A is. Everyone can judge her and the banana based on what they look like on the outside but they aren’t even considering what is on the inside. She is an outcast, having people form a circle around her not wanting to get to close. This is how I felt towards a brown banana, until I learned the truth. I was also judging until I was enlightened. But the townspeople for a very long time, don’t give Hester a chance to tell them the truth, and really show them what is beneath the surface. This doesn’t happen until later, because they made a preconceived notion just like I did with the brown banana, we both didn’t want to go anywhere near them.
Hester is a banana, letting her secrets, all of her softness rot on the outside while her insides are still preserved. Dimmesdale, on the other hand has this nice looking skin on the outside for the world to see while his secrets rot on the inside and eats up at him. He kept his secret of fathering Hesters daughter for seven years and just like with an apple over time it is going to rot, whether is shows on the outside or not. There could be a problem with them stem, letting bad things seep in and begin to eat away at the apple without anyone noticing. Then one day you could take a bit and find out for yourself. This is exactly what happened, Dimmesdale let the town take a bit of him and see into his secrets which then lead to his death or him being thrown away. The rottness became too much, he was at the point of no return no matter how much hester tried to help him.
Which one are you? An apple or banana? I think we are all a little of both, choosing wisely what we display for the world to see. I love both apples and bananas and they happen to go together really well which I assume reiterates the fact that we have both in us and are certain ones at certain times. I really liked the Scarlet Letter and this is just one of the few things I have learned from it.
A book in progress on the best thing in the entire world. 