Mirror Imagery and the Scarlet Letter

In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, mirror imagery is used quite often to affect the characters or the story, and also to help us understand certain situations or moods. The mirror imagery in the story is used with all of the main characters in the story, and sometimes helps link characters together and show their relationship to one another.
Mirror imagery is utilized in chapter two in the following passage, “She saw her own face, glowing with girlish beauty, and illuminating the interior of the dusky mirror in which she had wont to gaze” (Hawthorne 65). Earlier in the passage Hester had seen her mother, father, and her childhood home. She then discussed her marriage to Chillingworth, which tells us that she wishes that she could go back in time and never have married him, because her life was so much better before the arranged marriage. The marriage was never good because there wasn’t any love between them, which Hester later uses as an excuse to blame Chill...