Hester Prynne: Learning and Changing Hester Prynne is as ripe a protagonist as any for learning and changing throughout the course of a novel. She is a new mother and a publicly condemned and ostracized woman in a highly moral and tight knit Puritan community. Her very position in life, first child in hand and scarlet letter on bosom, demands that she learn and grow in some direction, for she is a woman strong enough to endure public shame and go on. It is not insignificant to note that Hawthorne considers the very fact of her learning and enduring at all, as opposed to succumbing and being def