Ultimately, Hester Prynne retains at least her faith, albeit an anachronistic one. She also remains with her daughter, Pearl. Sarah's independence leads to loneliness--bereft of ties to family or religion. In a letter to her daughter, also named Pearl, Sarah as much as instructs her to avoid men:

A young woman compromises and cheapens herself by openly lending herself to the companionship of young men, with all that implies. Boys pretend to scoff at such things but I don't think they really do--they like us to be pure and at their mercy or else whores who needn't trouble their consciences. But whores at least get paid.

Only when Sarah rejects the deception in all things, when she has finally accepted her loneliness, is her rebellion complete. Updike's final proposition for women, then, is a bleak one.

Bleaker still because Sarah has been socialized so thoroughly into her role as a housewife that she can never break free of it. She retains her meticulous materialism. After having fled from society, sitting alone on a island, Sarah sends a final letter--to her husband:

The Chippendale dining table and matching eight chairs with the diamond-and-scroll back splats came from the Perkinses and should go eventually to Pearl along with the carved sea chest that accompanied Daddy's great-grandaddy back and forth to China countless times and the dear little blackened salt-and-pepper shakers handed down through Mother's mother's mother's people the Prynnes.

Two hundred years after Hester Prynne struggled to be a woman in Puritan New England, Sarah Worth finds herself not much better off.