All 5 Uses of
estrange
in
The Scarlet Letter
- So long estranged by fate and circumstances, they needed something slight and casual to run before and throw open the doors of intercourse, so that their real thoughts might be led across the threshold.†
p. 177.7estranged = separated or no longer emotionally close
- But Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage and activity, and for so long a period not merely estranged, but outlawed from society, had habituated herself to such latitude of speculation as was altogether foreign to the clergyman.†
p. 186.2
- For years past she had looked from this estranged point of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or legislators had established; criticising all with hardly more reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the church.†
p. 186.6
- Hester felt herself, in some indistinct and tantalizing manner, estranged from Pearl, as if the child, in her lonely ramble through the forest, had strayed out of the sphere in which she and her mother dwelt together, and was now vainly seeking to return to it.†
p. 194.3
- There were both truth and error in the impression; the child and mother were estranged, but through Hester's fault, not Pearl's.†
p. 194.5 *
Definitions:
-
(1)
(estrange) arouse hostility or indifference where there had formerly been affection or sympathy
-
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
Much more rarely, estrange may mean to remove from customary environment or associations.