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Hypocrisy Of The Puritan Society In The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel Hawthorne

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In the “Scarlet Letter,” Nathaniel Hawthorne portrays hypocrisy of the Puritan society, where the protagonist Hester Prynne face many consequences of her actions and the how she tries to redeem herself to the society. During the seventeenth puritans believe that it is their mission to punish the ones who do not follow God’s word and it is their job to stop those from sinning. Therefore, the hypercritical puritan society punishes Hester harshly for committing adultery, but in Hester’s mind, she believes that what she did was not a sin but acts of love for her man. Eventually, she redeems herself by turning her crime into an advantage to help those in need, yet the Puritan society still view her as a “naughty bagger.” (Hawthorne 78) The Puritan society thinks that it was their job to punish people who committed crime severely because they believe they were doing god’s work. They persecuted Hester for committing adultery while they are blinded by …show more content…

Throughout the novel, Hester is fraught by the Puritan society and her suffering is an effect of how evil society is. Hester continues to believe that the crime she committed was not wrong and she should not be punished for it. Her desire to protect and love Dimmesdale, turn her into a stronger person and become a heroine in the book. Although society still views her as a “naughty baggage” (Hawthorne 73) and is punished for her wrongdoing, Hester never thought to take revenge on them, yet she gives everything she has to the unfortunate and leaves herself with very little. She continues to stay positive no matter what society has for her. The hypocritical society is blinded by how they should punish Hester that they are not showing kindness to Hester. Hawthorne creates the book to show how an individual spirit must overcome the difficult obstacles in the society cultural

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Hawthorne wants to portray just how much a women can change emotionally and outwardly based on other’s perceptions. When the reader is introduced to Hester, she is seen as a bold defiant women who was shaken by the mockery and stares of the townspeople, but as the story progresses she slowly begins to lose her identity as the community begins to accept her. She becomes submissive, “She never battled with the public, but submitted uncomplainingly,”(126) and “… many people refused to interpret the scarlet A by its original signification. They said that it meant Abel; so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman’s strength. ”(127)

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Hawthorne’s third person omniscient narration also supports him in his task of analyzing the individual in society by enabling him to look at Hester after her sin became public, while also giving him a wide enough scope to criticize elements of the Puritan society. In Hawthorne’s view, evidenced in this novel, the most damaging and powerful tool of social order that the highly religious Puritan society can inflict on the individual is a constant sense of guilt. The guilt and punishment that Hester Prynne’s society imposes on her for her sin is considered to be too much by Hawthorne, and his most emotional criticism of Hester’s over-reaching punishment is presented when Hester’s donations of high-quality clothes to the poor are rebuffed with

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The opening scene, in which Hester stands on the scaffold and defiantly refuses to name her lover, signals a complex swerve of high or elite literature from the popular pressure toward legibility (5). The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne follows the lifestyle of Puritans in early America in many ways. One of the ways Hawthorne explores their lives is how they are punished for their sins over several contexts, such as family, the church, and state. There is the world of the Puritans, who recognize no distinction between the public and the private and who assume that all should be bared before the multitude; and there is the consciousness of the three central characters, who wrap themselves in secrecy (5). The punishments for sin of men and women, however, fluctuate over the course of the story.

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