Guilt In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

In 1692, Massachusetts was churning with accusations of witchcraft and sorcery under the pointing fingers of its puritan occupants. Among those unsettling personages was John Hathorne, great great grandfather of Nathaniel Hawthorne and impenitent prosecutor of sorceresses. Nathaniel was haunted by his ancestor’s presence on his tree and added a “w” to his surname to avoid any awkward associations to the passionately misguided puritan. His aversion to puritan sentiments is also reflected in the pool of his literary works-- notably The Scarlet Letter --by his equation of the ideal puritan woman to death (as in of the individual). He likewise condemns the puritan’s use of regret to mold a vulnerable human being into something drearily unnatural. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne suggests that the origin of guilt is the absence of confession in the presence of sin; He specifies that guilt is often a tool of satan and, taken too

The most curious and equally cryptic symbolic character in the book is Pearl, the daughter of/and the scarlet mark. The spirit-like girl first appears after her mother and a seemingly unknown perpetrator encounter a life-altering relationship and become tainted by evil. Under the guise of curiosity, she pleads with her mother to confess to her-- the picture of childhood innocence --the meaning of the scarlet letter. She later petitions the reverend to embrace her and her mother openly, and will have no connection with him before he accepts them honestly. all of these details along with a constant insinuation of other-worldliness leads to Pearl appearing to conform to a similar role as Jesus, who speaks to the broken and asks only for them to accept his love. The letter central to the book is placed and held in a strange duality with this single, ethereal