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Hawthorne Being Racist: The Scarlett Letter By Nathaniel Hawthorne

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Mahek Saluja Mr. Stephens Honors American Literature 11 April 2023 Hawthorne Being Racist Hawthorne criticizes Indigenous culture, constantly claiming it’s significantly worse than Puritan society and that they are too wild and carefree when in reality, native people are separate from Puritan society and aren’t comparable to each other fairly. Native society is no better nor worse than Puritan society, it is simply different. They are shown this way to give the idea that Puritan society is better BECAUSE they control their civilians, rather than letting them be free to formulate their own wild decisions, but that isn’t necessarily true. Hawthorne doesn’t justify these claims well, making them no better than a generalized and racist opinion …show more content…

As they walk into the woods, Pearl begins a story of the black man and how “‘he haunts this forest, and carries a book with him,—a big, heavy book, with iron clasps; and how this ugly Black Man offers his book and an iron pen to everybody that meets him here among the trees; and they are to write their names with their own blood. And then he sets his mark on their bosoms!’” (PAGE NUMBER). Hawthorne has always given the woods an air of ‘danger’, and now, he shows it as a sinful place. The woods are now seen as a place where people to ‘write their names in the Black Man’s book’, which is also racist in its own way. The woods are seen as sinful seeing as it’s wild and distant from the ‘civilized society of Puritanism’. This almost encourages people not to enter the woods, and by association, to stay away from what’s in the woods, such as the native people. They have not harmed anyone, yet they are characterized just as negatively as the …show more content…

This implies that Hawthorne believes them to be godless and live in a place of sin. The reality of the woods is that neither it nor the ‘Black Man’ are at fault for what happens inside. People are more inclined to sin in the woods because no one is constantly watching them like they are in society. Hester says she met the Black Man and the scarlet letter is its mark, INSERT QUOTE but is that true? Did she undoubtedly meet the Black Man, or is she just scaring Pearl away from sinning in the woods as she did? This isn’t clear in the novel, which demonstrates this statement is untenable, and yet, Hawthorne almost uses this to characterize the woods as a negative and sinful place, when it isn’t, it’s just different. He blurs the line between the native people and the woods, because if he calls their environment sinful, what does it say about them? Native people haven’t done anything truly negative throughout the novel which means that Hawthorne characterizes them and the woods unjustly with no real evidence to back it up. What people do in the woods is because they WANT to, not because some dark force or sinning creature asks them to. This is of their own accord and cannot be blamed on the freeness of the

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Her writings also depict how little of value she placed in Native American people and their culture. In her culture, anything that defied her way of life or religion was of lesser value. Her story offers an insight to a female, puritan perspective on the Native Americans. One section of the narrative showed that she acknowledged that the Indians had their own civilization and culture based on their clothing, but it was a civilization of savages. Mary Rowlandson’s narrative is an important piece of literature at the time as it offers a greater understanding of her society at the time, and their deeply troubling relationship to and perceptions of the

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Finally in part three it is said that The New World was not a wilderness when Europeans came. It is said that it was an environment where the indigenous peoples had changed for years using fire for their benefit. Manns point of view was different than the typical and more well known thoughts that Native Americans had no effect on their environment and that their land was mostly wilderness. In the Preface Mann talks about he first started wondering what America was like before Columbus while he was writing an article about a NASA program where he ended up in Chichen Itza. “The seeds of this book date back, at least in part, to 1983...

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Similarly, document 3 states that a reason to move to America was to encourage Christianity to “grow strong and prosper”. In response to this, an Indian chief translated that “all was his, and that [colonists] should not setup any crosse without his leave”(Document 2). On the same note, a Jesuit priest surveyed the land of New Amsterdam for a personal account, and in his description he notes that “the savages had burnt a part of their grain” (Document 6). This priest believed that Indians were inhuman and uncontrollable, similar to animals. In historical context, though, the Indians were trying to push the colonists out of their land through vandalism in revenge for the abusive techniques that colonists used on the Indians, like raping and killing them.

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In Indian Relations, Bradford’s tone shifts from skeptical to manipulative using invariable details, simplistic diction, and contrasting syntax proving that the Puritan’s and Indian’s harmony resulted from deceit, and the Puritan’s original distrustful perception of the Indians changed to finding them “afterward profitable” since the Indians proved intellectually inferior and could easily fall prey to manipulation. When detailing the Puritan’s idea that the Indians would “skulk about them”, Bradford implied skepticism of the Indian’s motives for sneaking around the Puritan’s land. Using the word “skulk” shows the already cautious mindset about interactions with the Indians, because while the Puritans understood that the Indians demonstrated

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Mary Rowlandson observed the Native American’s hunting and eating habits while she was held in captivity with them. She recalled the variety of animals and animal parts they would eat with a mocking tone. “They would eat…Dogs, Skunks, Rattle-snakes; yea, the very Bark of Trees…and provisions they plundered from the English” (Mary Rowlandson, source 2-4, p. 81). This view of the Native Americans that Mary Rowlandson presented ensured the previous thoughts toward Native Americans. The Indians are presented as mindless consuming beats, killing and eating everything, even the supplies stolen from the English.

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The basis of understanding of the “wilderness” was that it represented the devil’s landscape and was ever devouring, therefore necessitating the need to conquer not only for God but for own personal gain and gratification in a new environment. To the colonists, nature was something to conquer, and as mentioned in Taylor’s Wasty Ways, “…settlers meant to amass the property that endowed independence, with all its promises of material comfort, social respectability, and political rights. They also found encouragement in the precedent of their parents and grandparents, who had persevered through similar travails” (Taylor 300). Colonizing the environment not only became a conquest for salvation, but the chance of living a better life as their ancestors have. This chance, in the “New World”, was a chance to secure an individual’s future prosperity in a new environment.

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Puritan leaders, felt it was their job to convince the world that there was a God, and one of the ways in which they did this was showing how the Natives revealed the presence of the devil, in hopes that others will join their pure community out of fear. Throughout The Narrative Of The Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, her prejudice terms describing the Natives clearly reflects how powerful and strong of an impact the Puritan exclusiveness of other belief systems has on a person. Prejudice terms as well as other terms were used such as, “savages”, “bloody heathens”, “merciless”, “infidels”, “ravenous beasts”, “black creatures”, “wolves”, etc. . For example, after Rowlandson was taken from her home in Lancaster, she mentions, “I had often before this said that if the Indians should come, I should choose rather to be killed by them than taken alive, but when it came to the trial my mind changed; their glittering weapons so daunted my spirit, that I chose rather to go along with those (as I may say) ravenous beasts,”.(par 6, lines 1,2,3,4)

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