Hawthorne Being Racist: The Scarlett Letter By Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

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

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