Almost 150 years old a text, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter can be viewed as a saga of a woman who let her heart take the charge of her head and faced consequences.
Set in the first half of seventeenth century in a Puritan village in Boston, Massachusetts, few years before the novel begins, Hester Prynne arrived to the ‘New World’, her arrival was soon to be followed by her husband’s arrival. He was in Europe to fulfill certain commitments. However, things took a different turn in his absence. Hester Prynne was accused of adultery; she was branded with the scarlet letter A. The novel traces the course of hardships of Hester and her illegitimate child Pearl.
Before proceeding, it is necessary to have an understanding of the formation of New England. It is necessary to know of the culture, its occupants and history. As the novel is set up in a Puritan village, it is mandatory to have a clear insight of who Puritans actually were. They were the extreme Protestants in the Church of England who wanted to purify their national church by eliminating every shred of Catholic regime.
If we consider North America’s earliest settlement, we will find that pilgrims from England first settled in New England in 1620, to form Plymouth colony. However, after ten years, Puritans settled to the north of Plymouth Colony in Boston, thus forming Massachusetts Bay Colony.
It is necessary to understand Puritan ideas and beliefs in order to comprehend the novel and this paper. The