Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter is set in the mid-seventeenth century during the Puritan era. Hawthorne was raised in Salem, Massachusetts, and was directly related to John Hathorne, who was a leading judge of the Salem Witch Trials in 1692. The guilt and embarrassment of being the descendant of a major Puritan magistrate during the Salem Witch Trials caused Hawthorne to go against the Puritan beliefs, which is reflected in most of his writing. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne expresses his displeasure with Puritanism with the use of metaphors, the portrayal of certain characters and with his way of exposing ideas of Puritan hypocrisy. In his novel The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne uses metaphors to reveal an object’s hidden alternative meaning, while also proving Puritan ideas to be wrong. Ryskamp states in “The New England Sources of The Scarlet Letter,” that throughout the book, Hawthorne uses “the portrayal of color contrasts for symbolic purposes, [such as] the play of light and dark” (Ryskamp 301, par.1). For Example, in Chapter 16, when Pearl and Hester are walking through the forest, Hawthorne …show more content…
In the second chapter of The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne says, “…cold [is] the sympathy that a transgressor might look for, from such bystanders, at the scaffold” (Scarlet Letter 37-38). The townspeople are judgmental and have no sympathy for sinners even though they themselves are sinners. As the story goes on, the most obvious Puritan hypocrite is Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale. According to Michael Colacurcio, “Dimmesdale’s problem is ‘hypocrisy.’ Most simply, he is not what he outwardly appears; he may or may not be ‘vile,’ but he is not the apotheosis of saintly purity the Puritan community takes him for” (Colacurcio 324, par.4). The hypocrisy in The Scarlet Letter proves that the Puritans are not as pious and godly as they think they