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Hawthorne's Relationship With The Puritan Society In The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel Hawthorne

739 Words3 Pages

Hawthorne is in relation to the Puritan society through his ancestors in addition to a long line of judges preceding him; whom were known for cruel sentencing during the salem witch trials. 20 or more witches were convicted of a crime under the judgement of Hawthorne's grandfather. Considering the correlation between the Puritans and Hawthorne himself- being more open minded- many see why he chose to separate himself with them. (The Scarlet Letter) Among all the Hawthorns were known for judging people and deciding their fate, similar to the Puritan people. They felt very strongly about people getting what they so deserved in return of their sins. In The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne uses his background knowledge and familiarity with the Puritan …show more content…

Hester has strong belief that her husband has deceased while away, she begins a relationship with Dimmesdale and falls in love with him, thinking that her husband is dead she allows herself to fall more for him during …show more content…

Hester's secret is revealed when the town learns she is bearing a child. Although upon questioning Hester doesn’t deny her sin, she doesn’t announce the name of her lover. Hester protects his identity because of his status within the community. The town sentences Hester to jail time for her wrongdoing, upon release she is to wear a scarlet letter A. Doing this Hester is publically humiliated in her hometown. “The Scarlet letter burned on Hester Prynne’s bosom. Here was another ruin, the responsibility of which came partly home to her.” (Hawthorne, p.116) Later is it learned that Hester’s lover was in fact Dimmsdale the town’s minister, whom himself sins by keeping this secret and continuing to preach and teach the ways of the bible. (The Scarlet Letter Analysis) Hawthorne exploits sin by utilizing the characters mistakes and putting emphasis on the fact that during this time period sin was against everything the Puritans stood for. Hawthorne occasionally reminds the reader sin isn’t easily forgotten. In Hester’s

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Even though only one person that he knows of, Hester, knows his sin, he still is going insane from the misconduct he did. Dimmesdale cannot be freed of his private guilt that is driving him crazy. Dimmesdale is noticeable being damaged by the suffering of keeping his guilt private. After Hester and Dimmesdale discuss their plans to runaway together, in the woods, Dimmesdale returns to the town with a new attitude. He grasps the

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How the Scarlet Letter Transforms Hester In The Scarlet Letter, when Hester is first brought out on the scaffold to by publically shamed for her ignominy, Arthur Dimmesdale pleads with her to name him as her fellow sinner so that he will not have to reveal himself when he exclaims, "Be not silent from any mistaken pity and tenderness for him; for, believe me, Hester, though he were to step down from a high place, and stand there beside thee, on thy pedestal of shame, yet better were it so, than to hide a guilty heart through life.” Hester refuses him and Dimmesdale goes unnamed and unpunished until the very end of the story. While Dimmesdale refuses to accept responsibility for his sin, Hester embraces the shame of the community. It is this difference which causes Dimmesdale enormous amounts of guilt and pain while Hester in able to find peace with herself and with her situation.

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Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, a brilliant spokesperson and a devout and wise Puritan minister in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, is the lover of a woman who commits adultery, Hester Prynne. Hester, a recognizable adulteress, wears the scarlet letter and lives as an outcast. Contradicting, Reverend Dimmesdale’s sin stays hidden from the Puritan community, know only to Hester and himself. As a minister, Dimmesdale believes he should suffer from punishments the way Hester did for committing the same crime, which leads him to fall into a terrible mental and physical state.

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We are all sinners, no matter how hard we try to hide our faults, they always seem to come back, one way or another. Written in the 19th century, Nathaniel Hawthorne shows us Hester Prynne and how one sin can change her life completely. Hester Prynne changes a great deal throughout The Scarlet Letter. Through the view of the Puritans, Hester is an intense sinner; she has gone against the Puritan way of life committing the highest act of sin, adultery. For committing such a sinful act, Hester must wear the scarlet letter while also having to bear stares from those that gossip about her.

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In the novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, sin is an issue that is brought up frequently. The story takes place in the seventeenth century in a strict Puritan community in America. Hester Prynne is sent to America from Europe by her husband, Roger Chillingworth. Chillingworth finally goes to America after two years, but Hester thinks he is dead since he does not arrive afters she does. Thinking her husband is dead, Hester decides to have an affair with the town minister, Arthur Dimmesdale.

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She receives three punishments from the townspeople, who claim they will free her from her sin. The community orders Hester to go to jail, wear a scarlet letter on her chest, and stand on the town scaffold for hours. Hester wears her scarlet letter proudly on her chest, and endures much suffering because of her public ridicule. Hester is “kept by no restrictive clause of her condemnation within the limits of the Puritan settlement” after she was released from prison, but she chooses to stay (Hawthorne 71). Later, Hester’s child, Pearl, symbolizes the Puritan view of Hester.

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Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter depicts the flaws in the human nature of both Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale. Although each character possesses their own belief and values, both played their part in the sin committed. However, there is always a cause for an individual’s wrong doing and in the case of both Hester and Dimmesdale it, “had been a sin of passion, not principle, nor even purpose” (Hawthorne 152).

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Nathaniel Hawthorne uses his famous book, The Scarlet Letter, as a commentary on the Puritan way of life. In the novel, guilt resurfaces repeatedly as staples of the Puritans’ obsession with a pristine and uncontaminated life. The effect of this obsession is catastrophic for many of the characters in the novel, which fulfils Hawthorne’s wish to expose the negative aspects of the Puritans’ lifestyle and their oppressive methods of forcing repentance through guilt. Originally, the guilt forced on Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale was described as the worst punishment imaginable: Hester, doomed to isolation and its accumulating hardships; Dimmesdale to silent self-torment over his guilt.

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Hester Prynne is the protagonist of the story. She commits the sin of adultery and her punishment was to wear the scarlet letter “A” on her chest for the rest of her life. The color scarlet of her letter represents a sexual sin. This is her punishment of shame because wherever she goes everybody will see her for her sin and her evil and not anything else. Even with Hester facing all this shame and punishment from the public she wears her scarlet letter with confidence and almost like she is proud of it.

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The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthrone demonstrates the consequences of sin and the effect it brings upon the individual and in the community in Boston 1840s. Throughout the Scarlet Letter, readers are constantly reminded of hypocrisy through characters such as Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth. Hester Prynne, the main character, was a strong, independent woman who dealt with her sin of adultery very well. Instead of running away from it, she lives with it and accepts her punishment to be publicly shamed in the town. However, while struggling to accept the will of the court, she did not believe that she truly committed a sin.

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583 Words | 3 Pages

People change for many reasons, the change may affect each person differently and over time a person can heal at their own pace. Depending on what has occurred to them and their actions towards themselves, helps to portray their reason to be and how it changed them into who they are now. Nathaniel Hawthorne depicts this in his novel the Scarlet Letter, many of Hawthorne’s characters undergo several changes because of the scarlet letter. Hester Prynne, the one who wears the letter A, is haunted by her crime as well as by her town. Pearl grows up knowing the scarlet letter and being a part of it, she does not know any of her town nor as religious Puritan, like everyone else.

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523 Words | 3 Pages

This is illustrated when the narrator says, “Man had marked this woman’s sin by a scarlet letter, which had such a potent and disastrous efficacy that no human sympathy could reach her save it were sinful like” (Hawthorne 81). This is because the word potent and disastrous means having great power and causing damage. The people didn’t have any sympathy for Hester for her sin. She was supposed to be put to death. In addition, the narrator says, “most of the spectators testified to having seen, on the breast of the minister, a Scarlet Letter the very semblance of that worn by Hester Prynne imprinted in the flesh” (Hawthorne 230).

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495 Words | 2 Pages

After I read the quote described above, I had felt a great sense of happiness and satisfaction. Through reading Hawthorne’s writing, I had enveloped myself into the book, and my feelings became Hester’s feelings. With this final act of closure from Dimmesdale, I had been so relieved that something good had come from The Scarlet Letter. Throughout the entire story, sin had been established as a prime theme, and the recurring idea was that the leading figures preaching against sin are actually the ones committing it, and how the Puritan society itself was extremely controversial and hypocritical. With the theme of sin in mind before I started reading the book, I did not expect something so heartwarming to occur.

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1284 Words | 6 Pages

In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne effectively conforms to the conventions of the gothic genre for the purpose of characterizing the Puritan society as oppressive, portraying the hypocrisy found within the society and highlighting the consequences for not confessing

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In the “Scarlet Letter,” Nathaniel Hawthorne portrays hypocrisy of the Puritan society, where the protagonist Hester Prynne face many consequences of her actions and the how she tries to redeem herself to the society. During the seventeenth puritans believe that it is their mission to punish the ones who do not follow God’s word and it is their job to stop those from sinning. Therefore, the hypercritical puritan society punishes Hester harshly for committing adultery, but in Hester’s mind, she believes that what she did was not a sin but acts of love for her man. Eventually, she redeems herself by turning her crime into an advantage to help those in need, yet the Puritan society still view her as a “naughty bagger.” (Hawthorne 78)

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