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Puritans In The Scarlett Letter

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As the sun’s blazing rays scorched the town square, the huge crowd that had gathered around the scaffold stared menacingly. The figure of a child being hung could barely be seen from the ground as the sun’s rays were too strong to get a clear look. The crowd was frantically gossiping about the calamity that had just occurred. Apparently, this boy had cursed his parents and was put to death publicly because his misbehavior went against one of God's sacred commandments. This is an example of one of the strict laws colonial Puritan society enforced. The Puritans were an authoritative, repressive, and God-centered society that dished out harsh punishments for crude actions such as disgracing God. The etiquette is very strict and all Puritans are expected to adhere to it but in The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, there are many instances where the Puritans do not adhere …show more content…

However, in The Scarlet Letter, after Hester had committed her sin of adultery and received her punishment (the “A”), the women were anything but polite. If Hester was seen in public, her existence was shunned, she was criticized, yelled at, and things were even thrown at her. In the Bible, which the Puritans strictly followed, Jesus said to his followers, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Instead of being merciful and kind towards Hester, the women were scornful and could care less about her. To repent for her sin, Hester started to commit herself to serving the less fortunate of the society, such as the poor. Although Hester started to act in a completely selfless way, she still received the same amount of hatred she did years ago when she stood upon the scaffold and received her scarlet letter. As seen above, the evidence proves that the Puritan women were going against the polite etiquette they were supposed to follow and the lesson Jesus taught in the

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Puritan’s harsh beliefs represented the beginning of the Nineteenth Century in the newly colonized America. Their community ruled with an iron fist: unforgiving, pitiless, stern. In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne expresses his disagreement with puritan priorities by revealing the hypocrisy widely practiced throughout their community. Hawthorne’s utilization of dim diction aids in the establishment of his scornful tone, while inclusion of symbols and intricate juxtaposition all serve to accentuate the Puritan’s duplicity. All these factors combine to develop a critical tone which rebukes puritan society.

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In Puritan society, citizens are to strictly adhere to set laws and instructions, or they risk being condemned to ‘an eternity in Hell’, as they put it. To understand as to why the Puritans are so conservative, one must first comprehend their origins. The Puritans are a sub-denomination of Christianity which left Europe to establish an orthodox society, purified of all corruption, that is also attributed, The City on the Hill. The Holy Bible,the ultimate (-- removed HTML --) , declares the manner in which an ideal Puritan is to act. Unfortunately, few of the Puritans who Arthur Miller portrays in “The Crucible”, a play that which describes the accounts of mass hysteria in a Puritan community named Salem , abide by the statutes enacted by God.

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However, after many years of performing good deeds for the community the scarlet letter, and by extension Hester, was met with less hostility. Her influence is so great that many citizens start to believe the scarlet letter “...[now] meant Able…”(Hawthorne

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Puritan communities are extremely stiff and strict. Their belief system was built upon the fear of sin. They attempted to oust sin from their societies entirely which is nearly impossible. This resulted in a society obsessed with punishing sinners and filled with hypocrisy. In the novel’s The Crucible by Arthur Miller and The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne the authors express their opinions on the faults in this belief system.

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When you think of a Puritan society, what comes to your mind? Perfect, flawless, and a religion based on following God? Well, that is what it says on paper, but is it really that perfect? Throughout the Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne jabs at the Puritans in an attempt to portray just how flawed they really are. After reading the book, you want to think that Hawthorne is telling the story of sinning in a Puritan society.

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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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Throughout the Scarlet Letter, Hester learned to handle her inner strength by accepting the “ SCARLET LETTER, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom” (Hawthorne 46) and letting it empower her instead of weaken her. This showed that she was attempting to redeem herself by accepting her sin before God. Hester also caused the town to recognize that she was changing the meaning of the “A” from adultery to “Able...so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman's strength”(Hawthorne 127). This showed that despite being an outcast of the Puritan society, she was redeeming herself by using her inner strength and physical capability even in the face of the shame that came from committing adultery. Hawthorne’s message was that it is possible to persevere in a resentful and dark world if people rely on their inner strength.

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Although Hester’s sin is different than Adam and Eve’s, the Puritan community still took action to her sin and punishes her by making her wear the letter A on her chest showing everyone that she had committed adultery and was unable to follow the 6th commandment (Thou shalt not commit adultery) in the Bible. “Along with that meaning came a fixed judgement of good or evil. But their view of meaning is shown up as native at the outset of the story, for that moment that the rake begins, that supposedly immutable meaning has already been undermined by Hester’s artistic and beautiful interpretation of the letter” (86). Although people view hester’s letter as a bad symbol, Hester is not afraid of what she has done. She gave birth to her wonderful child,

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In chapter 2 of The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne continues to portray the critical attitude Puritans had towards sins and repentance. Through the use of symbols, he exaggeratedly exposes how far a Puritan were to repent for their sins. From the moment Hester Prynne walks outside of the gate the women and men gathered immediately begin to gossip and badmouth her, besides not knowing anything about her other than the sin she committed. As she walks to the scaffold women begin to say her punishment of wearing an “A” is too light. They state that she can easily cover it, yet a woman rebuttals and says that she will forever “feel it in her heart” .To make things worse a woman goes as far as to say that she should be scalded with the

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In this novel, we experience the ways of the puritan and their injustice system to sinners. The Puritan fundamentalists of The Scarlet Letter practice are based on the unbalanced system of justice and mercy (Jahan). Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter was written in the eighteenth century. The setting of The Scarlet Letter is in the seventh century in Boston, America.

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She committed the sin in the first place, which is completely against the Puritan beliefs. Hester not only committed the sin but she then decorated the scarlet letter. When she decorated the scarlet letter it was perceived that she was mocking her own punishment. Another good example is that over time the meaning of the scarlet letter “A” began to change. “The letter was the symbol of her calling.

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The townspeople “[began] to look upon the scarlet letter as a token, not of that one sin, for which she had borne so long and dreary a penance, but of her many good deeds since.” This quote exemplifies how sin is not a death sentence for Hester. Through hard work and charity it allowed the rigid Puritan society to see her as something different, and as someone who would not let society define who she was. Hester, thus, was not only able to change herself, but also the image in which society viewed her by working hard to benefit the public. Likewise, the scarlet letter which was supposed to represent sin was instead “fantastically embroidered with gold thread, upon her bosom.”

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The Scarlet Letter, a novel written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1850, functions as an evaluation of Puritan ideas, customs, and culture during the 17th century. Through this evaluation, we can get a good idea of what core values and beliefs the Puritans possessed, as well as the actions they take in cases of adversity brought about by “sinners”. Some Puritan virtues created stark divisions between groups of people, some of which led to discrimination under certain circumstances. One of the most prominent of these is the treatment and standards of men and women, a concept that surfaced during some of the major points in The Scarlet Letter. The divisions that were created by Puritan standards of men and women played a great role in shaping the plot of The Scarlet Letter, determining the fate of many of the characters.

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The Scarlet Letter and Uses of the Puritan Past illustrate various aspects of the cultural values in Puritanism and their societal impacts. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne depicts Puritanism as a bleak, strict cultural instance in which people who do not conform to their rules are shunned and distanced from society. In Uses of the Puritan Past, Puritan culture is described as a social construct based on four primary virtues. These virtues were the main influence of Puritan activity in Uses of the Puritan Past, as they were responsible for the creation of social rules and essential morality resulting in increased power and influence of the Puritan over every day Puritan life in New England. Even though both The Scarlet Letter and Uses of the

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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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