The Scarlet Letter and The Puritan Age are very similar and have some connections; both have the same location, punishment, and a society. The Puritan age was a time when most of the settlers who came to America were Puritans from England. The Puritans were a group of English Protestants who wanted to “purify” the Church of England and use simpler ways of worshipping. The Scarlet Letter is a book about a woman named Hester that commits adultery and becomes pregnant. The town then dismissed her notably because she refuses to expose the identity of the baby’s father. Hester is regularly disciplined as a sinner and the entire time, the baby’s father is the priest who expresses his guilt by self-mutilation.
A group of Puritans in the 1630s came to America and settled in present day Boston and formed a community named “Massachusetts Bay Colony”. The Massachusetts Bay Colony is the same colony where The Scarlet Letter takes place ten years later. The colony was founded because Puritans
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Whenever you performed a sin, the Puritans would severely chastise you. In The Scarlet Letter, Hester is publicly shamed for committing adultery. As that kind of punishment is studied and compared to today, it's rather immoderate. If The Scarlet Letter were to be read by the Puritans, they would bear an understanding of the punishment and might have perhaps done the same.
The third connection is society. The Puritan religion is remarkably rigid and their society restrains you from releasing your innermost thoughts and secrets. In The Scarlet Letter, the forest is the shelter from society where you can reveal your emotions and feelings without anyone judging you. The forest is ultimately worry-free, so you have the freedom to do whatever you please, assimilated to the Puritan society which is portrayed as a jail primarily. So loosely, the forest is another society distant from Puritanism in both the book and in the Puritan