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Scarlet Letter Vs Puritan Age Essay

485 Words2 Pages

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 …show more content…

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

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The Scarlet letter is a book written in the time period of the mid 17th century in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. During this time, the puritans were a very strict and religious group of people who were oblivious to their hypocrisy. Notably, whenever someone had committed a sin, they publicly shamed the sinner as punishment such as putting Hester on the Scaffold with her child in the middle of town and questioning her about the baby in her arms. Committing a sin is the equivalent of interaction with or being possessed by the Devil. Due to the Puritan religion and the time period the people were in, they treated Hester and Pearl as a follower of the devil and the child of Satan.

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In puritan society, adultery is a severe sin worthy of heavy punishment. Despite receiving the harsh sentence of having to wear a scarlet letter A on her chest for the rest of her life, Hester’s sin is the least of those of the main characters in the novel. In chapter five, Hawthorne says this of Hester, “Thus the young and pure would be taught to look at her, with the scarlet letter flaming on her breast, ⏤at her, the child of honorable parents, ⏤at her, the mother of a babe, that would hereafter be a woman, ⏤at her, who had once been innocent, ⏤as the figure, the body, the reality of sin” (71). Because of her crime of

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Have you ever thought, what would it be like to be on your own with a child and being shamed? Well, through the story The Scarlet Letter is a woman, named Hester who had went through that situation. It tells the story of how she had dealt with all of the situations that got thrown her way. The puritans point of view compared to today 's point of view of the the same situation. During the mid 17th century, it was not acceptable to have sex unless you were married, so having a child and not being married was extremely unacceptable to the puritans; whenever Hester stepped out of the prison and walked to the scaffold, were a majority of the town was to see her and criticize the book states that one of the women there to judge her had said “ If the hussy stood up for judgement before us five, that are now here in a knot together, would she come off with such a sentence as

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Extreme discipline was given to sinners and lawbreakers because of the Christian belief the characters had in both novels. In The Scarlet Letter, Hester committed adultery and was sentenced to wear an “A” on her bosom, which stood for adultery. Adultery is an unforgivable sin to the Puritans, so when Hester gave birth to her daughter, Pearl, and her husband was missing, the townspeople knew a crime was committed and she must be punished. Townspeople did not think this was enough punishment for such crime. They wanted her child taken from

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Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter takes place in a Puritan town in the 1600’s. In his book Hester Prynne, who is the protagonist, commits adultery and out of it came a baby and a scarlet letter which she has to wear for the rest of her life. The person she committed adultery with was Reverend Dimmesdale, yet only Hester, Pearl (Her child), Roger Chillingworth

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Hypocrisy in the Scarlet Letter A sin to Puritans was not taken lightly, hints the reason why Hester Prynne is punished so harshly for her sin of adultery. Puritans hold people accountable for just about everything. But, Puritans seem to ignore the unfortunate sin of hypocrisy, which is why they committ the sin themselves. Because Dimmesdale is a “Reverend Master” (Hawthorne 48) and a “godly pastor” (Hawthorne 48), everyone looks to him to be truthful and sincere.

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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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In “The Scarlet Letter” he depicts it as an oppressive 17th – century Puritan society. “The style of Puritanism that Hawthorne presents is drab and gloomy, preoccupied with judgment and punishment, unrelenting and dogmatic,”1 writes Deborah L. Madsen in her book, “American Exceptionalism.” Hester Prynne, the main character accused of adultery, is persecuted by Boston community. Not only adults despise her, but also children who, blinded by the decayed values and norms, humiliate her and her child, Pearl. The character of Hester symbolizes the fight against Puritan enslavement, the need to modernize the prevailing norms that cause nothing but harm to American society.

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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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In the novel, Hester, a young woman involved in adultery after leaving her husband in Europe, is at the center of ridicule and exclusion from the rest of the Puritan community due to her actions. This ideology of community over the individual is prevalent throughout the book, and it has far-reaching effects on not only Hester but her daughter Pearl as well. One of the key forces behind the societal exclusion in The Scarlet Letter is the Puritan ministry. As one of the most powerful groups in New England in the 17th century, they exerted a large presence in local governments. According to Hall’s A Reforming People, Puritan presence in the government came suddenly along with the influx of colonists to New England: “Bringing with them a deep fear of arbitrary, unlimited authority, these settlers based their churches on the participation of laypeople and insisted on "consent" as a premise of all civil governance.

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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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