Sin In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, while beginning as a story of one woman, Hester Prynne, ultimately serves as a bird’s eye view of the community she lives within. The crushing weight of socio religious expectations within this community morphs public opinion into a weapon, one to be used unyieldingly against those deemed corrupt. Though never explicitly rebuked by the puritan doctrine or its leaders, this gossip-fueled public shame is utilized by Hawthorne to illuminate the hypocrisy within his ancestral hometown.

Hester’s reputation is completely interwoven with the community’s own, with each of her wrongdoings leaving a stain upon the record shared amongst the townspeople. In particular, her plight stands to reflect upon the Puritan

Without the possibility of genuine social connection, Hester exists as a blank canvas, patiently waiting for the townspeople to paint her as whatever they choose. Granted this new role, the adulteress slowly becomes anything from a “brazen hussy” to “the reality of sin”, her identity becoming malleable under the weight of her peers' interpretations (Hawthorne 39/53). Hester is established as the beacon of sin within the community, the bar with which others might compare their own sins. Because of her existence, the townspeople are able to escape the guilt of their own wrongdoing, soothing themselves using the vilified version of Hester Prynne. In this way, the book’s protagonist remains, even after her damnation, a scapegoat for her peers' religious penalties, allowing them to live the anonymity she was never granted. Subsequently, this treatment of Hester dehumanizes her day by day, slowly morphing her into a rigid standard of morality. This notoriety reaches a climax at the end of the adulteress’s stay in her hometown, in which the impropriety of her conversation with a seaman is masked by the fact that “so changed was [her] repute before the public” that any interactions she held could not have had “less result of scandal than herself” (Hawthorne 139). Without the rejection of these social practices by the town’s leaders, the

The irony of her plight lies within its artificial nature, invisible to unbiased onlookers. “The decision of her air, and the glittering symbol in her bosom” are meaningless to those uninvolved within the community, such as Governor Bellingham’s bondservant who presumes her “a great lady in the land” (Hawthorne 67). Isolated from the townsquare, her prominent symbols of wrongdoing exist only to elevate her carried dignity and grace, the Scarlet Letter an emblem of her good works and high social status. Unaccompanied by the scornful looks and scoffs of her peers, the letter is nothing more than a shimmering accessory, in closer proximity to a necklace than a pair of handcuffs. That being said, these remote moments are far and few between for the shunned woman, minutes of respite from her ordinary burdens. Without a shield of anonymity, Hester is subjected to the cruelty of her life existing as public knowledge, enclosed within “a sort of magic circle.. a forcible type of moral solitude” (Hawthorne 139). The continuous invasion of her privacy actually serves to further remove her from the community, stripping her of space with which to grow and mature. Despite being suffocated by the proximity of the town’s watchful eyes, she is robbed of the potential intimacy offered by group