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.
In the beginning of the book, Hester is standing the on the scaffold
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Originally it is meant to shame her for her sin of adultery but instead it is made to attract attention to it. Hester feels proud of the A and it scares the townspeople because they do not know how someone who has sinned can live with it so easily. They fear that she may be acquainted with the Devil they do not want any part of it so they decide to exile her and Pearl to punish her and to keep them from her sinning ways. Puritans always associated sinning with Satan and burning in hell for eternity. Yet they believed in predetermination, where someone's fate was chosen before they were born, but they believed that if a person did something bad that God would not appreciate them they would've condemned to burn in hell for that action. The only problem about that is that it completely goes against the whole predetermination idea because if someone's path is chosen before they are born then there is no point of caring about sinning or not so they don't need to worry about the path they are on because it is already chosen for …show more content…
She is not wrong to the think that way because it is actually not inaccurate. Mostly when people thought or talked about Hester, all they would know her by is the Scarlet Letter and her sin. So the letter is doing its job of amplifying the fact that she sinned but Hester does not want the letter and as the story furthers, she gets accustomed to it and she does not even acknowledge the letter anymore. She has the power to take it off but she refuses to do so because she feels obligated to wear it until she has fully repented her