In a world where society is disorganized,
unhappy, and chaotic, it can be extremely difficult to provide an honest, and
just law system. As a result, in
Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, people use their religion (Puritan),
as judge, jury, and executioner. For
some people, it can be very troublesome to live a normal life when you are
surrounded by biased and chauvinistic men and women. In this story, Hester Prynne is a victim of
her religion, and her fellow townsfolk.
Throughout the
book, Hawthorne writes about the townspeople and how they act
and behave
towards each other, Hester, and life in general. The novel starts with Hester walking towards
the town scaffold to be seen for public display, because she committed the
crime of adultery.
A lane was forthwith opened through
the crowd of spectators. Preceded by the
beadle, and attended by an irregular procession of stern-browed men and
unkindly visaged women, Hester Pyrnne set forth towards the place appointed for
her punishment. A crowd of eager and
curious schoolboys, understanding little of the matter in hand except that it
gave them a half-holiday, ran before her progress, turning their heads continually
to stare into her face, and at the wink-ing baby in her arms, and at the
ignominious letter on her
breast.
P. 52, 53
As this is
happening, all the people see is the crime that Hester committed, not the
person behind it. They do not take into
consideration, that the crime itself, is not as evil as they make it out to
be. Hawthorne describes it as enjoyable
to the spectators, by showing the
children watch
her and laugh as she makes her way to the scaffold. It's as though the people of the Puritan
religion are heartless, ruthless, cold blooded, and that what is going on, is
considered fun.
Aside from
forcing Hester to stand on the scaffold, they make her knit an "A"
onto her chest. The "A"
symbolizes adultery. The plan was for
people to look upon this symbol, pity her, and make Hester feel deprived of
humanity. Instead of knitting a
simple
"A", Hester designs a very complex and elaborate one. The reaction from the people shows how evil
some of them truly are.
"It were well," muttered the most
iron-visaged of the old dames, if we stripped Madam Hester's rich gown off her
dainty shoulders; and as for the red letter, which she hath stitched so
curiously, I'll bestow a rag of mine own rheumatic flannel, to make a fitter
one!" P. 52
Hawthorne shows
how he thinks the Puritan people would react to the manner in which Hester
stitched the "A", and he does not make them look very pleasant. By showing them as being ruthless, and evil,
Hawthorne is able to reveal his views of the Puritan people, and how he
dislikes them through the townsfolk (the woman in particular). He makes them come across as people you would
love to hate.
Hawthorne seems to think that the Puritan
religion is too strict and harsh. You
can see how he dislikes them by the way people act, talk, and live.
My imagination
was a tarnished mirror. It would not
reflect, or only with miserable dimness, the figures with which I did my best
to people it. The characters of the
narrative would not be warmed and rendered malleable by any heat that I could
kindle at my intel-
lectual
forge. They would take neither the glow
of passion nor the tenderness of sentiment, but retained all the rigidity of
dead corpses, and stared me in the face with a fixed and ghastly grin of
contemptuous defiance.
P. 33-34
Hawthorne is
saying that he has a biased view of the Puritan people from the beginning. Whatever he tries to do to make the
characters in the book seem innocent, or good, is extremely hard for him. He sees them as evil in the heart, and
nothing can change his mind.
Throughout the entire book, Hester was looked
down upon (though slightly less as the story progressed), and treated like a
second class citizen. Hawthorne shows
his distaste of the Puritan culture by expressing himself through the
characters and their actions. Not one
person in this novel was truly good, and all the characters sinned. It is impossible to have a perfect society,
and Nathaniel Hawthorne explains to us
in The Scarlet Letter, that one
ruled by the Puritan religion, proves this true.
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