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Puritanism as a symbol for Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Scarlet Letter
The Puritan Beliefs As Told Through The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne was not a Puritan. But Hawthrone’s forefathers were Puritans, so he had an understanding of their belief system and their basis behind it. He stated that he hoped the sins of his forefathers had been forgiven. Hoping to expose those ideas which he understood, yet despised, Hawthorne purposely presented many important Puritan beliefs as import aspects to the Scarlet Letter. In the Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne addresses three main Puritan beliefs: providence, predestination, and the strict code of ethics that the settlers of New Englanders lived by.
The first main Puritanical belief Hawthorne referred to was the belief in divine providence. The Puritans believed that God granted providence, the right to enter heaven upon one’s death, to people who were moral and performed meaningful deeds while on earth. The main example of God granting providence is in chapter 8 when Hester visits the governor concerning Pearl. "… The young minister’s argument…[that] the child had saved [Hester] from Satan’s snare" (100). Surly if God did not want Hester to enter His kingdom upon her passing, He certainly would’ve allowed Pearl to be taken and Hester to enter the forest with Mistress Gibbons. A second example of providence in the Scarlet Letter is when Dimmesdale is dying on the scaffold. He claims that the "burning torture upon his breast" (226) and the "dark and terrible old man" (226) ...
Nathaniel Hawthorne was a truly outstanding author. His detailed descriptions and imagery will surely keep people interested in reading The Scarlet Letter for years to come. In writing this book he used themes evident throughout the entirety of the novel. These themes are illustrated in what happens to the characters and how they react. By examining how these themes affect the main characters, Hester, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth, one can obtain a better understanding of what Hawthorne was trying to impress upon his readers.
In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne portrays the strong values of the puritans in the 17th century through the townsmen and women. Religion was a way of life for the puritans. Their values interjected in their emotions, attitudes, actions, and speech. Hester Prynne committed adultery, which defies the puritan’s beliefs. By examining the punishments that were given to Hester, Hawthorne is able to continue to emphasize the puritan beliefs and values. Community was to follow the beliefs of God and to do their duties the best they could; yet they were there to criticize and punish all who disobeyed the religion or laws. Through narrating the tail that is to follow, Hawthorne can better display the puritan beliefs of plainness, aversion to festivities, and the importance of the puritan’s beliefs.
John Winthrop aimed to created Christian utopian society when he founded the puritan community, he failed in this goal. Even with his failure, people still thought of the society as pure and just. What he engendered instead was a community whose theology denied human being’s free will, filled with paranoia, racism, sexism and hatred of sexuality and youth. These themes are clearly represented in the Scarlet Letter. The hatred of youth is shown early on in the novel, when Hester Prynne first enters from the prison, “This woman [Hester Prynne] has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die. Is there not law for it? Truly, there is, both in the Scripture and the statue-book.”(199). The aged ugly woman who makes this statement is used by Hawthorne to serve as representative for the puritans, while Hester represents youth and sexuality. The undeserving punishment of death for the crime of adultery only further demonstrates the extremities of this so-called perfect society. While perhaps seen as God’s will that a person who commits adultery must die, it is instead the government’s way of controlling the people by fear and terror so that t...
After the death of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s character Dimmesdale from the book the Scarlet Letter, there have been many theories about the cause of his death. Some literary analyzers claim that his guilt was the cause of his death. Others say that Roger Chillingworth, a physician, poisoned him with Atropine and Scopolamine. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s book The Scarlet Letter, Dimmesdale’s guilt appears to be the cause of his death, but his symptoms point towards Atropine and Scopolamine poisoning.
The Puritan society was extremely restricting. They had strict laws and rules, and harsh punishments for even the smallest of misdemeanors. They lived with only the bare necessities and discouraged uniqueness or boldness. As a Romantic writer, with beliefs the complete opposite of the Puritans, Nathaniel Hawthorne was very critical of the Puritan’s strict society. In the allegorical novel The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne uses the characters of Hester Prynne, Reverend Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth order to convey the central moral of rejecting societal ideals and acting upon one 's own desires and emotions.
... like Hester. He is implying that she is the victim and that the Puritans are actually at fault for this sin. Hawthorne's main goal is to convey the Puritans as sinful and unholy. He does not approve of the sin they hide and he thinks there should be punishment for their actions.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic, The Scarlett Letter, has become one of the most discussed novels of all time. A great deal of` controversy streams from the obvious gender-related issues throughout the story. Considering the setting of seventeenth-century Boston, the plot takes place in a conservative Puritan society. Because of this, Hester Prynne, the protagonist, spends the seven years, over the course of which the book takes place, dealing with the repercussions of what is believed to be a “crime” against God and her community. The situation she is put in is one very few people could truly endure. Yet, she is able to beat all odds and surpass peoples’ expectations of an “ordinary Puritan women.” The complexity of the story goes into the depths of gender equality and the unconventional position this woman has in society. Hawthorne is able to depict conflicting gender roles in The Scarlett Letter by illustrating the expected persona of a Puritan woman and directly contrasting that norm with his very complicated and well-developed character, Hester Prynne.
One of the many literary talents of Nathaniel Hawthorne in the Scarlet Letter is his ability to make a clear contrast between Hester Prynne and the Puritan=s doctrines. As a strict religious community, the Puritans condemned her for her shameful sin of adultery. The words Hawthorne uses to describe Hester and the letter show that her attitude toward the scarlet letter contradicted what the Puritans intended as a merciful punishment. The scarlet letter clearly emphasizes the burning passion Hester holds within her heart.
The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is a cult classic. And with good reason. Anyone who simply believes that the title of this book just signifies that the protagonist wears a scarlet “A” on her dress in punishment of her adultery is ignorant. Obviously this paper would not be required if such were true. Instead, The Scarlet Letter is extremely ambiguous. One can argue that the scarlet letter is a character itself. I intend to flesh this out in literary, historic, and symbolic terms.
Arthur Dimmesdale's soul was jeopardized by Roger Chillingworth's intentions, which were to ruin him, but his only messiah, is Pearl. Dimmesdale must embrace Pearl as his daughter and publicly confess to be free from his self-inflicted torture.
"Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get," suggests Tom Hanks in the motion picture "Forrest Gump". He utilizes this metaphor to align a box of chocolates as a symbol for life. Symbolism serves as a useful tool to convey a message or point subtly so that the concept lingers in the mind of the reader, who then establishes a relation in his or her mind with that object and the message. Hawthorne uses symbolism in The Scarlet Letter extensively to express the underlying truths about the stifling nature of Puritan society and the dispositions of the characters in the novel. Such elements as nature, color, and light; the scarlet letter itself; as well as the scaffold, where the three pinnacles of the plot occur, operate on a firm foundation of symbolism.
The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, had a large influence of a very popular religion during the 17th century, known as Puritanism. The Oxford Encyclopedia defines Puritanism as “religious sensibility centered around conservation” (?). The reason behind many people traveling to America during the 1600s from England was only for one specific reason: religious freedom (Joselit). “For leaving England for what would become New England, the Puritans were not seeking economic opportunity and security for themselves and their families. They were on a religious mission or, what later became known in Puritan circle as an “errand into the wilderness””(Joselit, 21). The first set of Puritans came to America in 1620, and started a colony in Plymouth, Massachusetts. By the 1640s, there were over twenty-five thousand English settlers in New England. The group of Puritans that settled in the 1630s lived in an area that they named the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which is present day Boston. This is where the setting of The Scarlet Letter takes place (Joselit).
Hawthorne judges the characters in The Scarlet Letter by using his own belief systems - drastically different from those of the Puritans. Instead of the stern, harsh values of the Puritans, Hawthorne sees life through the eyes of a Romantic. He judges each person accordingly, characterizing each person's sin as the pardonable sin of nature or the unpardonable sin of the human soul.
Since the beginning of time, there has been a constant struggle between good and evil. In his novel The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne uses the power of imagery to signify that light is a sign of goodness and darkness portrays evil and the unknown. In the novel Hester Prynne is confined to the forest as a result of being deemed incompatible with Puritan society. To the townspeople, the forest is unknown and therefore seen as dark. The town is seen as light and ruled by law and religion; the forest is viewed as dark and ruled by human nature. The symbol of the light is based on how people are exposed to the truth of who they are during the daytime. The darkness is when people are able to keep secrets and hide their sinful ways from society. Hawthorne also used the contrast of light and dark to show different aspects of society and to separate truth from lies. The imagery of light and darkness pertains to how the characters come to terms with their exposed past and how they ultimately choose to no longer hide behind a shady, dark past.
The Scarlet Letter is a fictional novel that begins with an introductory passage titled ‘The Custom-House’. This passage gives a historical background of the novel and conveys the narrator’s purpose for writing about the legend of Hester Prynne even though the narrator envisions his ancestors criticizing him and calling him a “degenerate” because his career was not “glorifying God”, which is very typical of the strict, moralistic Puritans. Also, although Hawthorne is a Romantic writer, he incorporates properties of Realism into his novel by not idealizing the characters and by representing them in a more authentic manner. He does this by using very formal dialogue common to the harsh Puritan society of the seventeenth century and reflecting their ideals through this dialogue. The Puritans held somewhat similar views as the Transcendentalists in that they believed in the unity of God and the world and saw signs and symbols in human events, such as when the citizens related the meteo...