Puritans in The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

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Nathaniel Hawthorne opens his most famous novel, The Scarlet Letter, in the midst of the action. The novel begins with a crowd of Puritan Bostonians waiting anxiously outside the town jailhouse, hoping to see convicts, sinners, and their overall hated fellow citizens be publicly punished and shamed. This is a classic example in medias res, which translates from Latin to mean “in the middle of things,” according to Encyclopedia Britannica. The concept of introducing a plot while it is occurring and letting the reader infer about the past through context clues and flashbacks developed during the popular phase of epic poetry in ninth century B.C. as seen in Homer’s Odyssey, according to Murray. In medias res is a technique that helps create a more dramatic atmosphere and helps the author captivate the reader from the beginning. Hawthorne indirectly introduces the protagonist, Hester Prynne, in the second chapter when the crowd discusses and criticizes the punishment she has received for adultery. At this point, the reader can construe that Hester Prynne is a woman who fell to the temptation of sin, and in the Puritan society, she will have to face punishment. The reader eventually finds out greater detail of what leads her to be in the situation aforesaid. However, the few pieces of background information do not explain her past in full. This is where the reader’s imagination and logic must participate to describe in greater detail how her life has taken this certain path.
Interest heightens in the second chapter when Hester Prynne, finally introduced and in action, walks out of the jail with an infant clinging to her. Hawthorne depicts Prynne as a force that cannot be reckoned with when one of the guards tries to assist her while w...

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Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Pleasantville, N.Y.: Reader's Digest Association, 1984. Print.

"in medias res". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
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London and the English Civil War: A Lecture by Professor Barry Coward of Birkbeck College given to the Friends of Senate House Library, 7 March 2005

Murray, Christopher John (2004). Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850. Taylor & Francis. p. 319. ISBN 1-57958-422-5

Pimple, Kenneth D. Studies in the Novel. Vol. 45 ed. Denton: Studies in the Novel, University of North Texas, 1993. Print.

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