The Importance Of Puritans In The Scarlet Letter

The opening scene, in which Hester stands on the scaffold and defiantly refuses to name her lover, signals a complex swerve of high or elite literature from the popular pressure toward legibility (5). The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne follows the lifestyle of Puritans in early America in many ways. One of the ways Hawthorne explores their lives is how they are punished for their sins over several contexts, such as family, the church, and state. There is the world of the Puritans, who recognize no distinction between the public and the private and who assume that all should be bared before the multitude; and there is the consciousness of the three central characters, who wrap themselves in secrecy (5). The punishments for sin of men and women, however, fluctuate over the course of the story. Although the town views Hester’s sin, adultery, as horrible and they punish her for life, they don 't equally punish the man who acted with her, ask or consider the whole story, and praise how Dimmesdale’s been acting, without knowing he’s also guilty of the sin.

When Hester is outed for the sin she committed, adultery, the townspeople reacted very poorly. They see her action as the end of the world and punish her for the rest of her life, but they didn’t even ask or consider why she did it in the first place. To a member of the Vigilance Committee, Hester 's outward submission to the strictures of Puritan law might well appear a shameful knuckling under, the kind of failure of