Hypocrisy in The Scarlett Letter

The Scarlet Letter submerses the reader in the Puritan’s culture. The story involves the Puritans portrayal of the sins of a young woman. Although a difficult read, the book stirs the reader to obtain a high moral compass. Throughout the novel, Hawthorne uses the symbols of light and dark to depict good and evil among the characters, Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is a study of the effects of sin on the hearts and minds of the main characters, Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, Roger Chillingworth. Hester, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth. Sin strengthens Hester, humanizes Dimmesdale, and turns Chillingworth into a demon.

The Scarlet Letter is about a woman named Hester Prynne and her crime of adultery. She had a baby with man who is not her husband, and she will not reveal who that man is. Throughout The Scarlet Letter Hester represents social injustice just as the Salem Witch Trials in The Crucible do, and this injustice becomes accepted and leads to acceptance. Furthermore, Hester’s case represents injustice in the fact her case was unjustified and she was imprisoned on unfair judgement, just like the people convicted of witchcraft in Salem had been accused based off of opinion, not fact. Both have endings of acceptance of their “sin.”

In The Scarlet Letter Hypocrisy is evident everywhere. The characters of Hester, Dimmesdale, Chillingworth, and the very society that the characters lived in, were steeped in hypocrisy. Hawthorne was not subtle in his portrayal of the terrible sin of hypocrisy; he made sure it was easy to see the sin at work , at the same time however, parallels can be drawn between the characters of The Scarlet Letter and of today’s society.

The Scarlet Letter displays a theme of sin throughout the novel through multiple major events. To start off, in chapter seven, “The Governor’s Hall”, Hester observes herself in a convex shaped mirror, and realizes that the scarlet letter was exaggerated in size. The second major event is the entrance of Roger Chillingworth. He was quickly accepted into the Puritan society as an excellent physician, but as time passed, a few puritans started to suspect Chillingworth of using the skill of black art from the Indians. Hester also starts to realize a change, which goes into another major event to display the theme of sin. As Hester and Chillingworth were talking, she started to recognize a change in him, similar to a demon that had possessed him. But Hester wasn’t the only one to notice, Chillingworth noticed himself. In chapter nine and ten, Chillingworth is given the opportunity to cure Mr. Dimmesdale and to discover all of Dimmesdale’s hidden secrets. The final major event to represent sin is in chapter fifteen, “Hester and Pearl”, when Hester rids herself of the scarlet letter and realizes the freedom from the weight of her sin and shame. In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne uses appearance versus reality to illustrate sin.

Nathaniel Hawthorne portrays the ideology of Puritan society in the novel the Scarlet Letter; however reader also get to witness his characters being an illustration of hypocrisy and victims to their own guilt. In the Scarlet Letter, as in many of Hawthorne’s shorter works, he makes profuse use of the Puritan past: its odd exclusionary belief, its harsh code of ruling, its concern with sex and witchcraft. The Scarlet Letter is a story that is embellished but yet simple. Many readers may view this novel as a soap opera due to the way Hawthorne conveys this Puritan society’s sense of strictness and inability to express true emotion along with the secrecy and how deceiving the characters are being. As the story unfolds the main character Hester Prynne is bounded in marriage at an early age. She engages in an adulterous affair with an unknown member of their small village. Hester soon becomes pregnant and with her husband’s absence the chances of this child belonging to her husband are slim. The towns’ people know that she has committed a sin and imprisons her for her crime.

In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne exhibits how three very unique characters are evidently brought together by the sins that they have perpetrated and how they manage to perform acts of atonement in the puritanical Boston society. Hester Prynne sins by committing the shocking transgression of adultery. Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, who as well engages in adultery with Hester, abandons her and their daugher because of his own cowardice and hypocrisy. Roger Chillingworth grows to become a maleficent being who tries to corrupt the very soul of Reverend Dimmesdale. Although Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale do sin greatly, it is Roger Chillingworth who sins to the most ferocious degree.

In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne develops the dynamic characterization of Hester Prynne from a beautiful, innocent girl into a somber, hardened women to showcase the evils and hypocrisy of Puritan New England’s culture of shaming. Hawthorne employs rhetorical devices such as metaphor and juxtaposition to further develop the characterization and his critique of Puritan society. When initially describing Hester, Hawthorne emphasizes her incredible beauty, and juxtaposes this with the other ugly, judging Puritan women, adding to the hypocrisy of her being shamed for sinning. Hawthorne emphasizes the verbal assault on Hester by employing metaphor and imagery in its description. After the community shuns and shames Hester for years, Hawthorne uses metaphor again to show how Hester’s body and character changes for the worst, emphasizes the malice and evil of public shame.

What is most remarkeable about Hester Prynne is her strength of character. Her inner strength and honesty and her compassion to others, even ones that have condemned her is what is brought to the reader’s attention throughout the novel. At the beginning of the novel Hester is described as a radiant beauty, however seven years later her beauty is gone and the beautiful hair that she once had is hidden underneath a cap that she wears. In Chapter 13, she removes the cap and the letter “A” and she becomes the beautiful person that she was before her punishment. I think that this is symbolic in that when she removes her cap and letter she taking off the harsh structure of Puritan society. When Pearl demands that she put back on her cap and letter “ her beauty, the warnth and richness of her womanhood, departed, like fading sunshine; and a gray shadow seemed to fall across her.” While her punishment does change her physical appearance, it has a deeper impact on her character.

With all the chaos present in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, there is a central point at which the novel revolves around: Hester Prynne’s sin. Because of her adulterous actions, she is mocked by both modern and Puritan society. It is through her character as an adulteress that D.H. Lawrence scorns and evaluates Hester Prynne’s flaws through his use of brief diction, sarcastic tone, and biblical allusions.

Hester faces conflict with Puritan society again when she cannot use her elaborate seamstress skills to make bride veils. Although Hester is very talented she is restricted from anything that would offend the Puritan society, which becomes evident when it is stated, “But it is not recorded that, in a single instance, her skill was called in aid to embroider the white veil which was to cover the pure blushes of a bride” (73). The moral sin of Hester Prynne leads to conflict with the Puritan way of life.

The setting of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet letter” is crucial to the understanding of the event that takes place in the story. The setting of the story is in Salem, Massachusetts during the Puritan era. During the Puritan era, adultery was taken as a very serious sin, and this is what Hester and Dimmesdale committ with each other. Because of the sin, their lives change, Hester has to walk around in public with a Scarlet Letter “A” which stands for adultery, and she is constantly being tortured and is thought of as less than a person. Dimmesdale walks around with his sin kept as secret, because he never admits his sin, his mental state is changing, and the sin degrades his well-being. Chillingworth

In The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the story revolves around the lives and the events of the following characters: Hester Prynne, who is the mother of an illegitimate child with the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale and is now being outcasted by her Puritan community because of it; the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale who is the charming minister of 17th century Boston, the father of an illegitimate child and has not had his sin revealed; then there's Roger Chillingworth who is the estranged husband of Hester Prynne who has given up a life-long pursuit of knowledge in exchange for one of revenge and evil. All of these main characters are important to the story of the scarlet letter, but the one who arguably has the most important and

Now that we see what happens when you don’t fit the mold of what society wants you to be and what rights you get striped away from you we go into the over kill and abuse they end up going through while being picked out of a group. For Hester it was more of an emotional abuse knowing every single turn she made she was being looked at and talked about. People would go around her to make sure they didn’t touch her, Hester's child was left out at school and shunned as the outcast because her mom loved someone else and couldn’t divorce her husband that was pure evil. Her mistress was also abused with the guilt that he felt for not having the courage to stand up and show he loved her and the child. He was to scared to show himself to his people,

In The Scarlet Letter, the perception of sin deviates from person to person. The deviation occurs on the severity of the sin that was committed and who committed the sin. Focusing on Hester and Dimmesdale, it is easy to compare the consequences of coping with the perception of their sins, on a private and a public level. The outcome of dealing with their sin is extremely different. The theme of morality affects Hester and Dimmesdale as well. They have varying levels of morality and this changes during the course of the novel.