Public Shaming In The Scarlet Letter

Hester Prynne of Nathanial Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter defies the Puritan belief system through her rebellion and compassion. Hester defies the Puritan belief system through her rebellion. Hester Prynne, while in Boston waiting for her husband to come from Amsterdam, commits the crime of adultery and gives birth to a child, causing her to be punished. Hawthorne describes her crime in dialogue between Hester’s husband, who has just arrived in Boston and is unaware of Hester’s circumstances, and a towns member who infers as to what she has done and how much of an uproar it has caused, during her public punishment, in the government forces her to stand on a scaffold for three hours and condemned to wear an A on her chest

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.

Society puts pressure on citizens to conform to their standards of what is normal, however, when one obeys the toxicness that is expected, they lose their individualism and change who they truly are. It is not any different in Hester Prynne’s situation in the historical fiction novel, The Scarlet Letter. Nathaniel Hawthorne writes of an adulteress, who is forced to wear the letter “A” upon her chest to represent her sin, and her daughter, a constant reminder of what she has done. Although a puritan community demands a society to conform, Hester Prynne continues doing what is not expected and living her individual life even after being forced to hold a symbol of shame, ultimately illustrating the importance of being a nonconformist.

Society has unintentionally been guided by the same themes since the beginning of time. The recurring themes that are present in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic The Scarlet Letter are still relevant in today’s society. When high school students and teachers claim that Hawthorne’s novel is archaic and should be removed from the curriculum, they are absolutely wrong. Hester Prynne, the main character of the novel, commits adultery and as punishment, has to wear a scarlet letter “A” on her chest for everyone to see. Throughout the novel, Hester is faced with obstacles such as the struggle between self and society and the burden of publicly suffering for her sins. Despite a substantial amount of time having passed since Puritan times, the themes that Hester Prynne had to experience are still pertinent. Roger Chillingworth, Hester’s husband, is driven mad by his incessant need for revenge and in society today there are many occasions where people are plagued with the desire to seek vengeance. There are some instances in life where human nature takes over without people even realizing and revenge is one of them. Also, people are right when they say “history repeats itself” because some of these themes never go away. The Scarlet Letter takes place in the strict religious time of the 1600’s and although the book seems outdated and obsolete, the ideas inside are still relevant and therefore high school students should continue to read this work

When two authors from distinctly different societies and historical periods build stories around the same theme, there is an undeniable importance in the message being delivered. One of the authors bringing this message about is author of The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne tells the story of Hester Prynne, a Puritan women in seventeenth century Boston, Hester, having committed adultery, is branded with a scarlet ‘A’ on her chest. The story describes the animosity that society feels towards her and her daughter Pearl, through the story Hester redefines the meaning of the ‘A’ and Pearl’s life is formed in a new light. While the setting of twentieth century Baltimore is unlike that of early Puritan society, The Other Wes Moore

“All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.” Everyone deserves privacy and the right to control what information is subjected to the public. Since everyone is showing their true colors, whether they know it or not, the amount of information out there in the world should be enough to know the character of an individual. In today’s culture, there is a want to expose someone, and the person being exposed may have said those thoughts in confidence, thinking it was a safe environment. People of faith should not show themselves freely to the world because it takes away their right to privacy which can affect their everyday life. In the Scarlet Letter, Hester underwent serious public shame because everyone knew about her private life without her consent. Her punishment was to wear a scarlet colored “A”, for adultery, on her chest and stand on a scaffold in front of the whole community for public shame. They even tried to take her child away. In the book, it describes her punishments by saying, “Lastly, in the lieu of these shifting scenes, came back the rude market-place of the Puritan settlement, with all the townspeople assembled and levelling their stern regards at Hester Prynne, - yes, at herself, - who stood on the scaffold of the pillory, an infant on her arm, and the letter A in scarlet, fantastically embroidered with gold-thread, upon her

In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hester Prynne’s punishment for adultery is to stand on a scaffold in the middle of town for three hours, and to wear a scarlet letter on her garment for the rest of her life. Today judges sometimes use public humiliation instead of traditional punishments, like jail time or community service, to punish criminals. In today’s society public humiliation should not continue be used to punish criminals in today's society.

The main character, Hester Prynne, is publicly shamed for adultery and forced to wear a scarlet letter “A” on her chest. Although one might view Hester as an evil character considering that she has committed a rather unbearable sin in the eyes of 1650 Boston, she is not at all a bad person. Though she commits one of the worst sins for a woman, she is not entirely unvirtuous. Though Hester is punished by being forced to wear the scarlet letter, she turns the letter “A” into more than adultery. “Such helpfulness was found in her, - so much power to do, and power to sympathize, - that many people refused to interpret the scarlet A by its original signification. They said that it meant Able; so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman’s strength”

This essay will cover how these topics relate to one another. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the protagonist, Hester Prynne, commits the sin of adultery and is forced to wear a scarlet “A” on her clothing as punishment (chap. 2). However, even though Hester partially feels remorse for her actions, she keeps on living her life normally and at times acts like the scarlet letter isn’t even there.

Envisage living in a community where one could only be intimate with their husband. Sounds insane, right? Though being sexually active with more than one partner in a lifetime is moderately common in today’s society, it was severely looked down upon in the 1800s. In The Scarlet Letter, Nathanial Hawthorne communicates the story of Hester Prynne, an adulteress. Hester Prynne lived in a Puritan Society in which women were held to high, difficult, and unjust standards by men. Evidently, she undergoes unusual punishments for her infidelities against her estranged husband. She forcibly wears an embroidered, scarlet letter A on her breast for the remainder of her life. Though physically benign, its call of attention to Hester’s transgression is emotionally straining. As a man or woman, adultery must always be perceived as improper and unlawful. However, the author exhibits transcendentalist values when one can conclude that Hawthorne’s words were not demeaning Hester, but more so commending her. His execution of rhetorical devices applauds Hester’s individuality in a conforming society. Through the author’s implementation of diction to illuminate Hester and debase the rest of society, manipulation of symbolism to compliment Hester’s individuality, and application of irony to manifest Hester’s gained dignity from rebelling, Hawthorne illustrates Hester’s journey in a culture against change as one of dauntlessness, and conveys his purpose that individuality is precious.

“Wahh, Wahh, Wahh.” Christina is crying as a result of public humiliation. Public humiliation can hurt someone long term. In “The Price of Public Shame” Monica Lewinski was hurt badly by public shaming, and she did not know if she could fight the constant threats to her. Also, in “Is the Internet a Mob without Consequence?” Someone tweeted something bad and in just a couple hours the responses to the tweet was very harsh. Finally in, The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne made a mistake and she got publically humiliated for one mistake that she made. This one mistake ruined her life. Because public shaming can ruin someone’s life for one little mistake they made, it should be left in the past due to the lack of a social life, and potentially ruining their professional life.

Imagine a world in which everyone believes it is in their best interest to suppress their feelings. Most people in the modern world would undoubtedly find this prospect awful and depressing. After all, our phenomenon of instantaneous communication was conceived with the belief that humans desperately want and need to share their emotions and ideas. The widespread popularity of Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking websites seem to affirm this assumption. If one was to compare the Puritan setting of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter with this hypothetical world, they would soon realize the two

Within the novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, a puritan woman is sentenced by local authorities to undergo public humiliation for committing what was seen as a grave crime.The punishment of public humiliation was often used as retribution for criminals or delinquents whose sentences varied depending on the crime committed, during the puritanic times; moreover, such a punishment is still carried out by judges to this day. Today public humiliation may not take on the identical forms, techniques, and methods that were used in the past, but it still exists and plays a huge role in modern society. Publicly humiliating a person, or group of people, is an uncivilized practice for the present-day community to participate in, especially

The novel “The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne was published in the 1850s, and takes place in the Boston, Massachusetts area during the 17th Century when Puritans were the main population. Hester Prynne, is accused of committing adultery and is forced to wear a scarlet A against her chest and care for Pearl, Her daughter who is born from the tryst. In the beginning of the novel, both Pearl and the Letter are introduced at the same time aspressed against Hester’s chest. Though she chooses to hold the child close to her and the Letter is thrust upon her, Hawthorne shows the reader how determined she is to take these symbols of sin and integrate them into her life and create her own identity.

Nathaniel Hawthorne highlights the habitual societal conflict of surfacing gender equality ideology throughout The Scarlet Letter. The typical female role in society during the mid-seventeenth century was to be a caretaker. Hester Prynne’s sentence for breaking this stereotype through adultery is to wear a large, red letter A on her chest. Hawthorne uses Hester’s character to add characteristics of early feminism. For example, Hester not only takes on the so called male and female role put in place by society at some point throughout the story, but she also challenges societal views of women. To fully understand the situation women were going through, you must be familiar with the historical context. The story takes place in a Puritan