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Scarlet Letter And The Crucible Analysis

Decent Essays

Throughout all of American Literature, authors have used different techniques to relay a message to the reader, one way being by depicting how the community’s influence on the protagonist shapes the protagonists’ development. In The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible, authors Hawthorne and Miller, respectively, use the social norms in Puritan society to express a common theme by portraying the positive and negative moral changes in characters. In Puritan society, individuals believed they were carrying out “God’s work”, creating a society where compromise was rare and harsh punishment was inflicted upon those who made mistakes that were deemed immoral to society. Because of the strict nature of the Puritans, acting in a manner that was completely out of the norm in Puritan society caused society to look down on those individuals. These characteristics of Puritan society are reflected throughout both The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible, in which both the protagonists and antagonists react differently; the protagonists attempt to atone for their sin because of the guilt they are unable to overcome while the antagonists do not attempt to atone for their sins and experience negative moral changes. Throughout Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Miller’s The Crucible, the depiction by both authors of protagonists who experience moral changes as a result of guilt originating from their committed sins, indicates the recurring theme in American literature that characters who exhibit

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