The Effects Of Public Shaming In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

Do you act differently around certain people? Are your actions different because you want to impress a girl, the popular kids, or your teacher you want a letter of recommendation from? All around the world, people try to disguise their true self, just so they can fit in and be someone they are not. In The Scarlet Letter, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale had been living behind a mask for seven excruciating years, as he remained unwilling to face the repercussions of society for his adulterous affair with Hester Prynne. If Dimmesdale was his honest and true self, he would have escaped death. While the epic is exaggerated through paranormal and supernatural occurrences, many of the punishments inflicted and morals questioned are quite topical today. Nathaniel Hawthorne encourages the readers to ‘show freely to the world’, no matter how daunting that personality may be (410). Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale’s downfall affirms the damaging effects of falsifying one’s disposition in The Scarlet Letter and today’s society.

Guilt and shame haunt all three of the main characters in The Scarlet Letter, but how they each handle their sin will change their lives forever. Hester Prynne’s guilt is publicly exploited. She has to live with her shame for the rest of her life by wearing a scarlet letter on the breast of her gown. Arthur Dimmesdale, on the other hand, is just as guilty of adultery as Hester, but he allows his guilt to remain a secret. Instead of telling the people of his vile sin, the Reverend allows it to eat away at his rotting soul. The shame of what he has done slowly kills him. The last sinner in this guilty trio is Rodger Chillingworth. This evil man not only hides his true identity as Hester’s husband, but also mentally torments

Society tries to tell us what we should wear, how we should act, what we can do, and a bunch of other things. The sad thing about that is we actually follow what they say, because we think that is the only way to fit in or be normal. Society tries to tell women how to dress or what they should be doing. How a reputation could last forever, or who you associate with describes how you act. How stereotyping is okay.

The author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, is the nephew of John Hathorne. During the Salem Witch Trials, the only judge that did not apologize for the remorseless and cruel acts that were put upon many men and women was in fact John Hathorne. Nathaniel changed his last name from Hathorne to Hawthorne in an attempt to disassociate himself from his uncle. John Hathorne is the reason why Nathaniel Hawthorne is obsessed with the puritan times. Hawthorne lived in the 1800s, but the setting of the novel is based before the Salem Witch Trials were held in the 1600s. In his novel, The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne uses the symbolism of the scarlet letter, Dimmesdale, and burrs to contribute to the overall theme of guilt.

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.

“Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred” (Hawthorne). As this sentence is read in the The Scarlet Letter, the reader will realize that the main theme of the book is the sentence above. Throughout the book, secret sin damages the lives, soul, and the integrity of the main characters. However, it could have easily been evaded through open confession of their sins. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s purpose in writing this novel is an attempt to influence the reader to openly confess their sins and never be ashamed of who they are. According to Levine, “even though we convey ourselves as saints, we are really sinners (Levine 64). The Scarlet Letter is a classic work of

Secrets can destroy even the most respected people. Sometimes is not the secret itself that drives people into exhaustion, but the emotional baggage that comes with it. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Reverend Dimmesdale physically deteriorates because of his guilt caused by a dishonorable sin. The Puritan society in which the story is set discourages the idea of the private self, which Hawthorne shows by creating distinctions between the characters’ private and public lives, specifically Dimmesdale’s.

In the book The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne remarks on his thoughts of his Puritan ancestors’ in his introduction and wording throughout the novel. In his introduction, he sets the tone on Puritanism by remarking, “” In the story itself, Hawthorne writes

In the fictional novel The Scarlet Letter, the contrast between public and private truth is made quite clear. The three main characters of this book make perfect examples of this overarching theme. The characters in this book are the pastor Mr. Dimmesdale, the doctor Roger Chillingworth, and the adulteress Hester Prynne. First, Mr. Dimmesdale, who seems like devout clergyman to the public, has a big secret that could get him killed if it were made known. Next, Roger Chillingworth, a harmless doctor in the eyes of the public, is actually a man on an evil and vengeful mission. Finally, Hester Prynne’s public truth is that she is unimportant outcast while in private the complete opposite is true. In conclusion, Mr. Dimmesdale, Roger Chillingworth, and Hester Prynne all are prime examples of the theme, public versus private truth, that Hawthorne tries to convey in The Scarlet Letter.

   Throughout The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne repeatedly portrays the Puritanical views of sin and evil.  The Puritans are constantly displayed as believing that evil comes from an unyielding bond being formed between love and hate.  For such reasons they looked towards Hester's commitment of adultery as an action of pure, condemned evil.  However, through the use of light and dark imagery, Hawthorne displays who truly holds evil in their hearts.  The one who is the embodiment of evil creates hypocrisy of Puritanical views towards sin and evil.  Hawthorne displays that those who expose sin to the public and the daylight are the most pure and those who conceal their sin under a

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

Through out the course of history, those who were considered sinners were often out casted from the society. This is much the case with Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. After a public trial, Hester is considered a sinner due to her birthing of a so called “devil child”. Hester is convicted to the life long bearing of a scarlet letter on her chest. The Scarlet Letter that Hester Prynne wears symbolizes the change in perception of sin through out the novel. Due to the revelations of the governor Winthrop and the reverend Dimmesdale, the way sin is perceived changes from one of shame to the idea that every one is a sinner in their own right.

To make a decision, one weighs the benefits and the downfalls, and concludes by judging the factors of each alternative. One's choice of whether to conform to society's demands or submit to personal impulses is difficult, especially under strenuous circumstances. Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter is a profound romance in which the characters must make such a decision. A reconciliation of the two forces is not seemingly feasible. Reliance of self consumes Hester Prynne, while denial of self engrosses her partner in the crime of adultery, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale. The roles of Hester's daughter, Pearl, and her estranged husband, Roger Chillingworth, as individual beings are less evident than that of their impact on Hester and

Novelist, Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his fictional novel, “The Scarlet Letter”, expresses a story about a young woman, Hester Prynne, back in the 1600s who was convicted of adultery and must now wear a big “A” on her chest to show those in the small Massachusetts Bay colony the sin she has committed. Hawthorne’s purpose is to illustrate the hardships Hester must go through for committing such act in the small colony where religion was put first. Hawthorne adopts a serious and pitiful tone throughout the novel to get the adult readers to sympathize with the main character, Hester Prynne. Though this book was written back in the 1800s and is based off a woman who’s shamed for adultery, this book can still relate to today’s world with some of

moral principles that govern a person's or group's behavior. This is how the dictionary defines ethics. Different people have different sets of ethics and sometimes they do not coincide with