“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
Nathaniel Hawthorne was a man who was both plagued and absorbed by the legacy of the Puritans in New England. He was related to John Hathorne, a Puritan judge during the infamous Salem Witch trials of 1692. In The Scarlet Letter, his fictional account of mid-17th century Boston presents an opportunity to examine different themes commonly associated with Puritans. Particularly the nature of sin, personal identity and the repression of natural urges are themes that appear repeatedly through the novel. While his account of this time period may not be completely historically accurate, it is indicative of the persistent thematic influence of Puritan culture on American and New England society.
Have you ever hid something so it seemed like what you did wasn’t as bad? Well you’re not the only one. In the novel “The Scarlet Letter,” Nathaniel Hawthorne uses tone, diction, and syntax to describe that the punishment on humans by others may not be as destructive as the guilt they impose on themselves. Hester Prynne’s suffering is illustrated at the hand of the towns folk, her husband, and the lying of the true father. Nathaniel describes, “surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A.” When Hester’s husband inexplicably fails to join her in Boston following their emigration from Europe, Hester engages in an extramarital affair with arthur Dimmesdale. When she gives birth to a child, hester invokes the condemnation of her community they manifest by forcing her to wear a letter A for adulterer. Although Hester decides to keep the true father a secret, I believe that
In The Scarlet Letter, an adulterer named Hester was shunned by the church and society. This book also has the church as the main group. The main unspoken rule dealt with was adultery. Hester’s husband had sent her ahead to America. She had an affair with a priest and this was just something that you did not do, and it was a logical unspoken rule that was broken, and, therefore, she was unable to really belong in this town for a very long time. The girl was so shunned, they put an “A” on her clothes. This was the epitome of humiliation. At this time, no one would associate with a girl like Hester. There was never a feel of belonging after that “A” was placed on her clothes. Hester’s actual husband who disguised himself as Roger Chillingworth to avoid the humiliation. Dimmesdale was the man she had an affair with, and he was a minister.
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.
Many would argue that the humiliation people feel when we turn their punishment into a show forces them to quickly change their ways, but Hester Prynne’s public humiliation in The Scarlet Letter proves that unsupportive shaming by the community does little good. Nathaniel Hawthorne starts his novel with her punishment, which involves baring her scarlet letter, the symbol of her adultery, to everyone in her community. Her peers revile and ostracize her, and in the time that they do this, she defies them, refusing to accept their shaming. In her actions, she represents everyone, as practically no one truly wants to feel embarrassed. Because of this resistance to embarrassment, nearly all people will naturally defy those who scold them in a public setting, making it less likely that the shaming will achieve its goal.
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
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.
The society we live in today grants us a variety of freedoms. No one tells us how to think or what to believe in. We decide what clothes to wear, what to do on Sundays and our religion – with no law to persuade us. These permissive decisions would not be looked highly upon in stern Puritan Society. There is no sense of individualism in 1600s Salem because laws envelop every bit of human society. With all these severe rules in place, there are bound to be rebellious actions. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne addresses the theme of an individual’s struggle against society by implementing three symbols: the wild roses, the scarlet letter and Pearl.
There has been a constant dispute over whether people should be governed by determinism or free will. Determinism is the idea that our actions and fate are predetermined and every occurrence can be explained or has a reason for happening; free will, in contrast, is the idea that we have the ability to act independently of external restraints. In the 17th century, Puritan society arose in New England as one that was governed by its religious views, and thus was a deterministic one. Nathaniel Hawthorne illustrates this in his novel The Scarlet Letter, in which the characters Hester, Dimmesdale, Pearl, and Chillingworth are alienated by society. Although
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.
God, the most fearful and powerful presence for almost all people and all religions, used shaming as a way to inflict this sort of fear and obedience in people so that they may never do such things as others have (Deuteronomy 13:11). However, we must not forget that the miscreant itself plays a major role. For example, Hester Prynne, a young and beautiful woman in 17th century America, commits the crime of adultery. She is forced to wear a scarlet “A” for the rest of her life. Hester becomes a walking example of both good and bad. Her scarlet A was a “passport” into other places people dared not adventure; her scarlet A teaches her how to be strong and to do good with all the bad she may or may not receive as consequences of her actions (Hawthorne 155). The scarlet A was the majority of Hester’s public punishment. She quickly becomes isolated and desolate from the community in many aspects. James Cox states that the purpose for a public punishment was to simply shame and embarrass the miscreant and to teach them a lesson so that they may be able to integrate themselves back into the community (Cox). Further along in The Scarlet Letter, readers learn that Hester devotes her life to changing how the community views her scarlet letter, and achieves this through the good she does in return for almost absolutely nothing but
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
In the stories of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, the antagonist characters display parallel story lines through their searches for the enemy. Roger Chillingworth, the former husband of Hester Prynne and the antagonist of The Scarlet Letter, works against his wife in order to find her untold second lover. Frankenstein is a contrasting story in which an unnamed monster is the antagonist towards his human creator, Dr. Frankenstein. Yet despite quite different story lines, the two characters possess traits that exibit parallels between them. In the novel The Scarlet Letter, Roger Chillingworth displays the startling passionate characteristics of an unwavering drive to seek out his foe, madness as his focus on his search takes over his entire being, and terrible anguish when his task is unexpectedly over, all of which are reflected in the daemon created at the hand of Dr. Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley 's novel Frankenstein.
Additionally, these texts allow for readers to gain knowledge about how punishments were done publically in order to bring shame upon the guilty party. For example, in The Scarlet Letter, Hester had to wear a scarlet letter “A” in order to make others aware of her crime (Hawthorne 51). Her scarlet letter “A” displayed her crime of committing adultery. Others put her down because the letter made them aware of her action and caused them to take action avoiding her. There were times, however, that Hester would try to escape the shame caused by her letter. During
The theme of isolation is highly present in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter.” Isolation Plays a very important role in the novel. Every main character finds themselves isolated in one way or another, but while some are absolutely and thoroughly destroyed by it, others gain loads of power. Characters Hester Prynne, Chillingworth, and Arthur Dimmesdale are all victims of isolation in the Puritan town of Boston, due to a different reasons such as Adultery, upbringing, and their past.