Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is known as a psychological novel regarding humanity, sin, guilt, and a fair amount of other ambiguous concepts. One of those is the significance of the three scaffold scenes throughout the work. The scaffold scenes signify religious and moral ideas, such as sinfulness, the spiritual figures the characters each portray, and the character development achieved by public and private absolution. The first scaffold scene begins the novel. In chapters two through
uncertainties of good and evil, and the continual hold of the past on the present. Hawthorne focused on his Calvinist lineage and America 's Calvinist ideological past, as well, in hopes of coming to terms and making sense of it. Hawthorne 's writing is full of symbolic characters, settings, and objects. Hawthorne 's
Sin. It is part of our nature. We have been cursed with sin since the fall of Adam. We all have secrets, but what about secret sins? Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter intending to convey his ideas about sin, especially secret sin. Many different ideas emerged while Hawthorne was writing this book in the mid 1800’s. Some people who came to be know as the “transcendentalists” thought man was basically good and did not sin. Hawthorne originally thought that the view of transcendentalism