Theme Of Punishment In The Scarlet Letter

Did you know, that in Puritan Massachusetts adultery was likely punished by death of both committees instead of humiliation? Arthur Dimmesdale, in the book The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is the town reverend and is also the father of Hester’s baby, but his guilt is overwhelming himself because he is unable to confess. Currently, Arthur Dimmesdale is torturing himself so juristically that he has developed a illness so bad that he has to constantly clutch his chest in pain. Roger Chillingworth, Hester’s husband, returns to Boston and sees Hester at the scaffold. Roger Chillingworth, seeing Hester on the scaffold with Pearl and the scarlet letter on her chest, starts a man hunt for the father of Hester’s baby. Chillingworth is also a physician and is living with Arthur Dimmesdale to help out his heart conditions. Chillingworth continues to grow suspicious of Dimmesdale in his man hunt for Pearl’s father, so he is secretly spying on him and giving him potions to help out his illness, which are really for humiliation. Dimmesdale’s insecurities and hopes that he will go to heaven hold him back from confessing to the townspeople. Arthur Dimmesdale’s guilt has changed his character physically and physiologically throughout the book because he has developed an intense heart condition, and his guilt is so intense he is starving himself to try to manage it, although, his physical condition is partly due to the treatment and torture he is undergoing from Roger Chillingworth. In the novel, Nathaniel Hawthorne presents Dimmesdale as the town reverend who is heavily respected to someone who is mentally ill and afraid to confess his sin to the townspeople.

In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne exhibits how three very unique characters are evidently brought together by the sins that they have perpetrated and how they manage to perform acts of atonement in the puritanical Boston society. Hester Prynne sins by committing the shocking transgression of adultery. Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, who as well engages in adultery with Hester, abandons her and their daugher because of his own cowardice and hypocrisy. Roger Chillingworth grows to become a maleficent being who tries to corrupt the very soul of Reverend Dimmesdale. Although Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale do sin greatly, it is Roger Chillingworth who sins to the most ferocious degree.

Judgment can be the the greatest plague of society. Judgment kripples acceptance, forward growth and blinds entire communities. Though in retrospect plagues are necessary, as is judgment. Without judgment humanity would be blind to people's character exposing them dangerous risks unstable people present. In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne , Hester dealt with the judgment repercussions of adultery. Her sin caused society's judgment of her to rise and fall, in tandem producing negative and positive effects for Hester. Throughout the novel the Puritan community shifts their views of Hester. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, judgment that plagued Hester as a result of her sin evolved and shifted the communities views of her.

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 book The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Dimmesdale gets sicker and sicker the longer he holds in his secret sin of Adultery. It takes place in a Puritan society, which was a strict, conservative, and simple group in Boston Massachusetts. The book focuses on the sin of Hester Pryne committing adultery and having a child, Pearl, with a man other than her husband, Chillingworth. Hester gets shamed and laughed at on the scaffold used for public humiliation. The vulnerable and weakening Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale comes closer to confessing to being Pearl’s father throughout the three scaffold scenes. “Sin as sickness” is a major theme in the book that is represented through Reverend Dimmesdale’s internal conflict. The more Dimmesdale

We did the scene where Hester is being released from prison and they put the Scarlett Letter on her chest. The theme of this is humiliation and embarrassment. She came out of the prison and immediately was judged and looked down on because of the sin she committed. That is unfair to look and judge somebody in such a way because of a mistake that was made. Everybody makes mistakes and sins, hers was just revealed because of Pearl. No person’s sin is worse than another person’s sin. God judges all the sin the same and obviously they did not it realize that. It is sad to say you are a Christian and judge somebody because of a mistake they made and you know you sin everyday but nobody knows it and you want to see other people’s faults to make you

Few themes in literature are as influential or tacitly communicate as much as the theme of sin does, especially in The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible. Through their masterpieces, Hawthorne and Miller reveal the commonness of sin and the grave consequences that often follow it, but also the endurance and perseverance of man despite sin, fulfilling Faulkner's idea of the “writer’s duty”, a term he used in his Nobel Banquet speech. According to Faulkner, the “writer’s duty” is to write about man’s “inexhaustible voice”, that he “has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance”, to remind him of the “courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice” that lies in the past. Faulkner states that if used correctly, the works of an author can urge men to “endure and prevail”, which is certainly what The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible teach through the life of Hester Prynne and John Proctor.

When I was in kindergarten I had to pull my pin for talking this was the first time I had ever really gotten in trouble at school I started to cry while the person I was talking to didn’t seem phased, even when people are children they react differently to different environments and what is going on in those environments. People react to punishment and turmoil in very different ways Hawthorne illustrates this fact well in his book The Scarlet Letter. In The Scarlet Letter the two main characters Hester and Chillingworth take their punishment and turmoil and have vastly different reactions to it but in some ways it affects them in the same.

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne paints a picture of two equally guilty sinners, Hester Prynne and Reverend Dimmesdale, and shows how both characters deal with their different forms of punishment and feelings of remorse for what they have done. Hester Prynne and Reverend Dimmesdale are both guilty of adultery, but have altered ways of performing penance for their actions. While Hester must pay for her sins under the watchful eye of the world around her, Reverend Dimmesdale must endure the heavy weight of his guilt in secret. It may seem easier for Reverend Dimmesdale to live his daily life since he is not surrounded by people who shun

The judge is not the only person to show sympathy for Hester; her husband, despite his plot for revenge, is also merciful when he learns about her disloyalty. Instead of having Hester severely punished, he takes pity on her and gives her child medicine to help it heal (Hawthorne). This act of sympathy is one of the most touching examples in the novel because Hester’s husband chooses to pity her even though he has the legal right to punish Hester and could just let her baby die out of hatred or jealousy. The most important example of sympathy in the novel is the sympathy Hester does not receive from the townspeople who shun her because of her sin. It is this lack of

Vengeance is the act of recovering justice by forcing the opposing individual to endure same punishment or exceed a far more harsh consequence than the victim. People often try to obtain revenge upon others for the wrong reasons due to fact that they believe the actions or sins of another person have affected the victim in a negative way. The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, uses the relentless character, Mr. Roger Chillingworth, to describe the result of being resentful and unforgiving to his wifes secret lover, Reverend Dimmesdale. The Scarlet Letter also vividly describes how Chillingworth became self absorbed with vengeance and how vengeance changes his physical appearance.

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.

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.

Colonial Boston is a town where “justice” plays an integral part in the citizens’ lives. Justice is especially prevalent in the Puritains’ strict belief in Christianity. “Good” citizens of the town embody it by exposing their neighbor’s secret sins. Ministers and magistrates enforce it by dealing out sentences to punish the sinner. Puritans believe after death God judges each man and all their secret sins will be exposed, judged, and appropriately sentenced to heaven and hell. Justice is just as central in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter as in colonial Boston. In the opening scenes of the novel the reader is introduced to Puritan justice as the public shames the adulteress Hester Prynne while she stands on the scaffold and the crowd

“Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted for too long a series of generations in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.” (23)-Nameless narrator’s narration