Instant Access To 100,000+ Essays!

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter in 1850, many years after the demise of the New England Puritan society that his novel attacks. The novel follows the struggles of two sinners in the morally strict Massachusetts Bay Colony in the seventeenth century. A young woman named Hester Prynne and the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale commit adultery. Hester’s sin becomes publicly acknowledged when she has a child; she is forced face humiliation by standing on a scaffold in the center of town and must wear a scarlet letter “A” on her chest. At the same time, Dimmesdale suffers in secrecy and his guilt causes him endless misery. As the novel progresses, Hawthorne makes it clear that Dimmesdale’s deceit is a much more severe form of punishment than that faced by Hester. Hawthorne’s theme of honesty is supported by the events that take place on the scaffold and the symbolism of the scaffold itself. The scaffold’s first use is as the site of Hester Prynne’s public humiliation. As an adulterer, she could by law have been killed, or have “felt the brand of a hot iron” (44) on her forehead. The town leaders mercifully give her a lesser punishment. In Puritan society, harsh punishments for Old Testament crimes were meant to