Nathaniel Hawthorne's Influence On Society

The way an author feels about people and their community can often subconsciously come through in their work, since works of literature are often a reflection of the author’s life or point of view, even when not intended to be so. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne demonstrates the way he views society and other people as a whole through the way he makes characters interact with each other, and also through how they interact with their society. His writing makes it clear that he has an interesting relationship with his community, and the way that the characters interact especially demonstrates that he has a certain perception of how people in puritan new England and simply in general would handle themselves and interact …show more content…
However, this does not mean that they are given any more personality or individualism than the other people, as during these conversations, the people act and speak as though they are not complex people, as every individual is, Some characters seem to simply exist for the purpose of furthering the plot through revealing pertinent information, especially towards the beginning, when it was necessary for Hawthorne to reveal information in order to craft the setting and exposition of the novel. One such character, the townsman who converses with Roger Chillingworth in the beginning of the novel, firstly acts uncharacteristically personable towards someone he had just met, expounding on the circumstances of a woman’s arrest without second thought, which could be an indicator that Hawthorne feels that since this character was not one of the central ones, he can be written as having less of a personality and less inhibitions than a developed character, showing how little regard Hawthorne has for developing those who are not integral to the