In his historical novel, The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne depicts the immense struggles and sorrows of a young woman, Hester Prynne, during her life as a social exile from 17th century Boston’s rigid Puritanical theocracy. Despite the perpetual discrimination that Hester’s receives from the Puritans as a result of her adulterous sins, Hawthorne seemingly sympathizes with Hester throughout the course of the story by intentionally elucidating a number of hypocrisies and shortcomings that the Puritans, ironically, are unable to recognize in their own corrupt society. Hawthorne, whose dislike for Puritanical Society is believed to have stemmed from his embarrassment of his own Puritan ancestors, uses several literary devices and descriptions
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The first instance of Puritan cultural hypocrisy is evident in the fact that there “was no great distance, in those days, from the prison door to the market-place (Hawthorne, 49).” Hawthorne uses this piece of information to illustrate the long-held Puritanical religious belief that sinning is a principal part of the human condition, which was emphatically described by the Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards in Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, which is illustrated through the proximity of the prison to the marketplace. In light of the fact that the marketplace was the beating heart of Boston and the prison was the embodiment of sin and unholiness in Puritan ideology, it can be concluded that Boston’s architectural infrastructure was, in part, based on the idea that it is natural to sin. However, given the intense and extraordinarily lengthy antipathy that Hester received for sinning, it is clear that the Puritans that discriminated against Hester were insincere to their own religious beliefs, which allude to sin being a natural aspect of humanity. This insincerity exhibited by the Puritans is also present in the layout of the marketplace itself. Hawthorne includes a discrete peculiarity of Boston’s marketplace, when he describes Hester’s shameful march from the prison to the scaffold and how the scaffold was positioned “at the western extremity of the market-place, [where] it stood nearly beneath the eaves of Boston’s earliest church, and appeared to be a fixture there (Hawthorne, 49).” This detail further reveals the extent to which the Puritan population is irreverent towards the own religious scriptures that they seem to respect. The reality that the church, the holiest and most righteous location in the colony, borders the scaffold, a place where the colony’s
The first instance of Puritan cultural hypocrisy is evident in the fact that there “was no great distance, in those days, from the prison door to the market-place (Hawthorne, 49).” Hawthorne uses this piece of information to illustrate the long-held Puritanical religious belief that sinning is a principal part of the human condition, which was emphatically described by the Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards in Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, which is illustrated through the proximity of the prison to the marketplace. In light of the fact that the marketplace was the beating heart of Boston and the prison was the embodiment of sin and unholiness in Puritan ideology, it can be concluded that Boston’s architectural infrastructure was, in part, based on the idea that it is natural to sin. However, given the intense and extraordinarily lengthy antipathy that Hester received for sinning, it is clear that the Puritans that discriminated against Hester were insincere to their own religious beliefs, which allude to sin being a natural aspect of humanity. This insincerity exhibited by the Puritans is also present in the layout of the marketplace itself. Hawthorne includes a discrete peculiarity of Boston’s marketplace, when he describes Hester’s shameful march from the prison to the scaffold and how the scaffold was positioned “at the western extremity of the market-place, [where] it stood nearly beneath the eaves of Boston’s earliest church, and appeared to be a fixture there (Hawthorne, 49).” This detail further reveals the extent to which the Puritan population is irreverent towards the own religious scriptures that they seem to respect. The reality that the church, the holiest and most righteous location in the colony, borders the scaffold, a place where the colony’s