The Community In Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

In today’s world, it is decidedly as difficult if not more so to see how Hawthorne’s stratagem works towards its aim. The same sort of hypocrisy that plagues the Puritans is demonstrated again and again, as individuals or groups look to “out” others or marginalize persons whom they look down upon for whatever reason. Donald Trump, for instance, with his comments about making Muslims carry identification cards because of their religion, or the identifying of Jews in Germany by their armbands. Though these “symbols” are not directly related to the spiritual concept of sin, as Hawthorne’s “A” is, they are still significant representations of the modern way in which society will marginalize a group for its own purposes. In The Scarlet Letter, …show more content…
In this sense, Chillingworth is the actual representation and physical embodiment of the community. He does in a revengeful manner to Dimmesdale what the community does in an explicit and literal manner to Hester. But Chillingworth is the manifestation or personification of the hypocrisy at the heart of the Calvinist-Puritan ideology: its severity is the opposite of the Christian ethos, which it purports to project. It wants to imagine that it shines its light like the city upon the hill, identified by the uber-Protestant of New England, John Winthrop, but what it actually projects is a lack of charity, a lack of empathy, a lack of sympathy, a lack of compassion, a lack of spiritual vision, a lack of grace, and a lack of Christian character. If the Calvinist-Puritan community of Hawthorne’s novel is supposed to be Christian, it is not based wholly on all that Christ did. Christ ate with sinners, talked with sinners, and forgave sinners. In this community, they label the sinners with a letter and banish them to the margins of society—or, in the case of Dimmesdale, stubbornly refuse to admit that their “saintly” pastor could be as touched by sin as the “adulterous” Hester