Justice In The Scarlet Letter

As has been well established in The Scarlet Letter, there are sins and sinners galore, no matter your definition of it. Who is actually at fault for these sins, though? Should we put more blame on the sinner themselves, or maybe turn to look at the enforcers and the ones who encouraged and even perhaps helped the sinner commit their crime? Is there only one side to the story, or are there several? While it very well could be argued that Chillingworth/Dimmesdale/Hester is the sole person to individually blame for this whole catastrophe, I would like to bring up a whole new mindset that says this: a crime, whether it be immoral or illegal, always has multiple people involved. Even if someone didn 't mean to partake in the crime at hand, …show more content…
Since the townspeople see what Hester did as a horrible sin only fixable by punishment, they did just that: they punished her, physically as well as socially. Her original punishment was death, but at her time on the scaffold, Dimmesdale managed to talk the persecutors out of killing her. Therefore, her real punishment throughout the novel is the social embarassment of having everyone know her sin, achieved both by the scarlet letter on her dress as well as being able to keep Pearl. As for Chillingworth, his revenge was a bit more simple: he wanted to find Hester 's lover and, more than likely, hurt him in some …show more content…
While some townspeople may have believed that Hester shouldn 't be allowed to keep her child, it was fairly decided that Pearl would be able to be raised by her biological mother. I 'd say that it 's procedural justice instead of distributive justice because not everything in The Scarlet Letter is equal and fair; instead of, "one for all," it 's more like, "let 's decide who gets what, but not be biased about it (probably)." Finally, the last form of justice showed throughout The Scarlet Letter isn 't necessarily a technical term, but it 's a term nonetheless: self justice. As you go through the book, Hester Prynne is seen standing up for herself, doing what she wants to do (raise Pearl and stay in town, mostly), and not caring too much (usually) about her neighbors ' stares, gestures, and whispers. Hester found justice after a crime was committed, and that justice was owning up to what she did but not letting it completely take over her life. If I had to wrap up The Scarlet Letter in one word, the word would probably be subjective. To each their own, and while everyone is going to think differently about who 's at fault and who 's innocent, I can most certainly say this: there are always more people involved than it seems like on the