Theme Of Shame In The Scarlet Letter

To be a part of a community that constantly shames a person is not a thing that most would willingly embrace; it is safe to say that a majority of people would run from a situation like that at their first chance. However, there is always the small part of the population that, for whatever reason, would put themselves through that kind of pain. At the end of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne comes back to her Massachusetts home in the Puritan community that punished her for adultery and once more puts on the scarlet letter that marks her sin. Hester stays in Boston, the town that has been the site of her shame and her punishment not because she has any great love for it or because she feels morally obligated to do so, but …show more content…
Indeed that is why she stays in the town in the first place: "Here, she said to herself, had been the site of her guilt, and here should be the source of her earthly punishment; and so, perchance, the torture of her daily shame would at length purge her soul, and work out another purity than that which she had lost; more saint-like, because the result of martyrdom" (69). She stays after being released from prison because there is some abstract sense of that being the right thing to do; perhaps she does not think it possible to truly repent and be forgiven anywhere else, especially if she in effect runs from the site of her adultery. Yet over the course of the book she becomes more independent, less bound by that sense of what others deem to be right: "For years past she had looked from this estranged point of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or legislators had established; criticizing all with hardly more reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the church" (171). No longer is she a part of the community, as she tried to be when she was released from prison and she worked for the Bostonians -- now she is truly separate, and she realizes that no matter how long she wears the …show more content…
She does so not because she feels the need to repent, but because she has become too accustomed to life there and wearing her sign of shame, the scarlet letter, to cast them behind and fit in elsewhere. Hers is obviously a painful decision, but it is possible to make a home even in a place that one does not love. Sometimes it is not the place with the most potential but the place with the most history that we are bound