What Are The Villains In The Scarlet Letter

The Scarlet Letter written by Nathaniel Hawthorne did not have a main villain set apart like most books do. Usually there an antagonist who is obviously against our given protagonist in the book. In this case our protagonist is Hester Prynne who is basically ridiculed and shunned from her village due to her sin of adultery. Depending on the reader and their opinion there could be two antagonists pulled from this story.

When people hear the word villain right away the words that come to mind are evil, harmful, and deceitful. But there is more to villains than that, they are usually powerful, intelligent, wounded, and determined also. Usually villains have personal vendettas against the antagonist, there is a motive behind their madness. There isn’t a thing that says that the villain needs to be a single person either. A villain could be a group or an organization against a person.

One of the villains that you could consider in the book is actually a group. The Puritan Society as a whole could be considered the main antagonist. The society was powerful since they grossly outnumbered Hester Prynne and had people of higher authority telling her how dirty and horrible she was with either words or looks over time. They also shunned and …show more content…
He contained many characteristics of a villain but his evils were mainly directed at Reverend Dimmsdale and not at the protagonist Hester. Rodger was intelligent enough to plot and scheme against Dimmsdale. He tormented him psychologically for years, Rodger was the main roadblock in the way of Hester and Dimmsdale’s happiness. Rodger was also somewhat wounded by the fact that Hester had a child fathered by another man, he was disappointed with her. Rodger was also determined, he became obsessive almost with finding Hester’s lover to make him tremble and pay for leaving her to suffer the punishment of wearing the A by