![]() ![]() Their isolation due to the surrounding crowd, Hawthorne implies, is a form of imprisonment even death is an imprisonment, and the sad lovers are separated from each other even in death. Each of them is in a separate sphere”, as she herself realizes, and they can never meet. In chapter XXII, we learn that Hester is surrounded by a group of curious onlookers, as Dimmesdale is surrounded by a group of listeners. The only time she is freed from this “imprisonment” is in the forest (chapters XVII and XVIII), where the sun shines and her lost beauty is restored. She is isolated on the scaffold (chapters II and III) also, and the “rigid” stares of the Puritans make her feel like a prisoner. Her ostracism is a form of imprisonment also. Hester herself is a prisoner of her past, as the scarlet letter constantly isolates her from her community (chapters V and XIII). This shows how the Puritan mind was obsessed with the idea of “dark” imprisonment for the defiant and the recalcitrant Puritan (like Pearl threatens to become). Pearl is threatened by Hester that she would be “imprisoned” in a dark closet if she does not keep quiet (chapter XV). We are shown, mainly, the punishment that the sinners, Hester and Dimmesdale, suffer.Įxternally, as Hawthorne insists in the book, the social instruments of punishment are the prison-house (chapter 1), the scaffold (chapters III, XII, XXIII), the crowd (chapter 1) and the magistrate, Governor Bellingham (chapter VIII). The crime, that is to say, is antecedent to The Scarlet Letter. In this sense, The Scarlet Letter deals, not with crime and punishment, but with the effect of a particular sin on a group of people-Hester, Dimmesdale and Chillingworth. The crime that Hester has committed is over before The Scarlet Letter begins. Individuals who defied or offended the society were dangerous, as they might cause anarchy in the society which was itself still trying to adjust itself in a new country in which there was danger from the Red Indians, the Spaniards, and from Nature itself. We have already said that the Puritan society of Boston was a theocracy, this is, it was a religious as well as a political organization. We shall consider The Scarlet Letter from both the social (legal) and the individual (psychological or religious) points of view. By good deeds and penance, the individual can make amends for his sin (as in ST Coleridge’s famous 19th century poem “ The Ancient Mariner“). #SCAFFOLD MEANING TO PURITAN COMMUNITY CODE#“Sin” and “Regeneration” are religious, Christian terms and they mean that the code of conduct that the individual offends is not legal but religious and/or moral. “Crime” and “Punishment” are legal terms, and in that respect, it is a society that imposes its code of conduct on the erring individual. The Scarlet Letter as a Story of Crime and Punishment ![]()
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