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Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American Novelist, best known for the Scarlet Letter. He was born and raised in Salem, Massachussets in 1804 and passed in Concord, Massachussets in 1864. He focused on topics of morality, religion, and history and centered on New England, where he was from. Hawthorne wrote metaphorically with an Anti-Puritan perspective which categorized him as part of the dark romanticism movement. In his writing, he touched on sin in humanity and psychological and moral messages. In his lifetime, he wrote nine novels and short stories.

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The Scarlet Letter was set in the mid-seventeenth century. During this time, Puritans controlled the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which is the story's setting. It takes place a few decades after the founding of Boston in 1630. The story begins approximately 15-20 years after the town's establishment, placing the events around the mid-1600s.

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Hawthorne used the Scarlet letter, A, to represent shame but later evolved to represent Hester's identity as an adulterer.

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The Puritans were a prominent religious group in the 16th and 17th centuries and originated mainly in England. They opposed the Reformation of the Church of England under Queen Elizabeth's rule, as they argued it was incomplete. They mainly believed that a select few would be elected for salvation, while the rest of humanity was to be punished. Their abstract religious beliefs would cause them to be driven out of England, and they would be forced to migrate to the New World. More belief that the Puritans held was the idea of keeping a formal relationship with God and using prayer as an instrument of salvation. With a strict lifestyle, Puritans believed that they could embrace the Holy Spirit even closer.

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Puritans: A Definition

The roots of Puritanism are to be found in the beginnings of the English Reformation. The name "Puritans" (they were sometimes called "precisionists") was a term of contempt assigned to the movement by its enemies. Although the epithet first emerged in the 1560s, the movement began in the 1530s, when King Henry VIII repudiated papal authority and transformed the Church of Rome into a state Church of England. To Puritans, the Church of England retained too much of the liturgy and ritual of Roman Catholicism.

Did you know? In keeping with their focus on the home, Puritan migration to the New World usually consisted of entire families, rather than the young, single men who comprised many other early European settlements.

Well into the 16th century, many priests were barely literate and often very poor. Employment by more than one parish was common, so they moved often, preventing them from forming deep roots in their communities. Priests were immune to certain penalties of the civil law, further feeding anticlerical hostility and contributing to their isolation from the spiritual needs of the people.

The Church of England

Through the reigns of the Protestant King Edward VI (1547-1553), who introduced the first vernacular prayer book, and the Catholic Mary I (1553-1558), who sent some dissenting clergymen to their deaths and others into exile, the Puritan movement-whether tolerated or suppressed-continued to grow.

Some Puritans favored a presbyterian form of church organization; others, more radical, began to claim autonomy for individual congregations. Still, others were content to remain within the structure of the national church but set themselves against Catholic and episcopal authority.

As they gained strength, Puritans were portrayed by their enemies as hairsplitters who slavishly followed their Bibles as guides to daily life or hypocrites who cheated the very neighbors they judged inadequate Christians.

Yet the Puritan attack on the established church gained popular strength, especially in East Anglia and among the lawyers and merchants of London. The movement found wide support among these new professional classes, who saw in it a mirror for their growing discontent with economic restraints.

During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, an uneasy peace prevailed within English religious life, but the struggle over the tone and purpose of the church continued. Many men and women were more and more forced to contend with the dislocations-emotional as well as physical-that accompanied the beginnings of a market economy.

Subsistence farmers were called upon to enter the world of production for profit. Under the rule of primogeniture, younger sons tended to enter the professions (especially the law) with increasing frequency and seek their livelihood in the burgeoning cities. The English countryside was plagued by scavengers, highwaymen and vagabonds-a newly visible class of the poor who strained the ancient charity laws and pressed upon the townsfolk new questions of social responsibility.

Puritans in New England

In the early decades of the 17th century, some groups of worshipers began to separate themselves from the main body of their local parish church where preaching was inadequate and to engage an energetic "lecturer," typically a young man with a fresh Cambridge degree, who was a lively speaker and steeped in reform theology. Some congregations went further, declared themselves separated from the national church, and remade themselves into communities of "visible saints," withdrawn from the English City of Man into a self-proclaimed City of God.

One such faction was a group of separatist believers in the Yorkshire village of Scrooby, who, fearing for their safety, moved to Holland in 1608 and then, in 1620, to the place they called Plymouth in New England. We know them now as the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock.

A decade later, a larger, better-financed group, mostly from East Anglia, migrated to Massachusetts Bay. There, they set up gathered churches on much the same model as the transplanted church at Plymouth (with deacons, preaching elders and, though not right away, a communion restricted to full church members, or "saints").

Differences Between Pilgrims and Puritans

The main difference between the Pilgrims and the Puritans is that the Puritans did not consider themselves separatists. They called themselves "nonseparating congregationalists," by which they meant that they had not repudiated the Church of England as a false church. But in practice they acted-from the point of view of Episcopalians and even Presbyterians at home-exactly as the separatists were acting.

By the 1640s, their enterprise at Massachusetts Bay had grown to about 10,000 people. They soon outgrew the bounds of the original settlement and spread into what would become Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Maine, and eventually beyond the limits of New England.

Who Were the Puritans?

The Puritan migration was overwhelmingly a migration of families (unlike other migrations to early America, which were composed largely of young unattached men). The literacy rate was high, and the intensity of devotional life, as recorded in the many surviving diaries, sermon notes, poems and letters, was seldom to be matched in American life.

The Puritans' ecclesiastical order was as intolerant as the one they had fled. Yet, as a loosely confederated collection of gathered churches, Puritanism contained within itself the seed of its own fragmentation. Following hard upon the arrival in New England, dissident groups within the Puritan sect began to proliferate- Quakers, Antinomians, Baptists-fierce believers who carried the essential Puritan idea of the aloneness of each believer with an inscrutable God so far that even the ministry became an obstruction to faith.

Puritanism in American Life

Puritanism gave Americans a sense of history as a progressive drama under the direction of God, in which they played a role akin to, if not prophetically aligned with, that of the Old Testament Jews as a new chosen people.

Perhaps most important, as Max Weber profoundly understood, was the strength of Puritanism as a way of coping with the contradictory requirements of Christian ethics in a world on the verge of modernity. It supplied ethics that somehow balanced charity and self-discipline. It counseled moderation within psychology that saw worldly prosperity as a sign of divine favor. Such ethics were particularly urgent in a New World where opportunity was rich, but the source of moral authority was obscure.

By the beginning of the 18th century, Puritanism had both declined and shown its tenacity. Though "the New England Way" evolved into a relatively minor system of organizing religious experience within the broader American scene, its central themes recur in the related religious communities of Quakers, Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists and a whole range of evangelical Protestants.

More recently, the word "Puritan" has once again become a pejorative epithet, meaning prudish, constricted and cold-as in H. L. Mencken's famous remark that a Puritan is one who suspects "somewhere someone is having a good time."

Puritanism, however, had a more significant persistence in American life than as the religion of black-frocked caricatures. It survived, perhaps most conspicuously, in the secular form of self-reliance, moral rigor and political localism that became, by the Age of Enlightenment, virtually the definition of Americanism.

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The Puritans were members of a religious reform movement that arose in the late 16th century and held that the Church of England should eliminate ceremonies and practices not rooted in the Bible.

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The rose bush in front of the prison is a symbol of hope. The bush had been there for some time and had been walked over, yet still stood tall.

"This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pipes and oaks that originally overshadowed it,---or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Anne Hutchinson, as she entered the prison door..." (p. 50)

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Pearl is the personification of her mother's sexual sin and is utilized as a punishment and a blessing. She is the product of sin but evokes passion and spirit instead of shame.

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A meteor traced out an A in the sky as Dimmesdale, Pearl, and Hester stood outside. Dimmesdale perceived the meteor as a sign to feel shame and wear an A like Hester, while others perceived the A as a sign for "angel".

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Some major themes to the Scarlet Letter are sin and knowledge, guilt, and atonement. These three types of themes are represented by adultery and its effects, the guilt after adultery, and seeking for forgiveness after committing the sin. Sin and knowledge can be seen from the Hester and Dimmesdale think back upon their sin and learn not to tread back and understand the effects of adultery. Guilt can be seen throughout the book as Dimmesdale is tormented by the sin of fathering an illegitimate child. With atonement, Hester and Dimmesdale have suffered the consequences of their sin and try to seek for forgiveness for their actions in a Puritan society.

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Pearl is Hester Prynne's daughter and is a child during most of the novel. She is inquisitive and provokes the adult characters with questions and truths about the world. Pearl works as a symbol of her mother's scarlet letter but is very innocent herself.

"Pearl's aspect was imbued with a spell of infinite variety; in this one child there were many children, comprehending the full scope between the wild-flower prettiness of a peasant-baby, and the pomp, in little, of an infant princess." (p. 93) Pearl is a very playful and curious child that likes to play outside and frolic.

"'He did not send me!' cried she, positively. 'I have no Heavenly Father!'" (p. 103) This is one of Pearl's only quotes so far, which is quite controversial for the time due to strict Puritan religious beliefs and ideologies.

"Luther, according to the scandal; of his monkish enemies, was a brat of the hellish breed; nor was Pearl the only child to whom this inauspicious origin was assigned, among the New England Puritans." (p. 102) Here, Pearl is being described as a devil child by the Puritans as her mother was sinful and created Pearl out of adultery.

"...the child stood still and gazed at Hester, with that little, laughing image of a fiend peeping out---or, whether it peeped or no, her mother so imagined it---from the unsearchable abyss of her black eyes." (p. 101) Hester views Pearl as a fiend with abnormal behaviors.

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Roger Chillingworth is an English scholar who moves to the New World after his wife, Hester Prynne. His last name Chillingworth contains the word chilling which means frightening or horrifying. He is the main antagonist of the book and is vengeful. Roger is a man of knowledge and religion who is also a doctor. In the text, it states, "...Master Brackett, the jailer, though fit to introduce a physician. He described him as a man of skill in all Christian modes of physical science, and likewise familiar with whatever the savage people could teach, in respect to medicinal herbs and roots that grew in the forest..." (Hawthorne 73).

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Hester Prynne is the protagonist of The Scarlet Letter. She is a kind, strong independent woman who is publicly condemned by her Puritan community for committing adultery and having a child. In chapter 2 of the Scarlet Letter, Hester is described as "With a burning blush, and yet a haughty smile, and a glance that would not be abashed, looked around at her townspeople and neighbors."(P.55) This outlines Hester Prynnes pride and dignity that she displays even while being publically humiliated.

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Reverend Dimmesdale is known in the Scarlet Letter to be a caring and kind pastor, who works under God. "The young pastor's voice was tremulously sweet, rich, deep, and broken. The feeling is so evidently manifested, rather than the direct purport of the words, caused it to vibrate within all hearts and brought the listeners into one accord of sympathy." (Pg. 70) His kindness affects everyone in the crowd, even swaying the emotions of the child. "Even the poor baby, at Hester's bosom, was affected by the same influence; for it directed its hitherto vacant gaze towards Mr. Dimmesdale, and held up its little arms..." (Pg. 70)

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The prison door symbolizes punishment. Its rusty iron and darkened oak door indicates its constant use over time without the village never using it. In the text, it states, "...weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browned and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New World..." (Hawthorne 49-50).

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The dark and light dynamics in the Scarlet Letter heavily reflect on Hester and Pearl. Pearl is full of light and the sunlight is heavily attracted to her. In the forest, she is bathed in the sunlight and it follows her like a dog. However, Hester repels the sunlight and it avoids her because of her sin and guilt, whereas Pearl is innocent and pure as she is youthful. A quote from page 192 is: "The light lingered about the lonely child, as if glad of such a playmate, until he mother had drawn almost nigh enough to step into the magic circle too."