Themes in the Scarlet Letter
In his novel, The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne incorporates Puritanism into several themes of his work: Individual vs. Society, The Nature of Evil, and The Heart vs. the Head. The novel is set in the Puritan town of Boston in the 1700s. Hester Prynne, the protagonist, is being persecuted for her crime of adultery and is forced to wear a scarlet "A" on her chest. Hawthorne shows the reactions of the Puritans to Hester's sin …
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…witchcraft when he knows in his heard that she isn't a witch. Overall, I think that Hawthorne was amazed with the Puritan way of living and this is the reason he shows Hester and Bellingham suffering by the beliefs of the Puritans that entangled them. Hawthorne probably held his interest in Puritanism due to the irony in how they escaped England from religious persecution only to come to the New World and become the persecutors.
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