P5+CLeon

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In the novel The //Scarlet Letter//, the author uses a reoccurring cycle of transgression, shame, repentance, and acceptance. Hawthorne does this in many areas, one of which is religion. During the time in which the story took place religion was key. The setting of the novel is in the New World in the seventeenth century. People at this time were traveling to the New World for the freedom of religion; however the character Hester Prynne is punished for her sin.

The transgression of the novel is that Hester broke one of God’s Ten Commandments, this is obvious. However if you if you look deeper you might find that the townspeople are curious to know, however do not press to find the father of the child. Chillingworth asks why the ministers do not take a guess at who the father is and gets a response from the Reverend Mr. Wilson, “Nay; it would be sinful, in such a question to follow the clue of profane philosophy.” (pg 106)

The main focus of shame in the novel is Hester’s public humiliation. She is brought from prison to a scaffold in the middle of the town where she had to stand for hours as the townspeople stared and talked about her. This day happens to be Chillingworth’s first day in town and he sees his wife upon a scaffold. He turns and asks a man who she is and why she is up there. The townsman replies, “You must needs me a stranger in this region, friend…or else you would surely have heard of Mistress Hester Prynne, and her evil doings. She hath raised a great scandal, I promise you in godly Master Dimmesdale’s church.” (pg 57) This shows that the entire town thinks that Hester has sinned and knows her for it. No one knew her husband, but they knew she was married, making it adultery, equaling a sin.

The way Hester wore her sin, the repentance, was that she wore a scarlet letter “A” upon her breast. Hawthorne says, “Man had marked this woman’s sin by a scarlet letter, which had such potent and disastrous efficiency that no human sympathy could reach her, save it were sinful like herself. God, as a direct consequence of the sin which man thus punished, had given her a lovely child, whose place was on that some dishonored bosom, to connect her parent forever with the race and descent of mortals, and to be finally a blessed soul in heaven!”(pg 82)

In time, Hester left Boston but as an older woman she returned on her own will. “But there was a more real life for Hester Prynne here, in New England, than in that unknown region where Pearl had found a home. Here had been her sin; here her sorrow; and here was yet to be her penitence.” (pg 234) In time things fade and people forget allowing Hester to be accepted by the people of Boston in the end.

In the time that this was written, there was no real separation of church and state, Hawthorne’s use of religion in Hester’s shame might be showing people his views, saying that she should not have been punished by law. There were many attempts to balance the religious powers and the political powers or secular powers. Hawthorne shows that religion is good and we can’t have a secular based society because the world cannot be that mechanical, when he has Dimmesdale and Hester almost escape but be brought back.