Seeking Bachelor's

Alyse Gowgiel
Gutierrez
English III AP
23 October 2010

The Scarlet Letter: A Model for Moral Exploration

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, a few rebellious citizens of a Puritan settlement in the seventeenth century defy the social norms of the time, and embark on a complicated, painful journey of both growth and discovery as well as tragedy and loss. Hester Prynne, a Puritansettler, and Arthur Dimmesdale, the minister of her town and parish, conceive an illegitimate child out of wedlock, but are unable to become a family, fearing the disapproval of their peers. Pearl, their daughter, is a wild young being, apparently influenced and formed by the anger and shame felt by Hester during the months before Pearl’s birth, and disregards Puritan tradition and rules,substituting her own original self-governance; she ultimately moves away from the settlement. Dimmesdale spends seven years torturing himself over his sin of adultery with Hester, and denies his own happiness and love for Hester and Pearl until his death. Hester’s former husband, an elderly, wicked man with the pseudonym of Roger Chillingworth, poses as Dimmesdale’s wise friend and doctor, while secretlytrying to avenge the loss of his wife’s fidelity. Throughout this clandestine plot, these characters’ society completely misunderstands the nature of the situation because it never looks past its morally influenced, one-dimensional assumptions about who these characters are and what they think, feel, and do. The culture in which this story is set seeks to make itself an amalgamation of conformingcitizens who all contribute to its uniformity by simply existing and abiding by the established moral and societal code; it does not foster individual identities and ambitions; it promotes solely uniform growth. Hawthorne, seeing this fusing goal for its true dangerous potential, seeks to guide readers in a refusal of the homogenizing nature of both Hawthorne’s increasingly materialistic societyand the society of the 17th Century Puritans. Hawthorne’s goal for The Scarlet Letter is to encourage readers to carefully pursue their own moral just and right way to live, but he warns that extremes result in moral lawlessness, giving examples and warnings of characters on the path he is advocating. The dual nature of Hawthorne’s message is a pervasive quality throughout the story, reinforcinghis argument that nothing in the world can function under just one influence. Hawthorne’s duality, reflecting the multi-faceted quality of his suggestion, also shows his preference of exploration and probing with the possibility of failure rather than absolute rule; he advocates a dynamic society, based on the needs of citizens, that can sustain such experimentation.
Hawthorne was disgusted withhis contemporaries’ impure natures, their self-destructive tendencies to force changes onto each other, justified with claims of moral superiority. This impure quality was common also to the hated-by-Hawthorne 17th Century Puritan system of theology, which sought to reform sinners through public mortification. Hawthorne believed that humanity, as comprised of each and every individual human,needs to cleanse itself of its own spiritual pollution in order to bring about social improvements, rather than relying on the corrections supplied by radical social reformers. Hawthorne furthered his claim that overzealous pursuits of controlling the actions of others is self-destructive in his portrayal of Chillingworth, a main embodiment of revenge and punishment in the book. Chillingworth, as hepursues revenge, is portrayed as increasingly evil and dark, the words “yonder black man” and “Satan’s emissary(88)” used to directly compare him to the devil. Readers watch as, in the eyes of the community, Chillingworth regresses and deteriorates into an extremely dark, evil state, devoid of moral control. At the end of the story, Chillingworth’s own anger and obsession consume him; readers...