Scaffold meaning to puritan community full#

Scaffold meaning to puritan community full#

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Analyzing the shaming scenes that organize the narrative means helping students to see more clearly the structure of the novel, the issues at stake in it, and the ambiguities of guilt and innocence that dominate in our meditations on our own lives. being strong willed and bold for standing on the scaffold and embracing the fact that she. When Hester let her hair down which made the A have a different meaning. The narrator feels as if the Puritans are mean, cruel, strict. Our exercises in close reading reveal that the desire to 'know' someone, as the novel's slow motion 'whodunit' clearly shows, can lead to deeper intimacy, or a denial of their quintessential humanity. Hawthorne presents the Puritan belief system as oppressive and based in fear. Hawthorne contrasts the prison and scaffold, the evil symbols of Puritan society, with the wild rose-bushwhich might be imagined to offer its fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went inin token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him (46). The Puritan society asserts its authority over the individual conscience by forcing Hester to accept her punishment. Knowing can mean sympathy and compassion, but it can also involve a pernicious desire to trespass in the interior of another's heart. The desire to know how the battle between good and evil is going in Puritan Boston, Hawthorne says, is something that binds the community together and threatens to tear it apart. Alone upon the scaffold, Hester must endure public exposure and the scrutiny of the entire community as part of the punishment meted out for her sin of adultery.

Today convicted criminals in the American justice system are routinely required to make a similar sort of public display. To describe the impacts of Puritan doctrine to societys life in The Scarlet.

Hester Prynne is forced to mount the scaffold and expose herself and her child to the citizens of Boston, who want to see her degraded and to learn the name of her partner in moral crime. It is set in the mid-17th century, a long time ago, yet the continuities persist. Abstract: Reminding students that Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter begins with an exercise in public shaming helps them relate to the novel.