Ignominy in the Puritan Community Essay

The title of Nathaniel Hawthornes The Scarlet letter refers to the verbal symbol of disgrace that Hester Prynnes participation forces her to wear as a reminder of her sinning. Though the word ignominy is used in sympathetic passages that describe Hester Prynnes disgrace as an adulteress and out-of-wedlock mother, its use at the same time reveals an extremely critical description of Hesters residential district Hawthorne finds that what is truly disgraceful is the way the biotic community relishes and exploits the opportunity to punish iodine of its members. Through powerful diction and imagery describing Hesters sin and by saintly representations of Hesters ravisher and wholeness, Hawthorne reveals his bounty toward Hester. The teller commiserates with Hester when the lecturer offset encounters her walking to her daily public shaming upon the marketplaces hold up.He writes, her beauty shone out and made a halo of misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped (50). The word halo suggests an angelic, rase saintly quality, compared to the sin for which she is being publically disgraced as penalty, making her circumstance more complex than exclusively one of punished sin. That she is enveloped by disgrace implies that her shame derives more from her surroundings than from her sin Hawthornes use of misfortune also demonstrates the fibbers sympathy toward Hester, once more suggesting that her disgrace comes as much from the communitys display of her sin as from the sin itself. Hawthorne portrays Hester sympathetically yet once more in her encounter with Chillingworth in the prison. The disguised physician declares Hester to be a statue of ignominy, before the people (68). Ironically, Chillingworth, in the role of a healer, here admonishes quite an than helps Hester. His words, intended to threaten and punish Hester, in fact, spark sympathy for her in the reader.Similarly, later in the novel, while Hester and Dimmesdale talk in the forest, b riefly outdoor(a) from the opprobrium of the Puritan community, Hawthorne describes how Hester Prynne must take up again the incumbrance of her ignominy (170), on her return to the settlement. The use of the words must and again reveal Hesters running(prenominal) forced obligation to wear and be a symbol of shame in her community, and show again the narrators sympathy toward her. The fact that she is burdened by disgrace illustrates the extreme cant over of her painful, shunned experience, thus establishing the cause for the narrators sympathy for Hester. As Hawthorne shows empathy regarding Hester as she leaves the prison, he also condemns the harsh experience inflicted on her by the community, The truly law that condemned herhad held her up, through the wondrous ordeal of her ignominy (71).The words terrible ordeal not only reinforce the narrators sympathy toward the protagonist, but also suggest that the narrator is judging the community, not Hester. By revealing the commun itys enjoyment and cruelty in heavy(p) Hester, Hawthorne criticizes the Puritans ideas of justice and mercy through both bumptious diction and direct communication with the reader. When A crowd of eager and homophile(a) schoolboys stare at the pitch-dark earn on her breast (52), the reader sees the eager pleasure and excitement witnesses experience from Hesters circumstance. Here Hesters disgrace has become both an entertainment and an educational device. The narrator continues with, she by luck underwent an agonyas if her heart had been flung into the street for them all to spurn and tread upon (52). With this description, Hesters humanity is maintained, even when the community, all of it, objectifies her as a educational activity tool.The image of her heart flung, spurned and trampled upon demonstrates both the narrators sympathy toward Hester and wrath toward Puritan society, regardless of the age of the member. Shortly after his description of the schoolboys callous trea tment of Hester, the narrator continues with a harsh account of the sustain and pillory once employed upon it, that instrument of discipline that represented the really ideal of ignominy (52). The pillory reflects the nature of the communitys reason of justice, and the narrator finds it extremely harsh. The word ideal, often associated with perfection, suggests that the pillory signifies the ultimate want effect of ignominy public shame from which the sinner cannot turn away.Next, it would expect that Hawthorne speaks out directly and emotionally to the reader, declaring, There can be no outrage, methinks, against our common nature, whatever be the delinquencies of the individual, no outrage more conspicuous than to forbid the culprit to hide his face for shame (52). Hawthorns use of word methinks suggests his forceful personal address on this sales outlet of cruelty he weighs in powerfully against the malice of the Pilgrim community that punishes Hester, even if it has not subjected her to the pillory. The word no implies Hawthornes view that this punishment is an unattackable violation of human decency on the part of any community that turns a criminal into a victim by inflicting the use of a pillory. The garner A Hester must wear shows that the Puritans have depersonalized Hester as part of her punishment for committing adultery.The Puritan community is again portrayed as disgraceful when tush Wilson, the eldest clergyman of Boston (60), steps forward above the scaffold where Hester continues to stand. He had carefully nimble himself for the occasion (63). Clearly, the words carefully prepared show Wilson relishing the public opportunity to punish Hester. He delivers to the community a discourse on sin, in all its branches, but with continual reference to the ignominious letter (63). His repeated reference to the scarlet letter underscores his depersonalization of Hester in her disgrace, without any consideration of her human suffering.The word ignominious reflects as much about the opportunistic clergyman and the punishing Pilgrim listening as it does about Hesters sin. The narrator continues, So forcefully did Wilson watch upon this symbol, for the hour or more during which his periods were rolling over the peoples heads, that it assumed new terrors in their imagination (63). The length of this sermon, and the nature of Wilsons rolling delivery show the clergymans intention to malleus his message into the crowd and fire up its punishing judgment.Hawthorne continues to criticize the community as he places Hester historically at the site where she was stolon disgraced. The narrator notes, If the ministers voice had not kept her there, there would in time have been an inevitable magnetism in that spot, whence she dated the first hour of her life of ignominy (211). Implied is the idea that the power of public shaming by the community causes her to remain. Specifically, by noting that the scaffold is where the first hour of her life of ignominy began the author criticizes the community by revealing that Hester did not experience ignominy until being publicly disgraced on the scaffold, even though her sin had been committed many months prior.With his use of the word ignominy, Hawthorne repeats throughout The Scarlet Letter the cruelty, judgmental attitude, and narrow-mindedness of Puritan society. He portrays Hesters community as condemning sinners mercilessly, refusing to accept ideas that are foreign to their ways of living or thinking. In this way, the townspeople depersonalize Hester, suggesting that she and her disgrace are one. Hester is seen as her sin, not as a complex human being with complicated, still unknown, circumstances.