“We would do well to get straight as quickly as possible is that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story The Scarlet Letter is not a historically accurate picture of the Puritans. In the preface to the novel, Hawthorne describes discovering the scarlet letter that Hester wears in the story as punishment for her adultery while working in a Salem custom house. Hawthorne’s account is purely fictional; he never ran across such a letter in real life. Furthermore, Hawthorne (who wrote two centuries after the original Puritans) used the Puritans in his
story for satiric purposes, and it is a convention of satire to exaggerate the negative features of the thing being attacked. It is a great tragedy that the only picture many people have of the Puritans comes from works of literary satire that make no pretense of being sources of accurate history. “
Leland Ryken
11 окт 2024
