Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - English sins of society sins of society It is difficult to draw parallels between the staunch beliefs of Puritan society in colonial America and the freedom experienced in the country today. The Puritans lived strict lives based on a literal interpretation in the Bible, and constantly emphasized a fear of God and a fear of sin. Modern society looks at this negative view of humanity as a whole as an out-dated opinion from the past, believing that, “Now people know better than that.” However, faults in human nature can not be completely erased by the passing of time and the modernization of society. People still have emotions of love, compassion, envy, and pride; and many types of interpersonal relationships within their community. Puritan literature focuses on all people’s instinct to protect their best interest and the lengths they will go to keep blame from themselves. Society emphasizes the sins of others rather than facing the faults in itself as seen through Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter and The Minister’s Black Veil, and Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible. The authors criticize society’s use of punishment, intolerance, and hypocrisy in dealing with sin. Puritanism viewed religion and law as almost identical, making Puritan societies strict theocracies with clergy exclusively controlling people’s lives. Puritanism was also based on a somewhat fatalistic view of the human race, as seen in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. The founders of Boston were said to, “have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another as the site of a prison” (33). Puritans believed that people were basically sinful and should be mercilessly punished for straying from the literally interpreted laws of the Bible, laws that hovered like clouds over their society. The main character in The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne, emerged from the gloom of this dark society’s punishment. For her crime of adultery, she faced the most commonly used punishment—public humiliation. Although this involved no physical harm, its use in such a proper society brought ridicule and shame paralleling a punishment as harsh as death itself. Hester stood amidst the crowd for three tortuous hours, struggling to withstand the burning glares of the townspeople feeling, “as if she must needs shriek out with the full power of her lungs, and cast herself from the scaffold down upon the ground, or else go mad at once.” (40). This display was made even more severe because she was also sentenced “to wear a mark of shame upon her bosom,” the letter “A”, for the rest of her life (43). The scarlet symbol for adultery branded Hester as a sinner to others, and when she was alone it burned like fire into her innermost heart to remind her of the life-shattering punishment society sentenced her for a single sin. For some sins, Puritan law demanded much more than an embroidered letter to transform a criminal into a living sermon of sin. Some crimes, such as witchcraft in The Crucible, called for death itself to be the example set for society. Punishment in Salem, Massachusetts was very rash; people were put in jail without justifiable evidence due to the schemes of the “inflicted” girls. Even the most honorable people like Rebecca Nurse, “the very brick and mortar of the church” were not immune to the Puritan policies of punishment, which were broken for no one (68). The jails filled as the accusations multiplied, but the lawmakers were too righteous to question if such honorable people could really be guilty justifying that, “Though our hearts break, we cannot flinch; these are new times” (69). Trials went into effect, and the promised hangings did occur when the innocent refused confession. Before the convicted were hanged, another Puritan punishment was carried out, excommunication. The sinners could not leave the world as people of God, so dozens were humiliated and broken by being expelled from the church. The few truly honorable people never broke down and confessed lies to save their lives. Therefore they were punished with death that the law required by the same church that taught them the values they died for. Authorities were not the ones to execute the punishment in The Minister’s Black Veil, but the impact nevertheless affected the individual and the Puritan community. Nothing painful or humiliating was forced upon Reverend Hooper, but he chooses to do something that punishes him emotionally for the rest of his life. He puzzles his church by appearing one day and, “Swathed about his forehead, and hanging down over his face, so low as to be shaken by his breath, Mr. Hooper had on a black veil” (Hawthorne, The Minister’s Black Veil 102). The purpose of this punishment, or whether it was intended as a punishment at all is never revealed to anyone. The simple black cloth may have been a penance for secret sin, a sign of humility, or a painful barrier to be offered to God. The emblem itself, such a minor and seemingly painless thing to endure was not a punishment in itself. It was the repercussion it had on Reverend Hooper’s relationships that made it such a painful infliction. The intended punishments for breaking a Biblical law or personal belief were not the worst hardship in interdependent society. The effect on relations with other people of the congregation was a punishment in it self. In The Scarlet Letter, feeling contempt from the same people who once searched for God’s grace along with Hester, made her penance part of all contact with other human beings. Just as Puritan lawmakers gave no second chances to sinners, the people followed an unwritten policy of intolerance. Hester was forced to enter a life of isolation from the moment she stepped her delicate foot off the scaffold; she took residence in a cottage on the outskirts of the town because no one wanted to live in close vicinity of such a sinner. The remoteness of her home was only a portion of her exclusion from the “sphere of social activity” (55). Hester’s only companion was her child, and her only accepted contact with the town was her services as a talented seamstress. However, even this small sense of purpose for Hester was spoiled by her shame, as the people utterly refused that she taint the purity of a bridal garment with her needle and thread. Hawthorne explains such particular intolerance saying, “The exception indicated the ever relentless vigor with which society frowned upon her sin” (57). The ever-active punishment for adultery therefore could not be overshadowed by good deeds; humbling glares from the women in town square, fear and mockery from naïve children, and being the topic of sermons to the multitudes relentlessly showed Hester’s banishment from living a normal life. Even years later, when people praised Hester’s work with the poor and commented that the “A” now stood for “able”, the negative side returned. Then society’s standards would again abide by Puritan law and cause people to snicker about the dark side of Hester’s past. The intolerance of society broke all barriers in Hester’s life; people were never able to “look past the dirt.” Intolerance of two similarly disrespected women in Salem gave fuel to the fires of witchcraft accusations; it made them easy victims of Tituba’s first charges. In The Crucible, the town did not question and almost expected the accusations of loathsome people in the town, such as “Bridget that lived three year with Bishop before she married him…[or] Isaac Ward that drank his family to ruin” (122). Anyone who notably broke rules of Puritan law was treated as sinful and capable of the lowest of deeds. When more honorable people were taken to jail, any doubtful or suspicious townspeople, such as the Proctors, were questioned as well. In these interrogations, Mr. Hale proved how unaccepting Puritans were of any logic going against the Bible. Elizabeth claimed that she did not believe in witches if she was accused of being one, causing the astonished Mr. Hale to question, “You surely do not fly against the Gospel—the Gospel!” (67). The entire witch-hunt progressed because people would not tolerate any objection to the trials. John Proctor, Mary Warren, and many other witnesses are repeatedly questioned whether they have an evil intention to undermine the good purposes of the court with their objections to Abigail. Like the courts, Abigail and the girls did not tolerate anyone trying to foil their plan and to reveal them as frauds. The flaws of people’s past were emphasized and utilized as weaknesses by the witnesses, and anyone that tried to get in the way of the girls was immediately taken care of. Intolerance of common sense and judgement gave the witch-hunt its power to continue for so long and to claim so many innocent lives. Such hatred of differences in the way some people chose to live their lives brought Reverend Hooper of The Minister’s Black Veil the most grief than any other effect of his black veil. From the first day he came to church with the veil, the congregation could focus on nothing but the foreign object covering his face. They forgot all that they loved and respected about him so much that they barely remembered to acknowledge his greetings. He became an outcast; people shuddered at his appearance at local events, just because they could not tolerate his peculiar decision to wear the veil. When Reverend Hooper attended a wedding, the horrible garb brought nothing but gloom and, “Such was its immediate effect on the guests that a cloud seemed to have rolled duskily from beneath the black crape, and dimmed the light of the candles” (Hawthorne, The Minister’s Black Veil 106). The veil seemed to become a blockade of love and sympathy to the extent that he almost lost his true love, Elizabeth. In the years without Elizabeth, until late in his life, Reverend Hooper was close with no one. He was only a strange object of mystery and a show for strangers to travel many miles to see; no longer was he a familiar person, an accepted leader, and a friend to the community. Reverend Hooper lived the rest of his life in isolation, left hidden by a trivial choice that others could not accept. Puritan society set strict guidelines in the written law and in unspoken social standards of intolerance, but society itself was a hypocrite in how it sometimes followed the revered words of God, and other times not. Arthur Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter was a perfect example of the cause of society’s hypocrisy and of a hypocrite himself. Dimmesdale lived a life in two separate worlds. He was an inexperienced yet highly respected minister in Boston, an example of holiness; and he held dark secrets of sinful adultery within the shadows of his quarters. Dimmesdale hypocritically spent his days preaching of being “born again” through confession and grace, and his nights punishing himself for not telling the public the truth of his sinfulness. He repeatedly attempted to tell the truth, but could never bring himself to clearly admit his sin. When Dimmesdale preached of his unworthiness and deceitfulness to the crowds, it was in an indirect way that, “The minister well knew—subtle, but remorseful hypocrite that he was!—the light in which the vague confession would be viewed” (99). The entire town respected Dimmesdale so much that when describing one of his sermons the amazed townspeople claimed, “…nor had inspiration ever breathed through mortal lips more evidently than it did through his” (170). Society, deceived by the lies of Dimmesdale, became a hypocrite in its treatment of two violators of the same Puritan law. It took two adulterers, Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne, and raised one on the pedestal of respect and placed the other on a scaffold of shame. Hypocrisy in Salem similarly raised a sinner to a highly respected position, the scheming Abigail Williams. Abigail led the “inflicted” girls into a tangled web of lies and deception because of her desire to have John Proctor and her fear of being punished for what she did in the forest. Abigail instilled fear into the town, so that her words and accusations became the only believable testimony. Elizabeth describes the extent of Abigail’s deceitful power saying, “where she walks the crowd will part like the sea for Israel” (50). The town continues to believe the one lying child over honorable victims and even respected the enforcement of strict sentences because they were in accordance with the Bible. Society is again a hypocrite when many people who had previously been caught up in the girls’ act suddenly thought twice about such strict punishments. Their change of heart came on because they or their own loved ones were now the people put in jail and facing trial. Giles Corey, who had once mentioned during a conversation about witches that his wife had a habit of reading peculiar books, regretted his incriminating comment later. When his wife was taken to jail for witchcraft, he remorsefully pleaded, “I never said my wife were a witch, Mr. Hale; I only said she were reading books!” (69). Hypocrisy reaches even to the highest authorities near the end of the trials, when people begin to see that innocent people are about to hang and need to be pardoned. Judge Danforth explains why this would by hypocritical saying, “Postponement now speaks a floundering on my part; reprieve or pardon must cast doubt upon the guilt of them that died till now” (124). By the time that Salem, Massachusetts realized how clouded its judgement had become, and how hypocritical they were, it was too late for the innocent to be saved. The community in The Minister’s Black Veil never opened its eyes and saw the hypocrisy in its actions. Throughout the story, Reverend Hooper tried to explain that any of the suggested reasons for his donning the veil could be reasons for any mortal to do the same. For example, the minister explained to Elizabeth, “If I hide my face for sorrow, there is cause enough, and if I cover it for secret sin, what mortal might not do the same?” (Hawthorne, The Minister’s Black Veil 109). The Reverend could never relay the message to anyone else that whatever he was hiding was symbolic of a fault in everyone. Therefore the community was hypocritical in making Hooper an outcast, when they did not treat the same sin in each other with the same disgust. In his dying speech, Reverend Hooper once more tries to show this asking, “Why do you tremble at me alone? Tremble also at each other! I look around me, and lo! On every visage a Black Veil!” (114). Reverend Hooper lived his life and suffered the punishment inflicted by himself and especially from others to teach a lesson. He saw the hypocrisy in the world that people feared those who had something different or something to hide. Reverend Hooper recognized a need to accept people for their whole selves, and that no one should try to be flawless in the eyes of others or the eyes of God. Authors of the Puritan era, including the writers of The Scarlet Letter, The Crucible, and The Minister’s Black Veil criticized society’s use of punishment, intolerance, and hypocrisy. The dealings of sin in the 1620-1720’s contrasts greatly with the components of punishment executed by modern authorities. Defense lawyers, probation, and the phrase, “Innocent until proven guilty in a court of law,” have replaced public humiliation and social isolation. Unalienable rights are now mapped out by the constitution as well as other components of a democratic government. In The Scarlet Letter, a townsman said, “It must gladden your heart…to find yourself, at length, in a land where iniquity is searched out, and punished in the sight of rulers and people” (Hawthorne, 43). Look at the current events, scandals, and crimes, and this statement could apply to descriptions of many justice situations today. Has society really surpassed the criticized methods of the Puritan era’s justice, or is it that the underlying principals remain the same? Bibliography: The Crucible The Scarlet Letter Word Count: 2681
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