n, can open up and be themselves. The forest itself is the very embodiment of freedom. Nobody watches in the woods to report misbehavior, thus it is here that Hester feels secure. Her beauty comes back when she re-enters the forest, but when she is among the community it disappears.If the Puritan society was too be so strict, constantly conforming to the Bible, after Hester served her sentence, why then was she treated so wrong? The bible itself says to “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Hawthorne could have had the community treat Hester better as time passed on, but he only showed that his sympathy lied with the community instead of Hester. Although she was strong and persistent with her punishment of wearing the A on her chest, Hester eventually broke down. She turned “ugly” and gloomy; showing the reader that the community’s guilt finally overcame her. Stephan Crane is another notable novelist with a central character that is out of place by definition of her community/environment. In the novel “Maggie: A girl of the Streets” Maggie Johnson grows up amid abuse and poverty in the Bowery neighborhood of New York's Lower East Side. Crane gives Maggie no direction, leaving her out on her on. She then “falls in love” with Pete only too soon discover that he is no different from her drunken mother and abusive father. If her relationship with Pete was to be the first kind of love she ever experienced, can you really blame her for becoming a prostitute in hopes that someone else would show her the “real thing?” If Crane had given her more love and support, along with confidence, she could have survived the community. No one in Maggie’s household really cared about anyone. When Tommie dies, no kind of emotion is shown from any one in the family. When Maggie begins prostitution, no one is really surprised because of the environment that is present during her ti...
