Substitute the obvious change in pronoun and “controversial photo-spreads in ‘Vanity Fair'” for “tight pants and capped teeth” and you have Demi Moore and her latest dilemma, the movie adaptation of The Scarlet Letter. The novel is indeed an unqualified classic, by American or any other standards. It addresses issues of group cohesiveness as a survival tactic and how much personal freedom can be permitted in the face of potential group annihilation by forces acting both from without and within. In the center of this debate, Hawthorne places one Hester Prynne, a woman who has given birth to a child which is not her husband’s, but has been fathered by the local minister, a man whose piety and reputation has been deemed by his community to be beyond reproach. As punishment not only for her sin of adultery but also, and more specifically, her refusal to name her co-transgressor, Hester is made to wear a scarlet letter, denoting her status as an adulteress. For modern audiences, the notion that violating the seventh commandment is the equivalent of endangering the community at large might strike some as being a rather quaint notion.
But, as cultural historian Leo Marx has rightfully indicated, the landscape in which Hawthorne’s Puritans found themselves, now part of the state of Massachusetts, is not merely a backdrop for events; it is “inseparable from policy and action and meaning.” Hester’s judges are deadly serious: with the threat of Indian attack ever-present, they cannot afford to see her silence as anything but dangerously insolent willfulness. The speculation that will result from her silence will poison the community with speculation and suspicion, threatening damnation from God in the form of weakened moral fiber and group solidarity, making the community divided and vulnerable.
The Essay on Hester In A Puritan Society
... life, and so she did. Through the Puritan community Hesters character had evolved from the shame of town, ... cell, and is introduced back into the community. When Hester is first brought out of her prison ... in Nathaniel Hawthornes The Scarlet Letter, were a group of people who were shaped by English experience ... town. The Puritans, one of the most devoted groups of Bible scholars, forget one of Jesus most ...
