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Scaffold scarlet letter12/12/2023 ![]() ![]() On Bellingham's walls are portraits of his forefathers who wear the stately and formal clothing of the Old World. Hawthorne's viewpoint of this society seems to be disclosed in several places in the novel but never more so than in the Governor's house in Chapter 7 and during the New England holiday in Chapter 21. Hawthorne, of course, presents the irony of this concept when he describes the prison as a building already worn when the colony is only fifteen years old. A group of them fled to Holland and subsequently to the New World, where they hoped to build a society, described by John Winthrop, as "a city upon a hill" - a place where the "eyes of all people are upon us." In such a place and as long as they followed His words and did their work to glorify His ways, God would bless them, and they would prosper. Because the Puritans chose to defy these assumptions, they were persecuted in England. In England, the clergy and the government mediated in the relationship between the individual and God. Their chief complaints were that the services should be simpler and that religion should contain an intense spiritual relationship between the individual and God. The Puritans left the Old World because they wanted to "purify" the Church of England. It is this colony that forms the setting of The Scarlet Letter. The second group in the 1630s settled in the area of present-day Boston in a community they named Massachusetts Bay Colony. These first settlers were followed ten years later by a wave of Puritans that continued in the 1630s and thereafter, until, by the 1640s, New England had over twenty-five thousand English settlers. While half the colonists died that first year, the other half were saved by the coming spring and the timely intervention of the Indians. ![]() The early Puritans who first came to America in 1620 founded a precarious colony in Plymouth, Massachusetts. The Scarlet Letter shows his attitude toward these Puritans of Boston in his portrayal of characters, his plot, and the themes of his story. His knowledge of their beliefs and his admiration for their strengths were balanced by his concerns for their rigid and oppressive rules. Nathaniel Hawthorne had deep bonds with his Puritan ancestors and created a story that both highlighted their weaknesses and their strengths. ![]()
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