In the novel The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne takes a very biased side against the Puritans he writes about. Hawthorne himself was a descendant of Puritan ancestors, and it seems that in many ways he still cannot escape the engulfing guilt of their crimes, as he never truly held their religion; “Hawthorne never felt he belonged to any such community of love and belief.” From what I have learned about the Puritans, I believe they were good people, but they went so far off the deep end with their religion that they sacrificed their plain old human kindness and forgiveness. They just didn’t understand that there were other things in life than their religion. Hawthorne’s presentation of the Puritans throughout the novel The Scarlet Letter is not
much different from my own opinion, though he leaves out even the slightest amount of good characteristics that they might possess.
Hawthorne ironically places the rose bush next to the prison to further embody his feelings about Puritanism. This implies that the Puritan authority may have been too unyielding, to the point of eliminating things of beauty. Here again, Hawthorne scorches the definition of a Puritan by making it seem as though any Puritan were incapable of holding beauty or love.
“The rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it, or whether, as there is fair author
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