The Scarlet Letter: Themes

In LitCharts, each theme gets its own corresponding color, which you can use to track where the themes occur in the work. There are two ways to track themes:

• Refer to the color-coded bars next to each plot point throughout the Summary and Analysis sections.
• Use the ThemeTracker section to get a quick overview of where the themes appear throughout the entire work.

 Sin

The Puritans believed people were born sinners. Puritan preachers depicted each human life as suspended by a string over the fiery pit of hell. As a result, the Puritans maintained strict watch over themselves and their fellow townspeople, and sins such as adultery were punishable by death. Hester is spared execution only because the Puritans of Boston decided it would benefit the community to transform her into a “living sermon against sin.” But just as Hester turns the physical scarlet letter that she is forced to wear into a beautifully embroidered object, through the force of her spirit she transforms the letter’s symbolic meaning from shame to strength.

Hester’s transformation of the scarlet letter’s meaning raises one of The Scarlet Letter’s most important questions: What does it mean to sin, and who are the novel’s real sinners? Hester’s defiant response to her punishment and her attempts to rekindle her romance with Dimmesdale and flee with him to Europe shows that she never considered her affair with Dimmesdale to be a sin. The narrator supports Hester’s innocence and instead points the finger at the novel’s two real sinners: Dimmesdale and Chillingworth. Chillingworth’s sin was tormenting Dimmesdale almost to the point of death; Dimmesdale’s was abandoning Hester to lead a lonely life without the man she loved.

 Individuality and Conformity

As an adulterer, Hester has broken Puritan society’s harsh and strict rules. Puritan society demanded conformity because it considered any breach of that conformity a threat to its security and its religion. Hester doesn’t conform and she suffers the consequences: the townspeople punish, shun, and humiliate her. The town seeks to use Hester as an example to frighten any other would-be nonconformists from breaking the strict moral rules of Puritanism. Yet Hester’s unshakable faith in herself, her love for Dimmesdale, and her devotion to her daughter empower her to resist and transcend enforced Puritan conformity.

In general in The Scarlet Letter, the conflict between individuality and conformity is also a battle between appearance and reality. Because the Puritan government is so harsh, all Puritans are always concerned about looking like conformists to best fit in. This means that they hide the reality of their human flaws, frailties, and sins in order to avoid punishment. The result are secrets that are the embodiment of the disconnect between private individual reality and the need to maintain the appearance of public conformity. And though keeping secrets provide a short-term solution for the sinner to avoid punishment, the novel argues that repression of the individual behind a mask of secret-keeping conformity will ultimately warp and destroy a person’s soul.

 Puritanism

The Scarlet Letter presents a critical, even disdainful, view of Puritanism. The narrator depicts Puritan society as drab, confining, unforgiving, and narrow-minded that unfairly victimizes Hester. In the scene in which Hester is released from prison, the narrator describes the town police official as representing the “whole dismal severity of the Puritanical code of law,” which fused religion with law. In contrast, he describes Hester as a woman marked by “natural dignity…force of character…[and] free will.” It is precisely these natural strengths, which the narrator holds in high esteem, that Puritan society suppresses. In The Scarlet Letter, the Puritans appear as shallow hypocrites whose opinion of Hester and Pearl improves only when they become more of an asset to the community, most notably when Hester becomes a seamstress and Pearl inherits a fortune from Chillingworth.

 Nature

In The Scarlet Letter, nature stands in contrast to Puritanism. Where Puritanism is merciless and rigid, nature is forgiving and flexible. This contrast is made clear from the very first page, when the narrator contrasts the “black flower” of the prison that punishes sin with the red rose bush that he imagines forgives those sentenced to die. The theme of nature continues with the forest outside Boston, which is described as an “unchristianized, lawless region.” In the dark forest, wild, passionate, and persecuted people like Hester, Pearl, Mistress Hibbins, and the Indians can escape from the strict, repressive morality of Puritan society. The forest, which provides a measure of comfort and protection that exists nowhere in society, is also the only place where Hester can reunite with Dimmesdale. When Hester moves to the outskirts of Boston, the narrator says she would have fit in better in the forest. Hester’s choice to live on the border of society and nature represents her internal conflict: she can’t thrive entirely within the constraints of Puritanism, but because of her attachment to society and to Dimmesdale, she also can’t flee.

  The Occult

The first association most people have with the town of Salem, Massachusetts is the infamous “Salem Witch Trials.” Set in and around Boston, The Scarlet Letter also deals with the specter of witchcraft and the occult. But the novel treats witchcraft and the occult sympathetically. By associating Pearl with other outcasts like Mistress Hibbins, Hawthorne suggests that witches were created by, and victims of, the excessively strict Puritan society. Puritan society created the witches by being so intolerant that people became interested in witchcraft as a way of expressing natural human feelings that Puritanism repressed. Puritanism then viewed witches as a threat to its repressive society and therefore sentenced all witches, like Mistress Hibbins, to death.