Historical and Literary Context of The Scarlet Letter: 14

Historical Commentary

A religious group which migrated from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in New England in the early 1600s, the Puritans believed in a “pure” interpretation of the Bible which did not include some of the traditional practices of the Church of England. Although the Church did not officially control the State in Puritan settlements, religion and government were closely intertwined. The ministers counseled the magistrates in all affairs concerning the settlement and its citizens. The Puritans had strict rules against the theater, religious music, sensuous poetry, and frivolous dress.

Hawthorne's Literary Times

Hawthorne wrote during the Romantic Period in American literature which lasted from 1830 to 1865. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edgar Allen Poe, and Walt Whitman were his literary contemporaries. The Scarlet Letter is considered a piece of American Romantic literature because it is set in a remote past, the Puritan era 200 years prior to Hawthorne’s time, and because it deals with the interior psychology of individual characters.

Romantic literature is marked by the belief that the imagination is capable of discovering truths that the rational mind can not reach. These truths were usually accompanied by powerful emotion and associated with natural beauty. To the Romantics, imagination, individual feelings, and wild nature weer of greater value than reason, logic, and cultivation. The Romantics didn't flatly reject logical thought as invalid for all purposes; but for the purpose of art, they placed a premium on intuitive, "felt" experience.

Characteristics of Romanticism

• Places faith in inner experience
• Shuns the artificiality of civilization and seeks unspoiled nature
• Prefers youthful innocence to educated sophistication
• Champions individual freedom
• Reflects on nature's beauty as a path to spiritual and moral development

Sources: (1) Holt Literature and Language Arts: Essentials of American Literature. Fifth Course. Ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart and WInston, 2003. (2)