Historical and Literary Context of The Scarlet Letter

Hawthorne's Literary Times

Hawthorne wrote during the Romantic movement in American literature which lasted from roughly 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 were 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

Historical Context

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; art was generally utilitarian, religious, or served a personal purpose.

The Purtians' beliefs were based in a system of Christian theology called Calvinism, named after John Calvin. John Calvin was an important French theologian and pastor during the Protestant Reformation. The primary tenets of Calvinism are enumerated in The Five Points of Calvinism (T.U.L.I.P.), of which, the concepts of predestination and total depravity are essential to understanding Puritan behavior.

Christianity

The Scarlet Letter is chock-full of biblical allusions. To fully understand the novel, it is important to have a basic understanding of Christianity and Old and New Testament literature. Here's a good place to start:

• Fall of Man/Original Sin

• The Garden of Eden

• Parable of The Pearl

• Mary, mother of Jesus

• The Practice of Baptism

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