Essay On The Scarlet Letter Individualism

Nathaniel Hawthorne finds in colonial New England a compelling setting for his dramatization of the paradox of individualism—America was founded on the principle that to be an individual is to be separate from the state, thus creating a community, or country in the United States’ case, formed completely of separatists. The Scarlet Letter dramatizes the individualistic dimensions as this tendency of democracy that “relieve(s) the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow” (Hawthorne 29). The Puritans were a group of dissident voluntary exiles who sought to strengthen and reform the Christian community in England by leaving it—setting out across the sea for a New World, a New England that would furnish a model for reconstructing the old one. “The Scarlet Letter agrees with the doctrines of the Puritans” and envisions this moral and political paradox in terms of individual
John Hancock's famously large signature is thus a graphic emblem of the revolutionaries' commitment to individualism. Of course, the Declaration's contention that "all men are created equal" evidently left out women and did not even seem to include "all men": when America achieved independence, many individuals found that their right to liberty was not considered self-evident. America’s commitment to an individual’s rights was more rhetoric rather than reality for African American slaves, Native Americans, and many other minority groups. This facade of individualism was solidified with the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The paradox present in both The Scarlet Letter and The Declaration of Independence condemns individuality as both a joke and as “the moving principle of life which different societies in different ways may constrain but which in itself irresistibly endures”(Stewart