A Moral Wilderness: Setting in the Scarlet Letter

Joyce Connolly Ms. Fitzpatrick The Scarlet Letter Paper Block-Three American Literature Wednesday, October 3, 2012 A Moral Wilderness In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne conveys a stark contrast between Puritan disciplinary institutions, such as the prison and scaffold, and the liberating quality of the wilderness. Through the looming prison-door, the scaffold’s merciless nature, and the forest’s unruly and mysterious spirit, the protagonist, Hester Prynne, recognizes that her New England roots suppress her identity while nature serves as a respite, providing forgiveness and acceptance that relieve Hester of her ignominy. Rather than escaping New England’s firm hand to seek a sake haven in the oasis of the wilderness, Hester realizes that the scarlet letter provides a harmonic relationship with nature, allowing her to create an internal gateway to freedom without having to depart from Boston. The ironclad prison door, established by the colony’s founders, represents the strict militancy of Puritan ways. The story opens with a profound description of the bleak and despondent setting. “The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of a human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison” (45). Despite the desire to establish a colony anchored on righteousness and joy, the founders of this colony found it imperative to put a cemetery and prison in place. By creating these two very repressive and dismal institutions, the colony communicates a regimented outlook and despotic traits that highlight and punish human sinful tendencies. Indeed, the very construction of the prison and cemetery express the colony’s intolerance for any type of misbehavior. By instituting the prison door,