“Shame, Despair, Solitude”: Punishment for Adultery in The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter deals with the Puritan Boston and the treatment of the sin of adultery in that socio-cultural context. The aim of this paper is to explicate how Hester and her daughter Pearl are punished for their connection to the sin, with Hester being an active participant in, and Pearl the product of an illicit relationship. To do this, the paper first establishes how the Puritan colonies dealt with adultery and then looks at the representation of it in the novel. The external and internal aspects of punishment of Hester and Pearl are then analyzed.