Scarlet Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne: The sins of the characters.

August 27, 2002
The Sins of the Puritans
"In Adam's fall, we sinned all."(Hall, 1)This quote from the New England primer much pertains to Nathaniel Hawthorne's characters in The Scarlet Letter. The Puritans were a people dedicated to improving themselves according to a certain set of principles that were exclusively Puritan. On the personal level, a Puritan would struggle to reach perfection by living out this system of values. If they did not succeed, as in Hester or Arthur Dimmesdale's cases, their retribution would be in the fact that they did not live up to the perfection in which they…