Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

In the scarlet letter the core of the story line revolves around a movement known as the Puritan. The Puritan movement began when King Henry declared England's independence from the Church of Rome and he appointed himself head of the new Church of England. King Henry did this because he wanted to divorce his wife Catherine of Aragon in order to marry Anne Boleyn. By appointing himself head of the Church of England he was able to grant himself his own divorce that the pope would not give him. At first there was little difference between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic but later with the spread of Protestant reformers such as John Calvin the church began to change. Some people thought the church of England retained too many of the superstitious practises of the Roman Catholic Church. They wanted simpler truths and less structured forms of worship like the earlier Christians, because they wanted to purify the Church of England, they got the name of Puritans. John Geree describes the puritans as "one, that honoured God above all, and under God gave every one his due"!

These Puritans followed a very strict code of practise; they were greatly influenced by the bible, their ministers and the government. They sometimes seemed to follow their codes of practise a little too seriously and seem almost hypocritical and farfetched at times, i.e. during the period of the Salem witch trials.

The history of Puritan Society itself portrays the Puritan society and its leaders as having the right intentions for a stable and necessary environment, the fact that they were trying to live "purely," shows that they had their hearts in the right place, but it was never their outright intentions to produce a hypocritical society.