Within the novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, a puritan woman is sentenced by local authorities to undergo public shaming for committing what was seen as a grave crime. During puritanical times, public humiliation was often used as retribution for criminals and delinquents to repent the crime they committed and to send a message to the surrounding community; moreover, such a punishment is still carried out by judges to this day. Today public humiliation may not take on the identical forms, techniques, and methods that were used in the past, but it still exists and plays a huge role in modern society. Publicly humiliating a person is an uncivilized practice for the present-day courts and federal system to participate in, especially …show more content…
Social media allows family, friends, and the family’s friends, and so on to be informed of the criminal’s crime. To make matters even worse, those people could get a warped version of the actual offence. This results in a usually negative change in how a person is seen within their own community and can have cause serious issues because “by taking punishment out of the hands of law enforcement and placing it in the hands of the public, whose emotions and reactions lie beyond their control, shaming campaigns can… be messy and unpredictable” (Khimm 20). The concept of mob mentality will be a prominent factor in how the community will see a person and if they are seen in a negative light then the collective community mind will shift to a mutual dislike of that person. Leading to the next problem, which would be how the criminal would be subjected to ostracization and alienation by the general public. This would be an unjust punishment because the criminal had already served their sentence. Even if the criminal lived in a more forgiving community that was more lenient regarding the criminal’s punishment, the criminal would still be subjected to constant ridicule caused by the punishment for the rest of their lives. Being remembered as the person who did something scandalous and the stigma would not disappear easily, …show more content…
Disregarding the fact that public humiliation has such a negative backlash which includes an unintentional sentence extension and could cause negative community reactions. The most important reason why humiliation as a punishment should cease to exist is because that a criminal’s punishment does not only affect them, it also reaches their immediate family and close loyal friends. So not only is the criminal being punished for their crimes, but the people who are close to them are subjected to either ridicule or ostracization as well. The people who were still loyal to the criminal as they were be being punished by the community would definitely have to deal with negative effects towards their own lifestyles Nobody would want to see the people they care about punished for their actions, especially if the criminal had a child. That child would no doubt be on the receiving end of bullying because of the criminal’s
When an individual commits a crime, it is often discussed as to whether or not a jail or prison sentence or a punishment such as community service would be a good consequence. Others deem that public humiliation would be the perfect punishment for these crimes. In the essay “Condemn the Crime, Not the Person” by June Tangney, she argues against the use of public humiliation as a way of punishing against crimes committed. Of all of the different options for punishment available today, I believe that public humiliation is not an appropriate form of punishment and less severe punishments are the appropriate consequences for individuals who have committed crimes.
letter *A* embroidered on her chest. The A served as a symbol of her crime, was
Throughout The Scarlet Letter, everyone had some form of a secret they’d rather not share, but sometimes not telling can do more harm than good. At the end of the film, Hawthorne left us a quote saying, “Be true, be true, be true.” Hawthorne is trying to say keeping secrets isn't always the best because it only leads to someone getting hurt.
“Only the man who has enough good in him to feel the justice of the penalty can be punished; the other can only be hurt.'; This is a very interesting quote, and depending what you make of it, it can be very confusing. To most people this quote might not mean anything, but you
icon. According to the public, "never had a man spoken in so wise, so high,
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is one of the most respected and admired novels of all time. Often criticized for lacking substance and using more elaborate camera work, freely adapted films usually do not follow the original plot line. Following this cliché, Roland Joffe’s version of The Scarlet Letter received an overwhelmingly negative reception. Unrealistic plots and actions are added to the films for added drama; for example, Hester is about to be killed up on the scaffold, when Algonquin members arrive and rescue her. After close analysis, it becomes evident of the amount of work that is put into each, but one must ask, why has the director adapted their own style of depicting the story? How has the story of Hester Prynne been modified? Regarding works, major differences and similarities between the characterization, visual imagery, symbolism, narration and plot, shows how free adaptation is the correct term used.
"To be fully human is to balance the heart, the mind, and the spirit.'; One could suggest the novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, that one should not violate the sanctity of the human heart. Hester was well ahead of her time, and believed that love was more important than living in a lie. Dimmesdale’s theology and his inclinations render him almost incapable of action; Chillingsworth dammed himself, along with Dimmesdale. Hester was “frank with [Chillingsworth].';
Guilt is a feeling of responsibility or remorse for some offense, crime, wrong, whether real or imagined. There are different types of guilt. Guilt can be caused by a physical thing a person did that he isn’t proud of, or wanted to hide, can be something a person imagined he did to someone or something else, or can be caused when a person did something to his God or religion. Everyone at some time in his or her life has a run in with guilt, and it has a different impact on each person. People, who are feeling guilty because of something they did or said, can influence how other people act and feel. Some people are affected worse by guilt than others, for example, Dimmesdale from The Scarlet Letter. Talked about in The Scarlet Letter, Dimmesdale, a man with the deepest guilt, was responsible for the moral well-being of his people. He went against his teachings, committed adultery, and left the woman to suffer publicly alone while he stayed like a hero in the town. On the other hand, sometimes the masses are affected by one person’s guilt. He was affected much more by guilt, because he didn’t tell anyone of what he had done. By keeping guilt internalized, a person ultimately ends up hurting himself. More than seventy percent of all things that make people feel guilty are found out later on in their life by other people. Guilt has three categories that it affects the most in people: physical, mental, and spiritual.
Progressing forward, Jeff Jacoby, columnist for The Boston Globe, provides readers with his view of “Boston’s Forefathers’” system of punishment in his essay, “Bring Back Flogging.” Within the contents of his work, Jacoby describes how flogging was utilized as punishment in its day. One such example he utilizes involves a woman who pleaded guilty to committing adultery. He writes that her punishment was “fifteen stripes severally to be laid on upon her naked back at the Common Whipping post” (Jacoby 1). In his piece, Jacoby argues for the revival of flogging and Puritan style punishment in the United States.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter has a very wide cast of characters, but settles upon three distinct main ones. These three characters are all very different, but still suffer from the same internal conflict regarding their relationships with one another. One theme can be associated with each individual character, but a single trait is common among all three. Love, fear, and revenge are all primary themes present in The Scarlet Letter, but no other emotion is as prevalent to the characters’ developments than their guilt. These themes give us a sense of how different, but also how similar, these characters are.
As we read the novel, “The Scarlet Letter,” we were acquainted with the manner the Puritan society branded their sinners contingent on the immoralities they have committed. They believed that punishing these sinners by humiliation was the prominent way for them to bear the cost of their debauchery. Resembling this past our present has been subject to this same form of branding and labeling. We judge the way the Puritan society strictly punished its citizens by putting them on scaffolds where they were publicly humiliated. We hypocritically judge this form of punishment when we are practicing these same immoral acts. Although we are not putting them on scaffolds or literally branding people we are causing them the same kind of degradation and bestowing on them labels that will hurt them the same way.
The first chapter sets the scene for the novel: Boston, during the seventeenth century. During this period, religion is the foundation for both the laws and the society. We are introduced to the town's cemetery and nearby prison. Next to the prison grows a wild rosebush. We can think of the wild rosebush as representing the beauty of nature, and the prison as the symbol of societies need to tame nature.
Public humiliation supposedly enforces people’s behaviors to change but does shame really influence people to change? Most people have their different opinions on public humiliation but either way Hester is a victim of this cruel well-known Puritan punishment. On the other hand, as a result of Reverend Dimmesdale withholding his sin, a hard-hitting sickness secretly hits the reverend. The scarlet letter located on Hester’s chest is a constant reminder of her wrong decision. In the novel The Scarlet Letter, author Nathaniel Hawthorne expresses the effects of sin in many ways, including public humiliation, Hester and the scarlet letter and Dimmesdale’s sickness. Maria Stromberg, who wrote the article “Hawthorne’s Black Man: Image of Social Evil” expresses the danger of breaking laws through her writings about The Scarlet Letter. Olivia Taylor’s article “Cultural Confessions: Penance and Penitence in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun” indicates that with every sin one commits there are consequences.
Punishing the unlawful, undesirable and deviant members of society is an aspect of criminal justice that has experienced a variety of transformations throughout history. Although the concept of retribution has remained a constant (the idea that the law breaker must somehow pay his/her debt to society), the methods used to enforce and achieve that retribution has changed a great deal. The growth and development of society, along with an underlying, perpetual fear of crime, are heavily linked to the use of vastly different forms of punishment that have ranged from public executions, forced labor, penal welfare and popular punitivism over the course of only a few hundred years. Crime constructs us as a society whilst society, simultaneously determines what is criminal. Since society is always changing, how we see crime and criminal behavior is changing, thus the way in which we punish those criminal behaviors changes.
According to David Garland, punishment is a legal process where violators of the criminal law are condemned and sanctioned with specified legal categories and procedures (Garland, 1990). There are different forms and types of punishment administered for various reasons and can either be a temporary or lifelong type of punishment. Punishment can be originated as a cause from parents or teachers with misbehaving children, in the workplace or from the judicial system in which crimes are committed against the law. The main aim of punishment is to demonstrate to the public, the victim and the offender that justice is to be done, to reduce criminal activities and to deter people from wanting to commit any form of crime against the law. In other words it is a tool used to eliminate the bad in society or to deter people from committing criminal activities.