Shame In Scarlet Letter

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As with her lover and her partner in sin, the life of Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter gives key insights to idea that shame varies from individual to individual, and from society to society. Like Dimmesdale, she experiences a deep shame for her previous actions. Unlike Dimmesdale however, she is punished for her crime and is forced to wear an embroidered scarlet ‘A’, as a token of her shame, “the same reason that the minister keeps his hand over his heart” (Hawthorne 122). From here, her experience with shame diverges from that of Dimmesdale. While the reverend falls victim the deleterious effects of shame, Prynne grows from her shame and becomes an integral part of the community, even earning a sense of respect from the town members. …show more content…

In the first case, Roger Chillingworth reveals the shame he holds as the husband of Prynne by commanding her to not reveal his relation to her, in part to avoid shame and in part to facilitate revenge. Throughout the course of the novel, Chillingworth makes it his sole purpose to exact revenge on Prynne’s lover, Dimmesdale, and in doing so, transforms from “a wise and just man to a fiend” (Hawthorne 119). In his search for revenge, Chillingworth’s primary tool is shame, of which in Dimmesdale he compounds and exaggerates. Had not have been this vengeful effort on Dimmesdale, masked by the intimacy of his role as physician, the reverend would likely have not had succumb so severely to the effects of shame, demonstrating the capability that an individual has to augment another’s own shame. On the other side of things, Pearl demonstrates the relative nature of shame through her innocence. Pearl, “the child of its father’s guilt and its mother’s shame,” nonetheless becomes symbolic of that which has not been touched and molded by the imprint of society, having grown up on the outskirts of the town and, in a certain sense, isolated (Hawthorne 78). Pearl does not experience any shame and the stigma her mother feels leaves her unaffected. Similarly, she does not understand Dimmesdale’s …show more content…

The Puritan world is built upon social hierarchy, as stated firsthand in the works of John Winthrop, the Puritan leader, and secondhand, by historian Andreea Minguic. Every person in the Puritan society occupies a position on this hierarchy, thus enabling different social statuses. Shame is subject to this social status because it is most often “elicited in social conditions that threaten ones social identity,” in the words of Margaret Kemeny (et al.) in the paper “Shame as the Emotional Response to Threat to the Social Self” (153). This social identity is largely defined by ones social status, which in the Puritan society and a majority of others is a function of profession and gender. The best example of this interdependency is the character Dimmesdale mentioned above; his social status is very high on account of his profession as minister. His high social identity becomes threatened in the novel and consequently he experiences shame that consumes him. The second example of this is Hester Prynne, who also faced emaciating amounts of shame. This shame was amplified by the fact of her gender that, as stated by Gideon Kressel in “Shame and Gender,” chained her, by the perpetuated social customs, to an inferior status with particular expectations, one of which was fidelity. In both the case of Prynne and

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