Similarities Between Scarlet Letter And The Crucible

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Men and women walk around in the same neutral colored clothing, hand in hand with the lord and their Puritan values. However, these seemingly ordinary Puritans are all similar in one form— sin. In archaic theme-based literature, similarities can be distinguished between two stories and their attributes. Within the works of The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible, a plethora of correlative elements can be identified by the reader. From analysis of the characters Hester Prynne from The Scarlet Letter and Abigail Williams from The Crucible, the two are drawn together through connections between their characteristics. Both, sinners of the Puritan society, display what would be described as alluring physical properties. "Abigail Williams, seventeen, enters— a strikingly beautiful girl, an orphan, with an endless capacity for dissembling" (Miller 169). As for Hester ", the …show more content…

Evil is portrayed as one or the other. In Puritan society, only good and bad exists among the townspeople. For example, if a person is not with the Lord, they are with the devil. In The Crucible, when Mary Warren is accused of witchcraft, she finds herself in a life or death situation and confesses her love to God in order to save her own life. " No, I love God; I go your way no more. I love God, I bless God," she exclaims to Danforth (Miller 226). Her desperate manner exhibits that only good and evil exists in this life and death situation, and she cannot choose to be neither. Hester's daughter Pearl who had been conceived from sin displays no love for the Lord or the Devil. When Pearl is asked the question 'who made you?' she announces "that she had not been made at all, but had been plucked by her mother off the bush of wild roses that grew by the prison-door" (Hawthorne 102). This answer separates Pearl from the rest of the community for not believing that God made her. This symbolizes the theme that only good and evil remains in Puritan

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