Okay, what the heck is up with The Scarlet Letter...?

Question

I have a paper due in like...a couple hours and haven't gotten any sleep yet...
Apparently my teacher thinks there's a morale to this horrid story...so, does anyone know what it is?

Answer 1

What it means to me is that society has its values backwards much of the time. Those that society deems good and respectable or prestigious are many times undeserving of the respect and prestige. By the same token, often those who are demonized and considered immoral and undesirable, are many times the really honest and caring. One such example of this is how wealth or vocation has more influence over a person's social status than does character.

Answer 2

The word is "moral" not morale...

The Scarlet Letter is about people judging each other withouth knowing all the facts.

The Reverend Dimmesdale was a sinner, but because he was a minister, people thought he was a good person.

Because Hester had a baby without her husband present, everyone knew that she had committed adultery - had sex with a man not her husband - and the community felt they needed to punish her for this. Was she a bad person? Hawthorne doesn't think so - his descriptions of her are flattering, and she is later vindicated, when Dimmesdale confesses that he was her lover.

It's not a "horrid story" - it just isn't told in the same style you're used to - people used to speak, and write, in a different style than now. The story is about how Hester suffers because she has been judged to be a bad person for having a baby outside of marriage, and she won't "rat out" her lover and confess who he was. The community makes her suffer for this. But as badly as she suffers, her lover, who can't admit that he is her child's father, suffers more from guilt.

The book is about how people judge each other, often without knowing what has motivated the "sin". How do you cope without friends, where everyone thinks you are a bad person? Don't we all have moments of weakness?

Hester Prynne was a young woman married to an old man. Divorce wasn't an option for her. He sent her to America, not a modern America but to a wilderness, where she knew no one and had nothing. Lonely and scared, she found a friend in Rev. Dimmesdale. They fell in love. She got pregnant. She had no option but to have a baby that everyone knew wasn't her husbands. She couldn't divorce her husband and marry the man she loved. She couldn't leave town and pretend the baby was her husband's or that she was a widow. It was a small town where everyone knew everyone else's business was, and there was no escape from gossip or prying eyes.

The moral is that the sinners had more compassion and were closer to being Christ-like than those who judged them, perhaps because of their sins. And Hester prevailed because she was true to herself, unlike Dimmesdale who could not forgive himself for not taking responsibility for Hester's child.

Get some sleep!

Answer 3

One has the duty/responsibility to be moral, behave morally, no matter what time and in what place you live.

Perhaps you instructor means to relate the immorality of our present day, modern society, to that of America, some two hundred years ago.

What a striking, stark difference. The Puritan society, culture, was based upon the strictest possible moral code, especially sexual.

Today's society seems to most people, in particular to those of us of the older generation, to be not only immoral, but amoral:no morals, good or bad. We are becoming like automatons. Always outer directed, never inwardly.

What do you think?

Questioningly,

Wotan

Answer 4

Hawthorne is easily one of the most preachy and outspoken authors in American literature. If you can't find the moral, then you haven't read the book and don't deserve the grade.

Answer 5

The sin of adulatory and the consequences of committing the sin of adulatory. Both from a social and moral stand point.