Forms of Violence in the Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Violence carries several meanings. It is commonly defined as an action causing pain, suffering or destruction, but can also refer to a great force, or an injustice, a wrong. Actually, violence is not only physical, it may also imply a moral dimension. In other words, it plays both on the field of the outer and inner worlds. In all cases, violence stages a relation between domination and subjection which are entangled in it. In The Scarlet Letter, violence seems to be the leading string of the plot: Hester Prynne has to undergo the ordeal of penance in a Puritan society that harshly condemns adultery. One can see here the atmosphere of violence she is plunged into. More generally, or rather more specifically, violence is present on various levels in this story: it manifests itself in the Puritan society, to which the notion of gaze is intimately connected, but also in the very minds of the characters who are haunted by their guilt, or even in Pearl's character in its complete opposition to the stern and strict principles of Puritan society. The question of the relation between the sinful Hester Prynne and the highly religious society she lives in illustrates notably the conflict, on a greater scale, between the individual and the group, the we and the I. This very theme would be most likely to represent violence in all its forms. And the most surprising fact in The Scarlet Letter is that though Hester is not forbidden to leave this society, she yet decides to stay, even though it hurts her.
Accordingly, it would be then interesting to study how the relation between the individual and society is depicted in The Scarlet Letter, and in what way on can consider it as a inevitable conflict? I will first concentrate on the main features of Puritan society, which is actually a metonymic feature of society as a whole before analyzing the effects it has on its people. I will finally focus on the individual's possibilities of resistance in the face of society.

First of all,