When Hester Prynne stands before Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Puritans in The Scarlet Letter, she encounters monsters of intolerance. Embarrassed by his ancestors, Hawthorne describes her accusers with a level of bitterness possible only in an aggrieved descendent, calling them “the most intolerant brood that ever lived,” “a people amongst whom religion and law were almost identical,” “severe,” and “grim.” His Puritans are unforgiving, and their sympathy “meager” and “cold.”
Students whose knowledge of the Puritans is drawn exclusively from The Crucible cannot be blamed for accepting Hawthorne’s description as history. Today, “Puritan” is a catch-all pejorative used to suggest that one’s opponent is dour, authoritarian, nit-picking, or afraid of pleasure, depending on the argument of the moment. Suggestions that they were overly scrupulous would not have shocked the Puritans—they were used to those accusations. However, Hawthorne’s declaration that Puritan nature knows no sympathy would have shocked his ancestors. Above all, they valued “love of the brethren” or “fellow-feeling” as a sign of spiritual regeneration, and a lack of sympathy would indicate that their social, spiritual, and political experiments were entirely in vain.
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