Comparing The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible
...s extremely important. The most pivotal scenes in the book take place on it. The scaffold is a place of public humiliation . The lawbreaker must stand in front of all his or her peers with them fully knowing of his or her crime. Standing on the scaffold as a guilty sinner would also mean that they would be shunned, as Hester was, for the rest of their lives. It seems a terrible punishment by today's standards; but the scaffold was not merely a cruel device of humiliation and scorn. The scaffold was the society's way of righting a wrong and preventing it from being repeated. The entire town was ashamed to see Hester, one of their own standing in front of them for a horrendous crime. It strengthened their resolve to continue to do what in their minds was righteous. The scaffold was not only a place of punishment. It was a place of atonement as well. It gave the guilty person relief knowing that they were acknowledged as a sinner and that they did not have to deal with the prison and the guilt of their minds anymore. The difference between Hester's emotional state and Dimmesdale's state was enormous. Hester was an acknowledged lawbreaker, she felt that she had been punished and was continually punished by the "A." Dimmesdale, however, never underwent punishment before his peers, so his guilt, his prison, festered inside him until he started to physically deteriorate. His lack of peace from hiding from the scaffold, from truth, was his undoing. As Dimmesdale found out at the very end of his life, the scaffold was every guilty Puritan’s only way of redemption. Chillingworth himself said, "Hast thou sought the whole earth over . . . there was no place so secret, no high place nor lowly place, where thou couldst have escaped me, save on this very scaffold!" The forest outside of Salem was unknown country, liking that of hell or the world of the devil. It was where the dreaded "Black Man" was fabled to meet with witches and sinners. The forest was also away from Salem, its prying eyes and harsh judgements. Here events could be open and free. Here was the only place where Hester and Dimmesdale can meet and talk freely of the sin they shared seven years previously. In this respect the Puritans were accurate in their superstition of the Black Man living in the forest. There was indeed in the forest a place where free thinking could go unfettered by Puritan code. This "Black Man" was no more than the freedom to form ideas outside of the Puritan way of life. It was dangerous to Hester and Arthur as they conspired to flee the colony instead of facing their problem. Mistress Hibbins recognized the change in Dimmesdale and acknowledged that he has had un-Puritan ideas. So he had, in a sense, met with the Black Man. The forest, at its most basic level was simply that place in the Puritan mind that non-conforming Puritan thoughts caould enter. The forest is not only an important location for meeting of "sinners" but also conjuring of spirts and greeting the devil. As seen in The Crucible the girls "met" with and conjured the spirits of the devil and the underworld. This was a meeting place of the mortal world and that of the dead. In both works the forest, or other darkened place, symbolizes an evil realm that only few enter, and never return from. Love versus lust is a characteristic that is expressed through the relationships between several leading characters in both works. From The Scarlet Letter, the illegitimate and inappropriate relationship between Hester and Dimmsdale was the most noticeable. Their lov...