As much as one may try to avoid sin, everyone will sin at some point in their life. However, there have been groups of people who spend much of their time getting as close to perfection as possible. One of the most extreme groups with this goal were the 17th century Puritans who immigrated from England to America. They set some of the toughest laws to follow and inflicted harsh sentences on those who broke them. Of course there were people who broke these laws and paid the consequences. Usually this was the case because of their pride. Still, not everyone was punished; many people escaped unharmed with their "crimes". Two books written about the Puritan time period, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Crucible by Arthur Miller, show several imperfect characters who have sinned, some who are punished for their actions and others who are not.
The main characters of these two novels are the sinners who receive the harshest penalties of the Puritan system because they are both proud of what they are going through.
The Scarlet Letter (1860) by T. H. Matteson. Oil o...
English: Hester Prynne & Pearl before the stocks
This is the title page for the first edition of Th...In The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne "has to wear the mark of shame upon her bosom" (Hawthorne 59), the letter "A", symbolizing her sin of adultery. Hester choses this punishment over the option of revealing the fellow perpetrator, which shows the pride in what she has done. However, besides her actions with this sin, Hester is a person who follows the Puritan religion very closely and has rarely sinned during her life. She is much more righteous a person than many others in her community. Yet, that one sin makes her look horrible in the eyes of the townspeople. The main character of The Crucible, John Proctor, suffers an even harsher penalty for committing the same crime as Hester. As he...