Contradictions between Scarlet Letter and The Lotery

Essay by hooman-talaHigh School, 11th grade April 2004

download word file, 4 pages 3.0

by: Hooman Keshavarz Hedayati

Hooman667675@yahoo.com

Five hundred years ago when a group of hard working people, who mostly left their homeland because of injustices and in equanimity they experienced by the Church of England migrated to America to start a new life with justice and freedom of religion. This group of very conservative and in many ways extremism Christians who enforced biblical laws in their community, called them selves Puritans, and their motto became, " We shall be a city upon hill" (The Puritans presentation). Puritans believed that god had total authority in every day life, as Furlong says "Puritans emphasized the absolute power of god, the right to make arbitrary and unquestioned choice, and the duty of man to submit himself utterly " (Furlong 26).

Nathaniel Hawthorn in The Scarlet letter, which takes place during this time period, tries to show us the prejudices in Puritan society between people and those who called sinners.

Hawthorn explains the importance of justice system of the city in the first chapters. "The founders of a new colony, what ever the Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest partial necessities to allow a portion of the virgin soil as cemetery, and another portion as site of a prison"(Hawthorn 49). From the start of story Hawthorn shows us the unfathomable Puritan belief, Original Sin, "Man is doomed to suffer because of Adam's sin in Eden."(Puritan Presentation.)

The word "Justice" in the American Heritage Dictionary is defined as, "The Principle of moral rightness; equity." But the moral rightness could change and be different in every society and every culture. The religion, race and nationality all are important factors in choosing a standardized moral factor in the society. In which we call it "Law" or "Justice...