The Scarlet Letter and Desires

The Scarlet Letter is the story of a woman named Hester Prynne. Hester Prynne is a woman from a Puritan village in Boston. She is a woman who got pregnant while she wasn’t married and her punishment was to wear a red A on her clothing to let everyone know of her sin. Her punishment becomes a sort of sermon to the others of the village of what not to do. It also serves as a constant reminder of her sin and the time when she choose passion over what she knew she should do. Her identity becomes her sin, and she is not able to create her own identity for herself. She tries to make the A her own by embroidering it in gold thread, but she cannot really create her own identity without her punishment following her. She is seen as an example of how the devil is alive and working is the village.

Not only does she have to wear the embroidered A on her clothing, she also had to stand in the pillory for 3 hours. A pillory was made to publically embarrass people of the community. It was kind of like the stocks and held your hands and head down. There was often a placard nearby to tell of the person’s crimes. Not only did the person have to stand in front of the entire community in this wooden contraption, they were often abused while in the pillory. People would throw things including rotten food and other objects at the person stuck in the pillory. They would often get hurt in the process of being humiliated by the community.

Her punishment becomes a sort of freedom to her. Women at that time had no voice or freedom whatsoever. But Hester was able to gain power from it and do things other women at the time would not be able to do. “She had wandered, without rule or guidance, into a moral wilderness. Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods. The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers - stern and wild ones - and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.” (Chapter XVIII "A Flood of Sunshine")She travels into places that other women would never go. She was liberated by knowing that she could live beyond the law and to know that she knew the darkness that was inside others in her community.

Plato believed that desire was so strong that it could if left unchecked, enslave your other parts. Can we control these desires? I believe that we should at least try to control our desires because if we don’t, just as Plato says our desires can enslave us. Think of it like an addict, the more we feed our desires, the more we will feel the need to keep doing whatever it is that we are feeding. I think we need to try to keep all three of the parts reason, emotion and desire in balance with each other.

Hester became an outcast to others in her village because of her sin. Other women are treated the same way in some places today. In some strict Muslim cultures, women must remain pure until they are married. If for some reason, they are not, they are immediately thrown out and thought to have brought shame upon the family. The punishment is stricter for these women than Hesters, they are stoned.

There was a case in the United Arab Emirates in 2000. An Indonesian woman named Kartini binti Karim was working as a housemaid and was found to be pregnant without being married. She and an Indian man were both charged with adultery, but the man fled the country before he could be arrested. She was on trial and wasn’t given a lawyer or even able to speak the language in which the trial was being conducted. She was found guilty, and sentenced to death by stoning. The whole time the trial was going on, her embassy had not been aware of her or the trial against her. When they heard about it, they immediately stepped in, appealed and got the sentenced reduced to a year in prison. She was an outcast from that society because she chose passion over the rules of that society.







Sources:

Wheeler, Julia. "Death by Stoning Appeal." BBC News 13 Mar. 2000.

"Kartini granted clemency by UAE court." Indonesia News 25 April. 2000.

(http://www.hamline.edu/apakabar/basisdata/2000/05/08/0052.html )