Tuesday, August 4, 2015

What are the limits on individual freedom in "The Scarlet Letter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne?

In one
sense, thein byhave all the freedom they could want, since we know they
can leave this Puritan community at any time. Evencould have left, taken off the scarlet letter,
and gone to a new community or back to New England--and no one in Boston could have or would
have stopped her. Hester had

the world before
her,--kept by no restrictive clause of her condemnation within the limits of the Puritan
settlement, so remote and so obscure,--free to return to her birthplace, or to any other
European land, and there hide her character and identity under a new exterior, as completely as
if emerging into another state of being,--and having also the passes of the dark, inscrutable
forest open to her, where the wildness of her nature might assimilate itself with a people whose
customs and life were alien from the law that had condemned her....


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