The Benefits of Sin Revealed in Nathaniel Hawthornes The Scarlet Lette

The Benefits of Sin Revealed in The Scarlet Letter      Ã‚  Ã‚   According to Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter, each of us is born with "original sin" we have inherited from the misdeeds of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. As Eve bit hungrily into the apple from the Tree of Knowledge, starving for wisdom, little did she know that the entire human race would thereafter be tainted by her "sin." Hawthorne and many others believe that ever since, human beings have been inclined to evil, more likely to disobey than to act in a godly manner. This is a faithless, cynical view of humanity, but one perhaps justified by the actions of Hester Prynne and the Reverend Dimmesdale. Sin seems to be an inevitable factor in their lives; though they are good people, their sin boils up and nearly destroys them. Do they make a conscious choice to sin? Or does their sin simply take control, as it is bound to do in all human beings? Perhaps this leads to a greater question of fate and free will, but in the end, the one thing they can really chan ge in their lives is the way they deal with sin, how they attempt to atone for it - and whether they view the affair they had as sinful in the first place.    Puritan society in the Massachusetts Bay Colony was a system based on religion. The Bible and the law were intertwined and could not be separated, not even in the minds of the people. Therefore it was difficult to argue that there were any laws at all that were worth having, if they were not spelled out explicitly in the Bible. Hester had committed adultery and given birth to a bastard child, and there it was, in the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not commit adultery. And so she was punished. The Puritans nodded and were satisfied, comfortabl... ...., C.E. Frazer, ed. The Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal 1975. Englewood: Indian Head, 1975. Coxe, Rev. Arthur Cleveland. "The Writings of Hawthorne." Church Review 3 (1851): 489-511. Gartner, Matthew. "The Scarlet Letter and the Book of Esther: Scriptural Letter and Narrative Life." Studies in American Fiction (1995): 131-144. Hawthorne, J. (1886, April). "The Scarlet Letter." The Atlantic Monthly [On-line], pp. 1-20. Available: http://wwww.theatlantic.com/unbound/classrev/scarlet.html Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. New York: St. Martins, 1991. Loring, G. B. (1850). "The Scarlet Letter and Transcendentalism." Massachusetts Quarterly Review [On-line], pp. 1-6. Available: http://eldred.ne.mediaone.net/nh/loring.html Scharnhorst, Gary. The Critical Response to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. New York: Greenwood, 1992.