Hawthorne's Portrayal Of Puritanical Hypocricy

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should act. It seems he did respect their beliefs, but thought they handled them inappropriately. “Even the very intensity of their faith, so admirable in a way, made them, he thought, liable to bigotry” (Waggoner 15). In most of his novels and stories, there is a strong display of the Puritan society’s reaction to a certain primary character’s struggle. Hypocrisy being a major element, Hawthorne also used guilt, confession, and sin as smaller elements to get his feelings across on the Puritans’ shortcomings.
Hypocrisy is a major component, if not the major component that Hawthorne used to express his attitude toward Puritan society. He demonstrates in the novel The Scarlet Letter and the short story “Young Goodman Brown” just how hypocritical the citizens of Salem could be toward one another and how their actions completely contradict their beliefs on how they should behave and their religious teachings. Each of these works demonstrated the element in a very effective way.
In The Scarlet Letter, a young woman has commit...