Puritanism in the Scarlet Letter #4

Among the Puritans, Indians were considered to be much too undomesticated and as "savages." Although, in the beginning, there was a middle ground between them, where both civilizations were very unbiased towards each other. This impression shifted as a result of the Puritans' innumerable attempts of converting the natives to Christianity, forcing them to succumb to the Puritans, and also the Puritans' view that they had ownership of Indian land. From reading chapter eighteen, I made a connection to Pearl and the wilderness. "She had wandered, without rule or guidance, into a moral wilderness... where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods." The natives were associated with wilderness as they ordinarily sustained themselves in forests and darkness. The wildness seen in Pearl ties into the uncivilized Natives. The town refuses to accept Pearl, isolating her from the rest of society, despite Pearl's inclination of becoming accepted. It was not only Pearl who had been seen by the town as wild and corrupt but also the Native Americans and Hester Prynne, whom had been fenced off from the entire society for nearly all of the remainder of her life. 

In the last chapter, King's Chapel is mentioned as well as the writing engraved on Hester Prynne's tombstone. The King's Chapel is an actual Puritan church which had been built in 1749 and is also located where the story takes place. I am not entirely sure if the tombstone is of great significance at all, but I remember studying Puritan tombstones in my history class. What I got out of it is that the tombstones of a person expressed the person's (in this case, a woman's) modesty and integrity as an individual. However, the writing engraved on Hester Prynne at the end of the story is a device to show that punishment would follow her even after she died: "ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES," (243). This further reinforces the belief of the scarlet letter's purpose and the Puritan concept of predestination, that they would not be able to save themselves since God had already determined their destiny.