End to Understanding II

Not so great yet. Then again, not too terrible for a rough draft. I think I might be supposed to mix up the scarlet letter - crucible examples more. At any rate, here it is, feel free to ignore - I post it only for reference as it's supposed to be THE ESSAY of Junior Year... Hey, wouldn't it be funny if Turnitin.com found this site and said I was plagiarising from myself? :P

An End to Understanding

One shows us a community torn asunder with raging and impassioned allegations of the occult. The other tells the tale of two lives irreparably scarred by the ironfisted ruling for a brief moment of lust. The Crucible by Arthur Miller, and The Scarlet Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne, tell two different stories with one ardent message, which stands today to warn us against the dangers of law untempered by both reason and human emotion. In both cases this admonition follows a simple arc of corruption and eventual failing over man’s judicial authority, beginning with an unbalanced influence of reason and emotion over the ruling of the court, molded by the strict puritan lifestyle. These unjust rulings extend to squander human lives and good intentions until ultimately and chaotically overthrown by either surrender or growing disregard of their magisterial power.

Humans are fundamentally flawed creatures. Prone to error, they have two forces at their disposal which, used in tandem, can lead them on the course of justice. These forces are those of reason and of emotion, each of which must be tempered with the other, or they may just as easily lead to ruin. Such is the sad case of the Crucible and the Scarlet Letter. In the Crucible, reason is at fault. In a panic fueled by a growing mass hysteria, the long repressed emotions and selfish motives of the people of Salem come to surface with deadly consequences. The Putnams, for example, take advantage of the madness to feed their own greed. They have their daughter testify against a neighbor so they can take his land. As Giles explains, “If Jacobs hangs for a witch he forfeit up his property – that’s law! And there is none but Putnam with the coin to buy so great a piece. This man is killing his neighbors for their land! (101)” Abby, the orchestrator of the confessors, has her own ulterior motives. Having once had an affair with John Proctor, she believes he would marry her but for his wife Elizabeth, and summarily moves to dispose of her. As Proctor turns increasingly against her, she shows no hesitance in taking him down as well. Cold and calculating, she knows that as an ‘innocent’ young maiden, she will be believed. “And if they ask you why Abigail would ever do so murderous a deed,” she fairly asks Proctor, “What will you tell them? (158)” The irrational court that the hearings are held in allow lies to fester and spread like wildfire. Hale, the learned judge, is originally overeager and ambitious in his judgments, thrilled at some level to put his years of study to test on the field. The other judges, Hathorne and Danforth, are equally partial and unyielding of their control in the court. Spectral evidence, now considered an oxymoron, was fair game in the Salem Witch Trials, as the witnesses would testify to spirits visiting them at night or advancing upon them in the court. If Salem, then, was host to a courtroom turned circus, the Boston of the Scarlet Letter is home to one of ironfisted damnation, bereft of human tenderness. The inhabitants there condemn Hester to a lifetime as a pariah for a moment’s lust, and call it mercy in the face of the gallows she might as easily have faced. Perhaps they are desperate for a scapegoat, thirsting for someone to take notice away from their own petty sins in a society where no transgression is too small to warrant the gaze of hell. Perhaps they are simply jealous of the young, beautiful Hester Prynne, who with her skilful embroidery looks so different from their own “broad shoulders and well developed busts and… round and ruddy cheeks. (46)” With whatever cruel motive born from a strict and cold life, Hester’s neighbors advance on her ruthlessly, hurling towards her every weapon of humiliation in an attempt to break her spirit.

Sprung from a thousand cruel motives and envenomed by bitterness, the unbalanced and barbarous rulings of Salem and Boston could only ever bring about evil consequence. In their own time, both waste innocent lives and squander good intentions, transforming the pure and good to corruption and decay. In the Scarlet Letter, the judgment of man leaves a child to grow up fatherless, a woman to live in pain, a minister to lead himself to death with guilt, and a physician’s heart and soul to blacken with vengeance. Each would have had much to offer the world, if treated by it with more clemency and understanding. Instead, Pearl, the child of lust, grows up in a broken home to be a wild and strange child, forever separated from the companionship of others her own age by the sinful past that precedes her. Her mother Hester is a beautiful, clever, and kind woman who grows old before her time wandering in constant pain from the guilt and ostracism she endures. She may have given great happiness to a man and many children as a wife, or even to society as a giving and talented embroiderer. Instead, she is long ignored and avoided, and takes to wearing her hair pinned up in a cap, turning grey and lifeless before the eyes of Boston. Dimmesdale, her partner in sin, is also relentlessly tormented. Never strong, he lingers on in bad health and unimaginable guilt for years, tortured by the physician who subtly draws out the effects of his own poisonous emotions. A brilliant speaker and holy, god-fearing minister, Dimmesdale nonetheless realizes that if his congregation only knew of the sin he had once committed, he would be cast out and made nothing before them, unable even to repent through good works and service. The physician, Hester’s thwarted husband, is also cruelly affected by the judgment even as he is part of it. He is made to feel as though Dimmesdale has committed a crime against him which is grievous beyond reckon and utterly unforgivable. His mind is twisted to madness with dark thoughts, and is increasingly compared with the Black Man, the Satan of Puritan society, as he sinks further and further from his roots as a gentle scholar. In the Crucible, the waste of life and love is even more lucid, as throngs of innocent people are incarcerated, many even killed. Children are made orphans. Women are made widows. Men are made to live in their guilt for the remainder of their wretched lives. Rebecca Nurse, a saintly woman all her life, is excommunicated and hung. Giles Corey, an old man a bit rough around the edges but kind at heart, and well loved in a begrudging sort of way, is torturously pressed with stones in an attempt to force a confession from him. Even long after the bloodbath has settled, unpleasantness haunts the town. Few participants ever rest in peace, some losing family members to death and illness, others doomed, it seems, to wander in search of employment or contentment.

Such destructive and wasteful judgment can not, and does not, continue forever, although by the time the wounds have been staunched they have left indelible scars. In some cases, the overthrow of the law, or the events that set it into motion, are dramatic and violent displays of false surrender. Dimmesdale confesses his sins at last, before the eyes of God and his beloved congregation. Freed from his guilt at long last, and finally safe from the poison of the physician, he dies in a sort of peace. Proctor uses his last words in a desperate attempt to rally Salem and expose the madness and hypocrisy of the trials. He sends himself to hang, with multiple chances to surrender to the hysteria and save himself. He refuses to condemn others, or to lie about his own sins, but stands at last clean before all. “I have found my honesty, (158)”, he says, finally finding a cause worth confessing, and dying for in the lives of his wife and his neighbors. He goes on to the gallows, but he has made his peace and is, as Dimmesdale, somehow content. Not all shake off the law so furiously, but time, the great healer, brings many of them to break it in their own slow and steady way. They become numb to its decrees and begin to turn against it, and the law in turn falls without support. The townspeople, after a time, cease to see the red A that burns against Hester’s bosom. They explain it away as meaning “A”, for “Able” and begin to appreciate her talents and her strengths. The witch trials swiftly but quietly dissolve, and as the years go by slow amends begin to be made. These are little enough atonement, and pale beside the transgressions they seek to allay, but they are made nonetheless. In its own zealousness, the law had burned too brightly and too ardently, and in the end died away with a bang and a whimper.

The Crucible and the Scarlet Letter are sad stories, drearily hopeful at best, which illustrate the worst of human nature and of the institution of law. They serve, however, as a warning, not an epitaph, and to some extent this warning has been heeded. Today we learn about the Salem Witchcraft Trials in school, refuse to admit spectral evidence to our courts, and pledge never again to let such injustice rule our minds. Whether or not we have been successful, of course, is debatable, but our court system is different for having that particular dark smudge on its past. When we read the Scarlet Letter, we close it having a slightly different opinion on judging others and the good in others. Perhaps it makes us better people, perhaps we continue to go about our lives as before, but the warning stands, and it would be wise to heed it.