In his inaugural address, Franklin D. Roosevelt told the American people “The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.” Throughout humanity’s past, one thing has been constant: fear. Everybody has a different fear, whether it be the dark, maybe heights, or even the unknown world around us. One of the clearest examples of this fear is the thoughts and actions about both God and the Devil in Puritan society. In his mid-19th century work, The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne employs both symbolism and the actions in the forest to represents both godliness and devilness, which manifests the idea that the Puritans were confused about the role of divinity in the unknown world. Readers who realize this battle of godliness and evilness throughout the novel may…show more content… Hawthorne expresses this idea by displaying the townsfolk’ thoughts and ideas of the forest is to push the narrative that the people involved in and around it are associated with the devil. Throughout the novel, Hawthorne mimics the thoughts of the people about the forest with the personality of Pearl stating that she is of “wild, heathen Nature of the forest” and is not motivated by “a higher truth” (Gartner). At times Pearl refuses to be a good christian young lady acting like she is truly made from sin, as a result of this, people begin to think of her as being born from the forest. Even some of the magistrates of the town think Pearl is of devilish nature because she is a representation of the adulterous sin from her mother and unknown father (Hawthorne 91). In addition to this, in the later chapters of The Scarlet Letter, Pearl continuously pesters Hester about how she got the scarlet letter; after being
