The Scarlet Letter and Areopagitica
Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter, and John Milton, author of
Areopagitica, share an interest displayed through their literature of law and its affects on society.
In Hawthorne’s novel, the dark Romantic delineates the severity of Puritan law and its
transformation of society into an austere entity. Milton passionately defends the subsequent
virtue that results from various opinions and imaginations as threatened by the censorship laws
enacted by Parliament. Milton’s Areopagitica shows relevance to Hawthorne’s Chapter XXI,
“The New England Holiday,” in The Scarlet Letter through Milton’s ideas of a “a fugitive and
cloistered virtue” and an “artificial Adam,” as well as the hypocrisy of the Roman Catholic
Church.
The townspeople of Boston represented in The Scarlet Letter are congruous with Milton’s
idea of a “cloistered virtue” and an “artificial Adam.” Hawthorne explains that these citizens
have been exposed to both the good and the bad of society, since they “had not been born to an
inheritance of Puritanic gloom. They were Englishmen, whose fathers had lived in the sunny
richness of the Elizabethan epoch” (185). Subsequently, Milton asserts that he “cannot praise a
fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed” because virtue is only worthy of
respect if its beholder has opened it to the world and experienced all there is to know about vice
(1462). The external purity of this virtue serves to mask the inner corruption of it due to its
seclusion from a world offering the fruits of experience. If one’s knowledge is complete on the
subject of evil, however, and he is still able to distinguish truth and morality, then he is in
possession of a true virtue. The townspeople exemplify the opposite of a secluded virtue in that
their forefathers have provided them with the experience of a lively and virtuous society, yet they
settle their lives under the austere Puritanical canopy with no more than a “shadow of an
attempt” to return to their “hereditary taste . . . by bonfires, banquets, pageantries and
processions” (185). They still choose the insipid side of life when they have the ability to
possess a conspicuous and free virtue. Adam had the same opportunity for virtue as the
townspeople of Boston had and chose the same path as them, as well. Milton writes, “when God
gave him [Man] reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing; he had been
else a mere artificial Adam” (1463). He is implying that providence was not responsible for
Adam’s sinful decision, since God entrusted him with the power to make his own decisions.
This makes him a real Adam as opposed to a hypocritical false Adam ruled by divine
intervention rather than personal truth and virtue. Milton asserts that God purposely surrounds
people with tangible temptations that could either lead to sin or virtue and asks, “Why should we
then affect a rigor contrary to the manner of God . . . by abridging or scanting those means . .
.both to the trial of virtue and the exercise of truth?” (1464). God gives people imaginative
minds for a reason, and the censorship laws are thus going against God’s principles. God gave
both Adam and the townspeople the minds to make decisions, and the townspeople’s ancestors
gave them the other half necessary for a pure virtue: the knowledge of both good society and
bad.
The strict Puritan law that pulls Boston down into the depths of austerity is relevant to
Milton’s representation of the hypocrisy of the Roman Catholic Church. Hawthorne describes
the frivolity that Boston lacks in comparison to England when he exclaims that “all such
professors of the several branches of jocularity would have been sternly repressed . . . by the
rigid discipline of law” in Boston (186). In contrast, Hawthorne illustrates England as a “sunny
richness” and “magnificent and joyous” (185). Milton also depicts England as a very forward
society, “of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit” (1466). Not only is England depicted as a
nation of great intellect, but of great spiritual virtue as well in possessing “the favor and the love
of heaven” (1466). However, the censorship laws that benefit the Roman Catholic Church
negate England’s uprightness, and Milton argues that “as our obdurate clergy have with violence
demeaned the matter, we are become hitherto the latest and the backwardest scholars of whom
God offered to have made us the teachers” (1466). Milton views the hypocrisy of the situation in
that the Roman Catholic Church is supposed to be the embodiment of both honorable law and
God, yet it takes steps toward degrading society rather than promoting an ethical advance. Just
as Puritanical Boston is lacking in truth and life due to law, England is being buried into the
depths of degradation by the Roman Catholic Church’s undignified laws. In opposition to the
censorship laws, Milton asserts that even the Bible “ofttimes relates blasphemy not nicely,” and
that if some literature is to be censored, then all literature needs to be censored (1463).
Hypocrisy is seen in this case as well in that the Bible may be more deserving of censorship than
other pieces of literature, yet it is instead revered by the Roman Catholic Church. Milton asserts
as well that “through our forwardness to suppress and our backwardness to recover any
enthralled piece of truth . . . we care not to keep truth separated from truth, which is the fiercest .
. . disunion of all” (1469). He addresses the judgmental aspect of this society that puts more
effort into restraint than development. In Boston, strict Puritan law is extremely denouncing
supported by the harsh punishments given for petty crimes and the gloominess of society itself,
just as English society is now being censored by its law. According to Milton, only God has the
power to limit the ideas that are circulated in society because the law’s opinion “that none must
be heard but whom they like, is the worst and newest opinion of all others, and is the chief cause
why sects and schisms do so much abound” (1470). The law, that is supposed to bind the nation
together, is in reality breaking it apart and dissolving all of its truths and virtues in the form of
various opinions and imaginations, just as Puritanical law has influenced the townspeople to
leave a society gray that has the potential to be vibrant.
Milton is more concerned with the volatile issue of censorship than Hawthorne is with
Puritan law because Milton is actually experiencing the effects of the law, while Hawthorne is
reflecting on the past. Nonetheless, the motif of corrupted and hypocritical law influences both
of the authors’ literature. They both address the idea of experienced people who are exposed to
both the good and the bad of society being less limited in their actions, decisions, and future than
those who only know one side of humanity. This idea raises a universal theme that a wellrounded individual has a greater opportunity for success than one not educated on all aspects of a
situation, thus instigating prejudice in partiality. All humans are entrusted with the ability to
make decisions. When it comes to contemporary issues, well-educated decisions have to be
made constantly dealing with the political, economic, social, and intellectual structures of the
world. In modern society, if different citizens were suppressed from expressing their individual
opinions and beliefs and did not introduce new ideas into society, as the townspeople of Boston
refrained from doing, the world would not be as cultured as it is today.