Student Question
In The Scarlet Letter, what is the Puritan attitude toward luxury and how do Governor Bellingham and Reverend John Wilson respond?
Quick answer:
Puritans believed in austere and exacting God who has created this earthly plane to test our souls. Couple this with an equally strong conviction that the Devil is a pervasive and active agent who dangles such pleasures before us to win our souls from God and the revulsion of Puritans toward luxury is understandable. Additionally, the Puritans had undergone severe deprivation over the first decade and a half that precedes the novel. To some degree, then, they made a virtue of necessity. Why then can Bellingham and Wilson be such blithe conspicuous consumers? Perhaps the congregation needs the visible representatives of divine power to serve as a reminder for the glories to be had hereafter. Certainly the flock'It becomes abundantly clear that Arthur Dimmesdale is not the only character in the novel who is living a kind of double life. Ostensibly at least, Puritanism eschewed luxury and embraced a simple, plain kind of lifestyle. And yet, as Hester Prynne and Pearl go to and enter Governor Bellingham's house, it is clear that in spite of his society's professed rejection of luxury and indulgence, a taste for the good things life has to offer persists in private behaviour.
Note the description we are given of Governor Bellingham at the beginning of Chapter Eight:
The impression made by his aspect, so rigid and severe, and frostbitten with more than autumnal age, was hardly in keeping with the appliances of worldly enjoyment wherewith he had evidently done his utmost to surround himself.
It is clear that the Reverend Wilson shares this belief as well:
The old clergyman, nurtured at the rich bosom of the English Church, had a long-established and legitimate taste for all good and comfortable things; and however stern he might show himself in the pulpit or in his public reproof of such transgressions as that of Hester Prynne, still, the genial benevolence of his private life had won him warmer affection than was accorded to any of his professional contemporaries.
This professed disavowal of luxury combined with the private embracing of it seems to point at the central hypocrisy of Puritanism, as its proponents certainly do not spare themselves any luxury they can obtain. It also points towards the double life lived by so many characters, and establishes Hester Prynne as being, in some senses, more honest than other characters in the book - she openly confesses and owns up to her "sin" whereas other characters are not so forthright.
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