Religion in The Scarlet Letter and Life of Pi Compared

Introduction: Religion as a Literary Theme

Religion features prominently as a theme in global literature, and in fact literature is rooted in religious and cultural traditions, including the ancient literatures of the Middle East and Mesopotamia. Modern literature sometimes presumes a pro-religious worldview, but occasionally authors offer scathing critiques of the way religion is used for mind control or for social, political, and economic domination. Generally, the evolution of literature shows that as the role of religion in society changed, so too did the role of religion in literature. Literature since the modern era, including work by Nathaniel Hawthorne, often offers scathing critiques of religion, whereas postmodern literature allows religion to play a more complex role in shaping individual identity.

In Canadian author Yann Martel's novel Life of Pi, religion is portrayed as a personal choice rather than a cultural institution. By contrast, the nineteenth-century work by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne shows how religion serves mainly as a patriarchal institution that does more harm than good. Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter heavily criticizes the political, social, and psychological roles of religion in a patriarchal society, whereas Martel's Life of Pi presents religion as a more subjective phenomenon. The differences between these two authors' treatment of the theme of religion reveal an important cultural shift between the modern and postmodern eras.

Religion as Oppression in The Scarlet Letter

In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, the author shows how religion becomes a tool of social oppression and political control. The story takes place in the seventeenth century, during the peak of Puritanism in the New England colonies. The protagonist, Hester Prynne, has been sentenced by the church-state — Puritan New England was essentially a theocracy — to wear a scarlet letter "A" to publicly shame her for the crime of adultery. As a result, Hester is shunned by the community and her daughter has no friends. Her husband has abandoned her, illustrating how women had few rights to divorce even when they needed one. The man she had the affair with was a man of the cloth, Reverend Dimmesdale, who ultimately dies of grief and guilt. Nobody wins when religion takes control of the state and presumes to legislate morality.

Using plot, characterization, and setting, Hawthorne shows that religious authorities are hypocritical — especially fundamentalists, as the Puritans in the novel do not practice what they preach, most notably Dimmesdale, the very priest who carries on the romantic affair with Hester Prynne. The absence of compassionate, genuinely Christian approaches to social order also registers as hypocritical. Hawthorne portrays Reverend Wilson and other religious community members as rigid and self-righteous, in contrast to the more honest protagonist and her lover, both of whom acknowledge that they have transgressed their community's social norms.

Hawthorne's Critique of Puritanism and Patriarchy

There is no benefit in ostracizing Hester Prynne other than to use her as a moral scapegoat for controlling the rest of the community and pressuring people into conforming to Puritanical values. Despite the negative portrayal of Puritanism in the text, however, some of Hawthorne's contemporaries read him as an apologist for Puritanism (Mills). In this reading, Hawthorne was trying to re-purify Puritanism by exposing its faults — such as the unnecessary shaming and witch-hunting of women. Likewise, Hawthorne "recovered what Puritanism professed but seldom practiced: the spirit of piety, humility, and tragedy in the face of the inscrutable ways of God" (Mills 78). Hawthorne distinctly uses the art form of literature to parody Puritanism and expose its deep-rooted hypocrisies.

For Hawthorne, religion is problematic not only because it is hypocritical, but also because it plays too large a role in politics, society, and the law. A scarlet letter was a badge of shame — a means of publicly degrading a community member as a form of legal punishment for the "crime" of adultery. Adultery is no longer a crime in the twenty-first century, but it took generations of feminist activism to demonstrate how fusing morality, religion, politics, and law can be dangerous. The Scarlet Letter illustrates this danger compellingly. The time period in which Hawthorne wrote was on the cusp of major social, political, and economic changes — changes that help explain how he could launch a critique not just of religion but also of religion's patriarchal character.

Hawthorne deliberately chooses to write not about his own time period but about the era of early colonial American history when the Puritans still controlled political and social life. Reverend John Wilson, for instance, was based on a real historical figure (Gilligan). Religion and law were "almost identical" in Puritan times, and based on the outcome and tone of The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne clearly reveals this to be a problematic coupling (Gilligan 26).

Religion as Personal Faith in Life of Pi

In the twenty-first-century novel Life of Pi, Yann Martel shows how societal attitudes toward religion may have changed since Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter. The protagonist, Pi Patel, is trapped on a lifeboat with a small menagerie of zoo animals that he and his father had been transporting. One of those animals is a man-eating tiger, who kills the other animals one by one until finally only Pi and the tiger — whom he names Richard Parker — remain. Life of Pi is not as overtly about religion as The Scarlet Letter, but Pi's inner spirituality is central to his character. The novel shows that religion can be a psychological comfort in times of extreme stress, far more than it functions as a political or social institution.

Rather than critiquing religion and religious authority as Hawthorne does, Martel decentralizes religion from the broader human experience. Some critics have even claimed that Martel's book is a defense of theism (Stratton 5). Pi Patel is Indian, and his religious beliefs and worldviews differ radically from those of Puritan New England. The religious structures and institutions of India play a very different role in the lives of individuals than the Puritanical institutions of colonial America did.

In Life of Pi, Pi's faith in God allows him to maintain strength and courage even in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. The book therefore attempts not to prove God's existence, but "to justify belief in Him" by people like Pi who choose to believe (Stratton 6). This approach to religion diverges considerably from that of Puritan times, when belief in God was practically enforceable by law; any sign of nonconformity to the Christian model of religious authority could result in banishment from the community, public shaming, or even execution. Religion in Puritan times was about social control, as Hawthorne demonstrates through The Scarlet Letter.

Just as Hawthorne uses the literary device of setting strategically to achieve social commentary, Martel does the same. The setting of Life of Pi is almost like a fantasy world — a parallel universe that exists only in the mind of Pi Patel. As magical realism, Life of Pi removes the reader from the mundane world to allow a clearer view of the meaning of personal values like faith and courage. Had Martel set the novel in an ordinary twenty-first-century world, the effect would have been completely different, just as Hawthorne could never have set The Scarlet Letter in mid-nineteenth-century New England without losing his metaphorical distance. The characterization and tone would both have changed. Setting is integral to the way both novels achieve their goals of portraying the universal theme of religion.

Conclusion: A Cultural Shift in Literature's View of Religion

Taken together, these two novels demonstrate how literature can convey strikingly different facets of the same subject. The Scarlet Letter and Life of Pi both show how concepts of religion change over time, even within the same broad cultural context. When Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter, Puritanism was already becoming less central to the social and legal fabric of America than it had been during the period the novel depicts. Nevertheless, Hawthorne would not have written the book if vestiges of that Puritanical past were not still visible in the social norms and legal codes of his own day. He uses the extreme example of the Puritan past to reveal the dangers of an overly religious society.

By 2001, when Martel published his novel, religion had even less bearing on the legislation of morality — which is why Life of Pi approaches religion so differently. Hawthorne does not address the connection between religion and personal spirituality, just as Martel does not address the connection between religion and political oppression. Each author instead focuses on the dimension of religion most visible and most urgent in his own historical moment, and in doing so, both illuminate the shifting role of religion in literature across the modern and postmodern eras.

Works Cited

Cole, Stewart. "Believing in Tigers: Anthropomorphism and Incredulity in Yann Martel's Life of Pi." SCL. Vol. 29, No. 2, 2004.

Gilligan, Carol. "A Moonlight Visibility." In Gerard Fromm (Ed.) A Spirit that Impels. Karnac, 2013.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. 1850. Retrieved online:

Martel, Yann. Life of Pi. Knopf, 2001.

Mills, Barriss. "Hawthorne and Puritanism." The New England Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 1, 1948, pp. 78–102.

Stephens, Gregory. "Feeding Tiger, Finding God: Science, Religion, and 'the Better Story' in Life of Pi." Intertext, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2010, pp. 41–59.

Stratton, Florence. "'Hollow at the Core': Deconstructing Yann Martel's Life of Pi." SCL/ÉLC, Vol. 29, No. 2, 2004. Retrieved online: https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/SCL/article/view/12746/13690