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Law, Crime and Punishment in The Scarlet LetterYounghee ChangThat Hawthorne was an acute intellectual and social historian is by now widely accepted by the scholars. But Hawthorne’s greatest concern with the New England past was, more often than not, focused on its law and the various systems of jurisprudence and punishment. One explanation is that the psychological and biographical circumstances of Hawthorne’s life pulled him to the repeated examination of his own past, which was largely Puritan and included some of his ancestors’ legal persecution of some innocent people. Hawthorne was especially interested in the ‘letter punishment’ of the Puritan society, which eventually led him to writing The Scarlet Letter. In a way, then, the novel is about a conflict between law and the individual, and centering on Hester’s sin, this is inevitably connected to the conflict between an oppressive Puritan law that coerces consent and demand obedience from individuals, and a natural law under which individual desire can flourish into happiness.In terms of these two kinds of laws, the four major characters neatly fall into two campsDimmesdale and Chillingworth on the side of the “iron framework” of legal instrumentalism of the Puritan society and Hester and Pearl on the other side of the natural law which is a basic assumption for human happiness.Through the book, Hawthorne may want to suggest any law that seeks to extract the last ounce of humanity and individuality from the offender represents a transgression far more serious than Hester and Dimmesdale’s. Then Hawthorne’s ultimate purpose of writing The Scarlet Letter may be to introduce what he calls “the forgotten art of gaiety” to his contemporaries.