Discuss The Scarlet Letter as a literary response to Puritanism

The scarlet letter Hawthorne, considered along with Melville and Poe as one of the best prose writers of nineteenth-century American literature, fell back with this novel 200 years ago to recreate a moral drama set in the Puritan New England of the first pilgrims.

Direct descendant of the first English settlers and whose ancestors, some, took with excessive zeal the maintenance of the religion, because not in vain several of his great-great grandparents were very skillful when flogging Quakers or burning witches in Salem, Hawthorne it takes its toll on that overwhelming and oppressive atmosphere of moral rigorism so typical of the Puritan mentality.

The story is very simple: Hester Prynne is condemned to the absolute exclusion of the community she belongs to because she committed adultery with someone she does not want to publicly acknowledge and whose daughter Pearl is born from.