Hester, who is known as someone who committed a sin, is forced to walk among the people and stand on the scaffold while wearing the Scarlet Letter on her bosom.
The Scarlet Letter begins with a public punishment scene as well. There is a scene in the Handmaid’s Tale where offred and ofglen are taking a walk alongside the river when they encounter the dead bodies of “sinners” who were executed. The other theme which undergoes in both stories is shame, declaration of guilt and public humiliation, which are fundamental policies of both of these governments. Even the way they talk and the phrases they use are so limited, praised be, may the lord open, and blessed be the fruit, to name a few. For instance, all the maids wear the same clothes, as well as the wives of commanders. On the other hand, we see the community in Gilead where everything is predefined and no one, even the people from the higher social class, cannot disobey. Therefore, she faces punishment, the Scarlet letter, that is her everlasting companion till the day she dies. Hester has listened to her heart and followed her passion, an action which is strictly repressed and illegalized in the Puritan society. As we see, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, everybody is forced to obey their so-called morality, and when one disobeys, they face punitive reactions on the side of the government. As Hovel continues in his book, "Within the system, every individual is trapped within a dense network of the state's governing instruments.themselves legitimated by a flexible but comprehensive ideology.” The same dilemma occurs in both stories. When an ideology dominates a society, the first and foremost danger it brings about is the elimination of diversity and its harsh force to not only invade individuality but to make everyone think and behave the way it wants. Therefore, in this article, in addition to introducing some conventional characteristics of all totalitarian regimes, there has been an effort to touch on some particular features that both Puritans and the radical Christians in Gilead own. However, the most significant similarity between the two regimes in these novels is that they are both religious and based on a different interpretation of the Bible. To examine the political regimes like the Puritans in The Scarlet Letter or the dominant government in Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale, first, we have to confess that what we deal with is not one of the thousands of dictatorships that existed in the human history, but a newborn type of a repressing system based on an ideology, which Vaclav Hovel in his book The Power of the powerless, prefers to call “post-totalitarian.” Being a post-totalitarian regime gives a dominant power specific traits, which all of them possess.
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