The Puritans were dissenters from the Anglican Church. The Anglican Church had become corrupt and many of its devout members felt the need to establish purity; hence the Puritans. The Puritans were the vanguard of the republican revolution of 1640 which was directed against the monarch of England. However, the restoration of the monarchy in the mid-17th century brought disillusionment with the state of England, and die-hard Puritans set sail from Old England to the virgin land of America to found their New England. This exodus brought Puritanism to America. Nineteenth-century American writers like Hawthorne and Melville look at the "new" American culture and examine the legacy of Puritanism with skepticism and questioning because in their time the problems and shortcomings of the Puritan dream were recognizable. . Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, when viewed from the world in which it is set, that is, the first Puritan immigrants to America, seems like a story about sin and punishment. But Hawthorne writes rather about Puritanism from a critical point of view. Since he is not writing from the Puritan point of view, quite significantly his protagonist Hester Prynne, who had arrived as part of the first Puritan community comprising only the most ardent Puritans who could make the perilous journey, later “threw away the fragments of a broken chain” and declares that “the law of the world was no law to his mind.” Similarly, Melville's character in Moby Dick, Ishmael, who begins with an intolerant Puritan mentality, shuns the shackles of narrow Puritan subjectivity after coming into close contact with Queequegg, a savage. Hawthorne, in an attempt to understand his situation in... .... middle of paper...... definitively leaves the Puritan world. Melville on the other hand shows Ishmael as more fit to survive than Ahab. Ishmael's survival is a testament to the affirmation of his appreciation for the multitude of the world and acceptance of the "other" as opposed to Ahab's blindness to color and diversity. Puritanism is, therefore, an American heritage; but there is an ambivalent negotiation on the part of authors such as Hawthorne and Melville in whose texts we see partly the acceptance and partly the questioning of that cultural heritage. For this negotiation, while for Hawthorne the experience of marginalization and putting things right (and not of adultery, sin and punishment) is crucial and that the fall is a possibility for the fallen, for Melville it takes the form of 'accommodation of the other. Works citedHawthorne – The Scarlet LetterMelville – Moby Dick