The Puritans were dissidents from the Anglican Church. The Anglican Church had become corrupt and the need to establish purity was felt by many of its devout members; hence the Puritans. The Puritans were at the forefront of the republican revolution of the 1640s directed against the monarch of England. However, the restoration of the monarchy in the mid-17th century caused disillusionment with the state of England and Puritan Puritans left Old England for the virgin lands of America to establish their New England. England. This exodus brought Puritanism to America. Nineteenth-century American writers like Hawthorne and Melville looked at the "new" American culture and examined 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, seen from the world in which it is set, that is, the first Puritan immigrants to America, seems to be a story of sin and punishment. But Hawthorne instead writes about Puritanism from a critical point of view. Because he does not write from a Puritan perspective, his protagonist Hester Prynne, who was part of the early Puritan community that included only the most ardent Puritans capable of confronting the dangerous journey, later "rejected 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 mindset, avoids the shackles of a narrow-minded Puritan subjectivity after becoming close to Queequegg, a savage. Hawthorne, in trying to understand his own situation in .... .... middle of paper ...... definitely leaves the Puritan world. Melville, on the other hand, shows that Ishmael is better placed to survive than Ahab. Ishmael's survival is a testimony to the affirmation of his appreciation of the multitude of the world and his acceptance of "the other", in the face of Ahab's blindness to color and diversity. . Puritanism is therefore an American heritage; but there is an ambivalent negotiation on the part of authors like Hawthorne and Melville, in whose texts we see part acceptance and part questioning of this cultural heritage. For this negotiation, while for Hawthorne it is the experience of marginalization and sidelining (and not of adultery, sin and punishment) that is crucial and that the fall is a possibility for the one who is fallen, for Melville it takes the form of an accommodation of others.Works citedHawthorne's – The Scarlet LetterMelville's – Moby Dick