On the basis of the eco-criticism, human beings are the component of the nature, and nature is important not for human demands but is vital simply because it is alive. Hawthorne’s thorough description of the four main characters in the novel shows that he made fully use of psychological description and environmental description. Obviously, it is not difficult for us to discover them in The Scarlet Letter. This article discloses the different psychology of Hester, Dimmesdale, Chillingworth. The heroine Hester in The Scarlet Letter is suppressed to hide the true feelings. The Scarlet Letter is created in a social and cultural backdrop, so it is clarifying details of the fact which the author took out of the life of the Puritan past. This novel truly shows the psychological degradation and social degradation relevant with the eco-criticism, which holds that the imbalance of natural environment and social environment will lead to psychological degradation. 

Therefore, we can try to analyze this novel by connecting psychological degradation, social degradation with the eco-criticism. 

1.2 Previous Studies

1.2.1 Previous researches on Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne is a distinguished novelist in the USA. Hawthorne’s works belong to “dark romanticism” (Reynolds, 1988: 524). His writing style is affected by his family circumstance and his own disposition. He was a scion of a noble family. Among his ancestors, there were two generations of key figures in the political and religious government. Hawthorne’s grandfather John Hawthorne was a judge who took part in the disreputable Salem Witch Trials in 1692. The witches were low self-consciousness women who can do the small sorcery. However, in 1692, twenty witches were put to death. It is said that Hawthorne’s family was damned by a witch’s husband and came to die. Maybe it was making its power presence, Hawthorne’s father died in the boat for the yellow fever. His family members, his mother and two sisters moved to his grandparents’. From then on, his mother hardly left her room, and almost had her meal alone. Hawthorne grew up in a lonely way, which had a great influence on him. It was the lonely personality that accomplished Hawthorne’s literature creation. After his father’s death, Hawthorne was apprehensive of the original evil, the radical tendencies of the religion and had an effect on his work. 

Critics have done several researches on Hawthorne’s work. They tended to use the feminist perspective and the historical approach to study Hawthorne’s description of women. Feminist scholars pay much attention to Hester. In Lauren’s eyes, Hester is “the citizen as woman love as a quality of the body that contains the purest light of nature” (1991: 94). From a historical perspective, Hester is the embodiment of self-reliance and responsibility that led to women’s suffrage and reproductive emancipation. Anthony found her literary genealogy among other fallen but redeemed women, both historic and mythic.

Hawthorne’s Contemporaneous Reputation: A Study of Literature Opinion in America and England is the contemporary work to study Hawthorne. Nowadays, Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage and another book, Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Contemporary Reviews (2008) are typical works to analyze Hawthorne based on a critical viewpoint.

In China, there are several papers focusing on the different perspective to analyze the Hawthorne and his work. For instance, On M-F and H-F Relationship in The Scarlet Letter from the Perspective of Eco-feminism; A Research of Characterization in The Scarlet Letter from the Perspective of Appraisal Theory; An Eco-feminist Reading of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. The basic knowledge about puritan, relevant theories and other background information are useful for this thesis.

1.2.2 Previous researches on The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne, as a significant prestigious novelist in America, completed his great work: The Scarlet Letter in 1850. It mainly tells the complex story of Hester, who has a bad marriage and gives birth to a daughter through an affair. After knowing his wife’s disloyalty, her husband used another identity to revenge on her lover. In the book, Hawthorne explores themes of legalism, sin, and guilt.