In "Crime and Punishment" (68), Johnson discusses how the narrator of the novel laments the "criminalization of essentially harmless human actions," ranging from laughing, being an idle Indian, to dancing. (courtesy of Greenwood Press).

"WHAT WAS CRIMINAL IN MASSACHUSETTS BAY?

The narrator of The Scarlet Letter makes a number of observations about the different crimes for which punishment was levied in Puritan times. The major one on which the novel focuses is, of course, adultery, which will be discussed at greater length below. But he also mentions as crimes sluggishness on the part of a servant, lack of dutiful behavior in a child, being a Quaker (or, indeed, holding any religious beliefs considered false by the Puritans), being a witch, wearing ornate dress (if you weren't high society or wealthy), being an idle Indian, joking, laughing, and putting on dramas or singing in public, to name a few. So many pleasurable and joyful activities were criminal acts that, according to the narrator, this 'blackest shade of Puritanism ... so darkened the national visage with it, that all the subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up. We have yet to learn again the forgotten art of gayety"'(218). This criminalization of essentially harmless human actions seemed to go against nature in a very destructive way."