No Name Village

The moment:

Page 13

"The frightened villagers, who depended on one another to maintain the real, went to my aunt to show her a personal, physical representation of the break she had made in the "roundness". Misallying couples snapped off the future, which was the be embodied in true offspring. The villagers punished her for acting as if she could have a private life, secret and apart from them."

This moment was chosen because it sheds light on the complexity of villager's motives to raid the aunt's home. The pregancy is seen as something more than an isolated moral infraction contained within one person (a la Hester Prynne), but rather as an act against the village itself. The villagers, in fear, seem to feel they are raiding out of self defense. The calculated nature of the raid suggests this as well; amidst all the chaos, there remains some conformity to protocol, and the villagers sob only in anticipation of future hunger pangs. They know that despite their rectifying actions, this doesn't change the fact that there will be another mouth to feed. Uncertainty presses itself upon this village, and the very poor of rural China feel that the only way to have a chance at survival is to dissolve all notions of individuality for the sake of community. The issue with the pregnancy is not one of sexuality, but of compromised lineage. It seems that the aunt had compromised the future.

Yet, in resurrecting the aunt, the narrator considers that maybe the aunt wasn't trying to have a separate life at all. Maybe she was being raped, and knowing that drama like that would shake an already fragile community, she put herself second and "did as she was told" (page 6). Throughout her pregnancy and birth she refused to identify the father, again putting community and others before herself. Yet class has determined the severity of the aunt's punishment, the famine times enhancing the group mentality and turning mistake into crime (page 13). The village, jaded by hunger and uncertainty, created a rift in their community that came back to hurt them. After giving birth, the aunt refused to leave her baby in the mud in exchange for the outcast table because she realized the cost of destroying people for the sake of survival. In an act mirroring her own ostracism, she rejected the village, forgetting it completely as she lie on her back becoming "...one of the stars, a bright dot in blackness." Yet where the village raid was coldly methodological, the aunt has malice in her heart, and chooses to taint the village well in her final, and only, act of retribution.

Question:

What does is the story suggesting about the state of the village, which is vigilant about maintaining order, when it is clear that some find death a more welcoming alternative?

Edit: on revisiting The Scarlet Letter, I am questioning my statement that the aunt's situation is very different from Hester Prynne's.