The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

On my recent trip to Guadalajara for the Thanksgiving holiday, I read for the second time most of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo on the plane ride down. I finished it at the hotel, which left me with nothing to read on the plane home. The Guadalajara airport had a small bookshop. Nearly all the books were in Spanish. A very small, English language literature section offered only a handful of titles, nearly all of them novels in the public domain bound in gift-edition decorative hardback covers. I wasn’t interested in any of the Jane Austen or Bronte sisters. I considered The Scarlet Letter, put it back, but then rethought again while walking away from the bookstore, so I went back and bought it.

Like Jane Austen’s novels, and Jane Eyre, I had read The Scarlet Letter long ago. I only recently read Wuthering Heights. I believe The Scarlet Letter was a high school assignment. I also remember reading The House of the Seven Gables and enjoying that more. But re-reading The Scarlet Letter now, it didn’t seem completely familiar to me. Of course I remembered the basic story; everyone knows The Scarlet Letter even if they haven’t read it. But there were details I had forgotten, or more likely missed the first time. The novel had bored me as a teenager and I probably skimmed. There’s not much plot and little mystery. At this reading I found it old-fashioned but remarkably interesting.

This edition incudes a long, related, preface, that I’m sure I hadn’t read before, called, “The Custom-House”. This is a telling by Hawthorne, in his own voice, of how he came across the story of Hester Prynne. For three years, he says, he worked in the Customs House in Salem, the office of the Federal Government that inspects, regulates, and collects taxes on imports and exports coming in and out of the harbor. It’s a political appointment, so Hawthorne, a Democrat, was appointed by the Polk administration in 1846 just after he published the collection of stories called Mosses from the Old Manse. Then he lost his position in 1849 when Zachary Taylor was elected, a Whig. He describes at length the other men working at the Custom House, not a busy place as most of the shipping business had moved away from Salem to Boston or New York or elsewhere. He recollects on his own life: his Puritan ancestors, and, I was charmed to see, his friendships with the Transcendentalist figures that would not have meant anything special to me in high school, years before I became a Unitarian minister.

“After my fellowship of toil and impracticable schemes, with the dreamy brethren of Brook Farm; after living for three years within the subtile influence of an intellect like Emerson’s; after those wild, free days on the Assabeth [a river west of Boston], indulging fantastic speculations beside our fire of fallen boughs, with Ellery Channing; after talking with Thoreau about pine-trees and Indian relics, in his hermitage at Walden…” (pp. 30-31).

Eventually, Hawthorne gets to the point of the Introduction. He finds a packet of papers stored away in an attic of the Custom House. “I chanced to lay my hand on a small package, carefully done up in a piece of ancient yellow parchment” (p. 35). These are the hundred year-old papers belonging to a previous official of the Custom House named Jonathan Pue. Mixed up with business records there are also personal notes recording the (at that time) hundred year-old story of Hester Prynne. Hawthorne even finds, included in the package: “This rag of scarlet cloth, –for time and wear, and a sacrilegious moth, had reduced it to little other than a rag,–on careful examination, assumed the shape of a letter. It was the capital letter A” (p. 37).

Hawthorne begins to meditate on the story, and when he loses his job due to the election, writes it up. In the edition I read, the story proper begins on p. 54.

Unlike a modern novel, the story contains very little action. Hawthorne writes long descriptive and philosophical passages. There are only a handful of actual scenes in the entire novel, and the first few scenes are expository. I kept waiting for the story to begin. We start with an introduction to Hester Prynne. She emerges from prison with the scarlet A attached to her dress. Interestingly, nowhere in the novel does Hawthorne explicitly say that the A stands for adultery. There’s no ambiguity about the meaning, but the reader must supply the word for themselves.

Hester is made to stand on a scaffold, showing her shame to the public, for three hours. The same scaffold setting appears twice more in the novel at crucial points in the middle and in the final scene. And then, she is condemned to wear the scarlet letter for the rest of her life as a “living sermon against sin” (p. 70). She holds her baby in her arms, three or four months old. On the scaffold she must listen to scolding sermons against her by her pastor, Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale and his mentor, Rev. John Wilson. They attempt to coax Hester into revealing the name of the baby’s father, but she refuses. We’re also introduced to a man in the crowd, recently come into the village from the wilderness where he had been living with the natives. From his conversation with another man in the crowd we learn that Hester had been born in England and married there to an older man. He had sent her ahead to New England some three or four years earlier but had never come after her. No one knows whether he may be at the bottom of the sea, or elsewhere. That Hester now has a young child but no husband makes her sin obvious.

Hester completes her public humiliation and is returned temporarily to prison. The man who had spent time with the natives comes to her to offer medical help and it’s revealed that he is Hester’s husband. Hester won’t tell him the name of her lover, either, but the man determines he will discover him on his own. He asks Hester to keep his identity secret and says he will go by the name Roger Chillingworth.

Hester sets up an isolated household outside of town. She supports herself and her daughter, Pearl, by doing needlework, her skill putting her in demand for the ceremonial clothes of the clergy and political leaders. Pearl grows up to be an independent and free-spirited child, with an air of magic about her. Roger Chillingworth attaches himself to Rev. Dimmesdale; the two men even take up lodging together in the same boarding house. Rev. Dimmesdale suffers from heart pain. Chillingworth, as a physician, and having learned medicine from the natives, treats him. But in truth, Chillingworth has divined that Rev. Dimmesdale is the child’s father, the man who cuckolded him, and while pretending to befriend him finds ways to torment him.

Here, for a time, the novel becomes Arthur Dimmesdale’s story. He’s torn between his secret sin and knowing that if he revealed it he would no longer be able to act as the respected and effective minister he is to his congregation. One night he wanders out to the town square and stands on the scaffold where Hester had stood years earlier. One by one, Rev. John Wilson and then Hester and Pearl, and finally Roger Chillingworth come by, each having attended at the death bed of John Winthrop. A meteor streaks across the sky, and in its glow against the clouds Dimmesdale sees a letter A, meant for him, he supposes. But then a villager comes by, remarks that he, too, has seen the A, but interprets it as standing for Angel, in token of the great man who had died that evening.

Hester Prynne’s station in the village improves as her original sin loses its shock and Hester becomes known as a caring presence. Some even begin to interpret her letter A as standing for “Able”. But Dimmesdale’s health continues to fail. While walking on a beach with Pearl, Hester encounters Roger Chillingworth and realizes that he has learned the truth and that Chillingworth is enacting his revenge. Hester determines to save Dimmesdale. She contrives to meet him in the woods as Dimmesdale is returning from a visit to the Apostle Eliot (a real-life missionary to the natives). She tells Dimmesdale that she and he, and little Pearl, now aged seven, can leave Boston on a ship bound for Europe. Together they can leave their past and shame, and Roger Chillingworth’s unhealthy influence, and begin again as a family. They agree.

The final scene is at the New England holiday called Election Day. Dimmesdale gives the Election Day sermon in his church, never better, and then walks through the crowd toward the festival. Arrangements have been made for passage on an outward bound boat, but Roger Chillingworth has heard of their plans and booked a berth for himself with Dimmesdale, his “friend”. When Dimmesdale reaches the scaffold he calls out to Hester and Pearl and asks them to help him up to the scaffold and join him there, where at last he will reveal his long hidden shame. He shouts out to all the gathered people, including his fellow clergy and magistrates, and then, “With a convulsive motion he tore away the ministerial band from before his breast. It was revealed! But it were irreverent to describe that revelation. For an instant the gaze of the horror-stricken multitude was concentrated on the ghastly miracle; while the minister stood with a flush of triumph in his face, as one who, in the crisis of acutest pain, had won a victory” (p. 277).

And then he sinks to the scaffold and dies.

“Most of the spectators testified to having seen, on the breast of the unhappy minister, a SCARLET LETTER–the very semblance of that worn by Hester Prynne–imprinted in the flesh” (p. 279). Roger Chillingworth dies himself within the year. He leaves his estate to Pearl, who becomes “the richest heiress of her day, in the New World” (p. 282). Hester and Pearl disappear for some time, traveling the world. Years later, Hester alone returns to her hermitage in Boston, where she reapplies the letter to her dress. On her death she is buried beside Arthur Dimmesdale with one tombstone for both graves, “On a field, sable, the letter A. gules” (p. 286) (meaning a red letter A on a black background). The gravesite, one more pleasing connection to Unitarian Universalism for me, is “in that burial-ground beside which King’s Chapel has since been built” (p. 285). (Founded in 1686 as an Anglican church, King’s Chapel became Unitarian in 1787.)

Arthur Dimmesdale, with his secret shame, fares more poorly than does Hester with her public shame. After the original punishment, Hester and the village moves on. She lives independently, partly shunned by society, but also in her own way accepted and even valued. Dimmesdale is self-punished by his guilt, and further punished by his recognition of his cowardice in not revealing himself. Whether the scarlet letter he wears is physical, as it seems to be when he exposes himself at the end of the novel, or a fantasy, his moral reckoning takes physical toll on his heart. It’s sad that although the novel is entirely about the consequences of sex, nowhere in the novel is there any recollection of the attraction that brought Hester and Rev. Dimmesdale together. No happy memory. And in the one tender scene they have together in the forest where they agree to go away together, it’s not a romantic bond that binds them together, but a shared need for a practical resolution to a seven-year-old problem.

One wonders, immediately after her sentence, why Hester doesn’t simply move away from Boston and abandon the letter, an obvious solution that Hawthorne raises but elides unsatisfactorily. He claims that the magnitude of the event causes Hester to feel rooted to the spot where it happened, as a person feels rooted to the place of their birth.

That Hester takes charge of her own person marks her out as somewhat of a proto-feminist. Remember that although the novel takes place in the 1640s (John Winthrop dies in 1649, in the seventh year of the action of the novel) Hawthorne is writing it in 1849 surrounded by emancipated women like Margaret Fuller. Hester’s only sin is to have sex with a man she isn’t married to, a sin she shares equally with the man, of course, and is somewhat understandable as her husband appears to have abandoned her and may actually be dead for all anyone knows. After that, her life is exemplary, as a mother, as a worker, as a helpful member of society. Unlike the evil Roger Chillingworth and the weak Rev. Dimmesdale, Hester is strong and principled, bearing up under society’s condemnation and betraying neither her lover nor husband. And it is Hester who conceives the plan to save Dimmesdale when he comes close to death, for his sake being willing at last to take the option of uprooting herself that she was unwilling to do seven years earlier. In her final days, back in Boston, Hester becomes a sympathetic counselor to women suffering from the social injustices plaguing their sex. Hawthorne writes:

“Hester comforted and counseled them, as best she might. She assured them, too, of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in heaven’s own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness” (p. 285).