Scarlet Letter (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (2 page)

INTRODUCTION

The Scarlet Letter
is not so much about an adulterous affair as about a severe punishment inflicted by the Boston community and the psychological consequences for the central characters. The novel begins not with an adulterous attraction or discovery of the affair, but with the consequence of adultery—with Hester Prynne’s emergence from her prison cell to endure her exposure on the pillory and with glimpses of the other central characters’ private misery, which the novel explores in great depth in subsequent chapters.

To contemporary readers as well as to readers of Hawthorne’s time, the judgments of the Puritan society that brands Hester with the scarlet A, subjects her to an official sentence of public humiliation, and ostracizes her and her child are apt to seem disproportionate to the crime. Yet Hawthorne’s novel remains credible both as a reflection on a particular historical moment and as a portrait of the internal devastation caused by a particular transgression that, in America, at least, might today inspire an ambivalent mixture of censure, titillation, and indifference. That successive women’s movements and our purported sexual liberation and rationality have not rendered The Scarlet Letter irrelevant raises the suspicion that the moral relativism of contemporary times may be overstated, and that the crime behind the red letter might be more, or other than, simply of the flesh.

Several years before the opening scene of
The Scarlet Letter,
while still in England, Hester married a scholarly man many years older than herself. Hester is young, beautiful, and passionate, and the reader first encounters Mr. Prynne through her recollections of him as remote and misshapen, one shoulder higher than the other. The novel never makes explicit her reason for marrying this man, whom she candidly denies having ever loved, but the description of her parents’ genteel poverty supplies a practical explanation. Hester and Mr. Prynne lived together first in Amsterdam, until he decided they should settle together in the New World. He sent his young bride ahead of him, but Mr. Prynne has not arrived. Sometime after her arrival, Hester committed adultery and became pregnant with her lover’s child.

The novel opens with Hester emerging from prison to carry out her sentence. A panel of magistrates “in their great mercy and tenderness of heart,” spares Hester the statutory punishment of death and sentences her instead “to stand only a space of three hours on the platform of the pillory, and then and thereafter, for the remainder of her natural life, to wear a mark of shame on her bosom” (p. 54). The “mark of shame” is the letter A, made from scarlet cloth and fantastically embroidered by Hester. During her exposure, one of the patriarchs who have gathered to oversee Hester’s punishment demands that she reveal the father of the child she clutches to her breast. Hester refuses, and, when the patriarchs urge the respected minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, to entreat her, she meets his eye and vows never to reveal the identity of her lover. At this moment, of course, she is looking at her child’s father, and the minister almost collapses from the tension. After she has endured her three hours on the pillory, a stranger to the community, who had wandered into the crowd during Hester’s punishment, visits her in her prison cell. The stranger is Hester’s husband, but he asks that she not reveal his identity to spare him the humiliation of being known as a cuckold. He also demands that she reveal her lover; again, Hester refuses. The former Mr. Prynne adopts the name Roger Chillingworth and resolves to discover for himself the man who has betrayed him.

The rest of the novel follows a seven-year course that historical events described in the novel date as beginning in 1642 and ending in 1649. During these seven years, Arthur Dimmesdale’s fame as a preacher grows at the same time that his physical and mental health deteriorate. Roger Chillingworth discovers the reverend’s secret, and, passing himself off as a physician, treats Dimmesdale’s physical symptoms while feeding their psychological cause. Hester, through her great skill in needlework and her acts of charity, redeems herself in the community, though she chooses to continue to live in isolation. Hester and Dimmesdale remain apart for all of this time, until Hester and her daughter, Pearl, encounter him at the pillory, where Dimmesdale, in a feverish state of guilt and self-loathing, has gone with the professed intent of exposing his crime, although it is late at night and his attempt to expiate his “crime” goes largely unwitnessed. The symbol of his guilt, however, appears in the sky in the form of a constellation in the shape of the letter A.

After witnessing her former lover’s decline, Hester determines that she will reveal Chillingworth as her husband to Dimmesdale so she can warn the reverend of Chillingworth’s malicious design. She waits for Dimmesdale one day in the forest, where no one will see them. For Hester, their meeting is a release of the passion she has continued to feel for Dimmesdale since the time of their affair. Hester is desperate in this scene to assuage her former lover’s misery, not only out of concern for his well-being, but also because she wants him to accept her and her child into his life. She says of their affair, “What we did had a consecration of its own,” an apparent reference to Pearl that borrows religious terms to describe what Dimmesdale views as an offense against his faith. Dimmesdale’s response is far more equivocal: He initially chastises Hester for having caused him to stray, then blames Chillingworth for his miserable emotional state. Lastly, while he lacks the courage to propose the plan himself, he insinuates his desires to Hester, then passively accedes when she at last expresses the same desire—one that she kept hidden for seven years: that she, Dimmesdale, and Pearl leave Boston to live together as a family. Their happy plans never come off. When Hester confirms that the three of them will sail for Europe after the election-day sermon Dimmesdale will give, she learns that Chillingworth has booked passage aboard the same ship. But the father, mother, and child are never to board that ship together, for, after delivering the Election Sermon, the Reverend Dimmesdale takes Hester and Pearl with him onto the pillory to reveal his crime. Before the crowd, he exposes the stigmata that have broken out on his breast in the shape of the letter A. He then dies with his head resting on the scarlet letter.

Although the mark of Hester’s crime is stitched in red across her breast, emblazoned in stigmata across the breast of her lover, and broadcast across the sky, Hawthorne never names her crime in The
Scarlet Letter.
The novel’s title alludes to, but does not reveal, the letter A, which itself suggests, but does not divulge, the crime of adultery. By the time Roger Chillingworth, concealing his relationship to Hester when he wanders into the crowd during her exposure, inquires of a spectator “wherefore is she here set up to public shame,” the two symbols of Hester’s crime—the scarlet letter A and the baby Pearl have all but revealed its nature. But the scarlet letter remains the fullest articulation of the crime, for Roger Chillingworth interrupts before the spectator has done more than insinuate the transgression that gives rise to the spectacle of public shame.

If The Scarlet Letter
evokes Hester’s crime without naming it, the novel tells almost nothing about Hester and Dimmesdale’s affair. During the reverie that briefly distracts her from the hideous spectacle of which she is the center, Hester recalls in sequence her childhood home, her father and mother, her own youthful likeness, and the early days of her marriage, but in her remembrance she skips over the time from her adulterous encounter with Dimmesdale to her present circumstance, as she stands at the pillory. Possibly Hester and Dimmesdale consorted with initially innocent intentions after one of his sermons, although it is difficult to imagine Hester, even before her fall, as so devoted to Bible studies that she would seek or elicit her minister’s private tutelage. Nothing in the novel, apart from what the reader can glean from the natures of Hester and Dimmesdale, permits the inference that the couple had an enduring affair, although nothing contradicts this possibility, either. But by the time the novel opens, and even more so by its close seven years later, the characters are so transformed that the reader can hardly draw informed conclusions about their earlier selves. Despite the novel’s frequent references to Dimmesdale’s repressed passion, a sexual encounter between Hester and him seems as remote from the events described in the novel as the Puritan penal system is from contemporary mores. In
Studies in Classic American Literature
(see “For Further Reading”), D. H. Lawrence assumed that Hester seduced Dimmesdale, an explanation that renders the act of adultery more plausible, but not any easier to imagine. Depriving his readers of the means of imagining the event that triggers Dimmesdale’s unraveling, Chillingworth’s vendetta, Pearl’s birth, and Hester’s disgrace seems to be a deliberate part of Hawthorne’s artistic design.

The crime that gives the novel its name and preoccupies all of the characters, then, is shrouded as much by the symbolism that overshadows the thing symbolized as by the shame of the characters. Without an account of the criminal act, readers of
The Scarlet Letter
apprehend Hester’s crime through the refracted light of multiple moral perspectives. In that he is Hester’s creator, Hawthorne’s view of Hester’s crime is at least interesting, if not determinative of how readers of his day, or of ours, should respond. The narrator and the Puritan community both overtly pass judgment on Hester’s act, although the former vacillates in the harshness with which he judges her. In addition, each of the three important adult characters—Arthur Dimmesdale, Roger Chillingworth, and Hester Prynne—present a particular response to Hester’s adultery that may inform our own. The fourth important character, Pearl, though a child and only intuitively aware of the crime, offers an additional perspective as well as a real challenge to a response of unmediated censure, for if the Puritans cannot qualify their judgment of Hester’s crime, they cannot acknowledge what Hester calls its “consecration.” Though the perspectives of Hawthorne, the novel’s narrator, the community, and each of the novel’s four main characters say more about these individuals and their Puritan society than about adultery, each perspective contributes to the reader’s multidimensional experience of the novel’s central, unmentionable event.

Hawthorne’s ambivalence toward his Puritan ancestry complicates the attempts to understand his response to Hester Prynne, her act of adultery, and the punishment inflicted on her. In the novel’s introductory section “The Custom-House,” Hawthorne refers to the “stern and black-browed Puritans” who were his forebears: William and John Hathorne, the author’s great-great-great grandfather and great-great-grandfather, who lived in Salem during the mid-1600s. These men were magistrates, and the records of early Massachusetts history, with which Hawthorne was acquainted, contain accounts of each of these men inflicting humiliating and often brutal sentences. The elder Magistrate Hathorne, for example, sentenced a burglar to having his ear lopped off and the letter B branded onto his forehead.

But the notoriety of the Hawthorne forebears derives primarily from their treatment of women. In their roles as magistrates and Puritan patriarchs, the Hathornes had no squeamishness about inflicting physical punishments on women for their religion, sexual behavior, and, most infamously, supposed practice of witchcraft. The reference in “The Custom-House” to the “incident of [William Hathorne’s] hard severity towards a woman” relates to the treatment of a Quaker woman, who was tied half-naked to the back of a cart and flogged ten times each in Boston, Salem, and Dedham, at the honorable William Hathorne’s direction. The
Records of the Salem Quarterly Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts
(Salem, 1914; vol. 4, p. 84) reveals a sentence issued by William Hathorne against an erring woman in November of 1668:

This passage likely influenced Hawthorne’s choice of name for his heroine in
The Scarlet Letter.
William Hathorne’s fifth son, John, added to the notoriety of the family name in his role examining many of those accused of being witches during the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692, a role he never repented even when other magistrates who served on the same panel expressed their remorse. Most of those accused and executed as witches were women. Hawthorne describes his feelings about his Hathorne ancestors with a mix of horror, awe, and kinship, asking that he not be cursed for their deeds, at the same time imagining their disdain for their descendant and noting that “strong traits of their nature have intertwined themselves with mine” (p. 11). Critics generally take the Hawthorne’s addition of a
w
to his ancestral name as evidence of a desire to distance himself from his ancestors; possibly, though, Hawthorne sought to spare the Hathornes the association with his literary career, which he characterized in “The Custom-House” as a source of ignominy.

Hawthorne’s relationship to William and John Hathorne is similar in its ambivalence to that of the narrator of
The Scarlet Letter
to the Puritan patriarchs who impose sentence on Hester Prynne. In describing the Boston governor and the assemblage of elders who preside over the exposure of the scarlet letter, the narrator vacillates between qualified praise and open dissent: