The narrator’s view of Hester’s crime is as complicated as his view of her persecutors. While observing the unsuitedness of the Puritan patriarchs to pass judgment on Hester’s crime, and commenting on the cruelty and coarseness of the Puritan crowd that gathers before the prison house, the narrator repeatedly refers to Hester’s crime as a sin, or a transgression of basic morality, rather than an infraction against the mores of a particular culture during a particular period.
In contrast to the complicated, internal response of Hawthorne’s narrator and likely Hawthorne himself, the Puritan community responds in a manner that is fully public and only modestly nuanced. This response immediately eclipses the crime and its immediate consequences in the first months following the act of adultery. The reader never learns when or how the crime is exposed, the event that presumably initiates Hester’s confinement in prison, because Hawthorne makes the punishment the novel’s opening scene, before the reader knows the nature of the crime. But the community inflicts a punishment even more devastating to Hester than the official sentence of humiliation and exposure: Her expulsion from human society drives Hester to lawless and nihilistic reveries, and Pearl to sociopathic defiance.
From the novel’s beginning, however, individuals in the community show the compassion that is absent from the magistrates’ sentence. While gathered to witness Hester’s exposure, five matrons, well fed on “the beef and ale of their native [England], with a moral diet not a whit more refined,” expound on the appropriate punishment for Hester. Four of the matrons agree that Hester’s official sentence is too lenient, and advocate branding her with a hot iron or death, the sentence associated with the crime of adultery in both the New England statutes of the 1640s and in the Bible. But one woman, who, like Hester, is young and has a child in her charge, imagines Hester’s humiliation and responds sympathetically, enjoining her companions to silence to protect Hester from hearing their cruel judgment.
This lone voice of sympathy, coming from a spectator who is more nearly a peer to Hester, sharing with her the circumstances of youth and motherhood, seems a fitter judge than the patriarchs who assemble to witness the execution of Hester’s punishment, and who are so removed from Hester in their age, gender, and passionless rigidity. The narrator comments on these men after John Wilson, a clergyman among them, calls to Hester to demand that she reveal Pearl’s father:
But, out of the whole human family, it would not have been easy to select the same number of wise and virtuous persons, who should be less capable of sitting in judgment on an erring woman’s heart, and disentangling its mesh of good and evil, than the sages of rigid aspect towards whom Hester Prynne now turned her face. She seemed conscious, indeed, that whatever sympathy she might expect lay in the larger and warmer heart of the multitude (p. 55).
The narrator inserts throughout the novel observations on the natures of the characters and their actions that mix compassion and insight with an unquestioning conviction that a serious wrong has occurred. The narrator’s view of the Puritan elders is especially apt, for though the patriarchs mitigate Hester’s sentence from the one prescribed by statute, their reasons for doing so relate to her lover’s transgression and the wrong done to her husband, rather than to the circumstances of Hester’s character or actions that might place her crime in a less culpable context. The magistrates seem to judge her solely by her effect on the two men implicated in the adulterous triangle. Accordingly, they spare her from death for two reasons. Hester’s youthful beauty leads them to surmise she was “doubtless strongly tempted to her fall.” In addition, they believe Hester’s husband, the victim with whom the panel of patriarchs is most likely to empathize, is dead, and so the offense against him is perhaps less.
As time passes, the Puritan community proves more inclined to judge Hester by the sum of her actions than are its elders, who have the same prejudices as the community, only “fortified in themselves by an iron framework of reasoning” (p. 134). The disjunction between the organic ability of the community to mediate its view of the crime through appreciation of the criminal’s subsequent acts and the greater intransigence of mostly aged, conservative, and male statesmen of the community is strangely prescient of a recent episode in American history involving President Bill Clinton and an intern. But the passage of time does not diminish, and for Dimmesdale, at least, only exacerbates, the effect in the minds of the characters most intimately affected by the crime.
Dimmesdale is the character most devastated by his role in the crime, which is, of course, that of coadulterer. Dimmesdale has sinned according to his own system of beliefs; to his credit, he does not tailor or dilute his belief system to accommodate what he has done. Dimmesdale’s religiousness is genuine, and while his English heritage and inhibited passion set him apart from the Puritan elders “amongst whom religion and law were almost identical” (p. 43), his religious faith is nonetheless uncompromising concerning the sin he has committed. Understood as a reaction to a violation of faith, rather than law or even morality, Dimmesdale’s response is, even by today’s standards, neither disproportionate nor dated. Laws supposedly reflect social mores, and they change to mirror changing opinions about the inherent wrong in certain behaviors, the threat of a particular behavior to society, and reasonable responses to behaviors deemed worthy of punishment. Religion, reason, and public mores no doubt influence one another, but in ways that are complicated and rarely direct. Whether Dimmesdale’s response to his violation of faith is reasonable is irrelevant; his anguished response is authentic and timeless.
Faith is cause enough for Dimmesdale’s torment, but other factors compound his misery. Although he flagellates himself, he cannot allow himself to borrow another means of atonement from the Catholic faith, namely, confession. When Hester meets him in the forest to divulge Chillingworth’s identity, Dimmesdale justifies his failure to confess his crime:
Of penance I have had enough! Of penitence there has been none! Else, I should long ago have thrown off these garments of mock holiness, and have shown myself to mankind as they will see me at the judgment-seat (p. 159).
Immediately, Dimmesdale contradicts himself by relating his misery to the concealment of his crime:
Happy are you, Hester, that wear the scarlet letter openly on your bosom! Mine burns in secret! Thou little knowest what a relief it is, after the torment of a seven years’ cheat, to look into an eye that recognizes me for what I am! (p. 159).
In this scene, Dimmesdale seems to talk himself into at last confessing his crime. He does so only after delivering the most inspired sermon of his career, the Election Sermon, thus postponing his spiritual salvation so as not to interfere with the climax of his professional career. Dimmesdale’s inner torment derives in part from the knowledge that the confession necessary to purge his soul will dash his professional aspirations.
Like Dimmesdale, Chillingworth conceals his relationship to the adulterous act. Unlike Dimmesdale, who turns his anguish inward upon himself, Chillingworth focuses his misery upon an outward target. Chillingworth determines to prolong his rival Dimmesdale’s agony by ministering to his physical health while insinuating himself into the minister’s interior life, where Dimmesdale seeks to keep his secret buried. But Chillingworth’s efforts to relieve his misery by transferring it to another wear on him in the same way Dimmesdale’s efforts to conceal his relationship to Hester and Pearl destroy the reverend. When Hester confronts Chillingworth to abandon her promise to keep secret his identity as her husband, she observes the ugly transformation effected by his seven years of obsession with finding, then destroying, her coadulterer: “In a word, old Roger Chillingworth was a striking evidence of man’s faculty for transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil’s office” (p. 140). Though Hester has no passionate memories of Chillingworth, her memories from her married life are of a decent man. The fiend that drives Dimmesdale to his death—or hastens Dimmesdale’s death, as Dimmesdale’s health has already deteriorated before he ever encounters Chillingworth—has also driven out the gentle scholar, leaving a man as misshapen morally as he is physically. Chillingworth dies within a year of Dimmesdale’s death, as though only the fiend remained of the old man, and without a victim to feed on, the fiend could no longer survive.
While ruthless in his pursuit of Dimmesdale, Chillingworth is from the outset forgiving of Hester. If nothing else, the old cuckold is perceptive, for he understands his own fault in marrying a woman who would never love him, and who was probably too young to understand fully the meaning of her vows. Like Hester, who tells Dimmesdale that their crime “had a consecration of its own,” Chillingworth sees the crime in the context of its particular facts. Hester’s marriage to an older and deformed man whom she never loved, and his betrayal of her “budding youth into a false and unnatural relation with ... decay” mitigate her wrongdoing and transfer some portion of the blame to him. He tells her, “between thee and me, the scale hangs fairly balanced.” When Chillingworth dies, he leaves his estate to Pearl, as if he also accepts a share of responsibility for Pearl’s circumstances. Chillingworth views the crime in the context of the moral circumstance of each person tarnished by association, and the person’s relation to him. In this context, Pearl is innocent and Hester may be forgiven. Only Dimmesdale has erred against Chillingworth.
The child, Pearl, does not fully understand the circumstance of her birth, but knows well its consequence of isolation. Sensing that she and her mother do not have a choice in their separation from the community, she responds with an angry sociopathy, hurling rocks at other children, mocking Reverend Wilson when Hester visits to implore Governor Bellingham not to take Pearl from her, and tormenting Dimmesdale with her intuitive association between the scarlet letter and his gesture of keeping his hand on his heart. Pearl’s defiance is her lifeblood; she seems to know that to accept the Puritans’ estimation of her mother and herself would be to deny her right to exist. She rejects their estimation as though her life depended upon it—because it does.
Hester’s response to her crime combines the morbid inwardness of Dimmesdale, the intelligent perceptiveness and relativism of Chillingworth, and the defiance of Pearl, along with other reactions of her own, including the sublimation of her misery in art. Further, while Dimmesdale’s and Chillingworth’s responses intensify but do not change qualitatively, Hester’s response to her crime evolves during the seven-year term of the novel. Her embellishment of the scarlet letter with fantastic embroidery, similar to the finery in which she dresses Pearl, and her ornate dress during her exposure on the pillory, show her flouting the Puritan’s censure of her conduct, as though so confident in her own values that she need make no outward concessions to the community’s judgment. The “turmoil,” “anguish,” and “despair” Hester endures during this exposure seem, initially, exclusively related to her public disgrace, rather than to an inward-looking response, such as guilt. During her interview with Chillingworth inside the prison, Hester reveals another aspect of her experience of her crime, when she voices genuine remorse for her trespass against her husband. Initially, then, Hester responds to her adultery as a private matter, with important consequences for those immediately affected by the act and otherwise only to the extent that it inappropriately becomes public.
But Hester’s rearing of Pearl and the bold digression of her thoughts during her long solitude add another dimension to Hester’s view of her crime. Though Hester’s intellectual forays become increasingly subversive, her instruction of Pearl remains conventional. She schools her child in
The New England Primer
and the
Westminster Catechism,
standard fare of the day for school children, and admonishes Pearl for giving voice to the same dark speculation in which Hester engages when Pearl denies having a Heavenly Father (p. 81). Hester wants not only to spare her child the misery brought down on her for her defiance of the community’s social norms. She also fears for the child’s moral health, and endeavors to constrain her child’s spiritual development at the same time she herself internally ventures past the constraints of received moral wisdom. Moreover, the iconoclastic reveries in which Hester indulges reflect acquiescence in her guilt more than active subversiveness; accepting her fallen state frees Hester to question the whole order of society because she accepts the society’s judgment that she can scarcely fall farther. To the extent Hester finds moral truth in her digressions, she sees herself as too sullied to be an instrument of its expression, having
long since recognized the impossibility that any mission of divine and mysterious truth should be confided to a woman stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or even burdened with a life-long sorrow. The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure, and beautiful; and wise, moreover, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy; and showing how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such an end! (p. 215).
The young Hester Prynne on the pillory responds to her circumstance with defiance and shame, which she combines with remorse over the personal dimension of adultery, the betrayal of her husband. By the end of the book, however, Hester has internalized some part of the society’s judgment of her behavior, and views her crime as one of serious moral consequence.
From the novel’s opening, Hester’s response to her crime also has an external component, the exotic letter she has stitched with the same flamboyance she later devotes to Pearl’s costumes. Hester’s needlework gives expression to “a rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic” in her nature. Her beautiful renderings might also constitute an escape for Hester from the shame of her predicament, the dreary isolation of her daily existence, and the plodding literalism of the Puritan society, were Hester not so burdened by her sin. Her needlework