The Scarlet Letter
A classic like
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter
“perpetrates bad morals (The Church
Review),” takes on the themes of pride, sin and vengeance with a burning
passion when Hester:
“Yonder woman … was
the wife of a certain learned man, English by birth, but who had long ago dwelt
in Amsterdam,”
was publicly
branded as an adulterer, the people around town began to think of her as a
figure of evil and that she symbolizes all that is wrong in the world:
“But the point which drew all eyes, and, as it were,
transfigured the wearer—so that both men and women who had been familiarly
acquainted with Hester Prynne were now impressed as if they beheld her for the
first time—was that SCARLET LETTER, so fantastically embroidered and
illuminated upon her bosom.”
Hester
Prynne's adultery causes her alienation from the Puritan society in which she
lives. After the term of her confinement ends, she moves into a remote,
secluded cottage on the outskirts of town; because of this seclusion from
society, the Puritans regard her with much curiosity and suspicion:
"Children...would creep nigh enough to behold her
plying her needle at the cottage window... and discerning the scarlet letter on
her breast, would scamper off with a strange, contagious fear."
There
is a catch, however; her husband has been missing for years. Hester is sent to
prison, where she gives birth and calls the child Pearl—A born outcast of the
infantile world,” for she is her mother's only treasure.
As
her punishment, Hester is brought into the marketplace and is forced to wear a Scarlet
Letter “A” upon her breast, which she proudly embroiders with gold thread.
Hester is satisfied, and ready to lead a quiet life with Pearl, her child, as a seamstress as she had
before, but her composure leads us to wonder:
Who is the child's father, and how will he cope with his
guilt?
And when the clever husband returns, shall the father
survive his venomous wrath?
Arthur
Dimmesdale “a real existence on earth,” Hester’s partner in adultery, is a minister,
whom the people calls:
"A true priest, a true religionist, with the
reverential sentiment largely developed, and an order of mind that impelled
itself powerfully along the track of creed"
The experience of
Hester and Dimmesdale recalls the story of Adam and Eve because, in both cases,
sin results in expulsion and suffering but it also results in knowledge. For
Hester, the scarlet letter functions as "her passport into regions where
other women dared not tread," leading her to "speculate" about
her society and herself more "boldly" than anyone else in New England. As for Dimmesdale, the "cheating
minister," his sin gives him:
"Sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood
of mankind, so that his chest vibrate in unison with theirs."
Prynne and Dimmesdale
infringe the seventh commandment which says “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”
On the contrary, Hester believes in the sanctity of the love relationship
between her and Dimmendale as she says:
“What we did … had a consecration of its own. We felt it
so; we said so to each other.”
It is also viewed
by the puritan community as "Able, So strong was Hester Prynne with a
woman's strength," The letter A is to be precise, also becomes "the
cross on a nun's bosom" In keeping with her status as a sister of Mercy,
Hester's dark , oriental beauty also undergoes a change:
"It was a sad transformation, too, that her rich and
luxuriant hair had been cut off.”
Hester is
transformed from a sinful woman into an “Angelic Sister of Mercy” and from a
dark, voluptuous oriental woman into a nun who deliberately suppresses her
youth and beauty.
Why did Hester
Prynne keep secrets that ended up hurting everyone? Hester can atone for her sin
of adultery, but every day that she keeps the secret of her lover, and the true
identity of Roger Chillingworth a secret she is committing a sin.
“Take heed how thou deniest to him—who, perchance, hath
not the courage to grasp it for himself---the bitter, but wholesome, cup that
is now presented to thy lips!”
Another theme is
the extreme legalism of the Puritans; rejected Hester spent her life mostly in
solitude, and wouldn't go to church and cries:
“There is one worse than even the polluted priest … That
old man’s revenge has been blacker than my sin. He has violated, in cold blood,
the sanctity of a human heart. Thou and I, Hester, never did so.”
Now the question
comes in the mind, would it not have been better to have his sin revealed?
Then, the minister is given another chance to redeem himself but he cowers yet
again when Hester and Pearl stand with him Pearl asks: “Wilt thou stand here with mother
and me, tomorrow noontide?”
Wild
conclusion conclude, Hester Prynne's offense against society occurred seven
years earlier, but she remains punished for it. Hester learned to forgive herself
for her adultery, but society continues to scorn her for it. (One might
remember Jean Valjean's permanent identity as criminal after a single minor
crime in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables.)
Hawthrone seems ready to assert, at times the converse of Christ’s words:
“If ye were blind,
ye should have no sin.”
All
in all novel “created an allegorical view of life upon which early Puritan
society was based (Yvor Winters).”
