The Scarlet Letter

“With his own ghostly hand, the obscurely seen, but majestic, figure had imparted to me the scarlet symbol, and the little roll of explanatory manuscript. With his own ghostly voice, he had exhorted me, on the sacred consideration of my filial duty and reverence towards him,—who might reasonably regard himself as my official ancestor,—to bring his moldy and moth-eaten lucubrations before the public.”

Although Hawthorne’s story of how he came up with the idea for The Scarlet Letter is likely embellished (if not entirely fabricated), it does have figurative significance. The narrator’s account of feeling a “filial duty” toward his “official ancestor”—that is, his predecessor at the Custom House—humorously echoes his attitude toward his real ancestors; Hawthorne was ashamed of the role his family had played in events like the Salem witch trials, and (as he explains earlier in the Introduction) he felt obliged to atone for their actions. Implicitly, the novel itself is his way of doing this, with the evolution of the “scarlet symbol” over the course of the narrative reflecting this transformation of shame and guilt into good.

“She hath good skill at her needle, that’s certain […] but did ever a woman, before this brazen hussy, contrive such a way of showing it! Why, gossips, what it is but to laugh in the faces of our godly magistrates, and make a pride out of what they, worthy gentlemen, meant for a punishment?”

Contrary to what one might expect, it’s the women in the crowd who respond most strongly and negatively to Hester’s public punishment. The above passage, for instance, touches on both Hester’s sexual indiscretion and her perceived lack of shame; in embroidering the letter with gold thread, this woman says, Hester is effectively flaunting her sin. Notably, this condemnation centers on Hester’s womanhood: “hussy” is a gendered insult, and needlework is a traditionally female skill. In other words, the speaker appears to view adultery as particularly unforgivable in a woman. The ambiguity of the letter—the fact that it can be interpreted as a symbol of pride—also indicates an important contradiction in Hester’s sentence: The magistrates intend the letter to represent Hester’s sin, but such symbols are inherently open to reinterpretation. The passage therefore foreshadows how the letter’s meaning evolves throughout the novel while also highlighting the inadequacies of the Puritan understanding of complex questions of sin and moral character.

“He looked like the darkly engraved portraits which we see prefixed to old volumes of sermons; and had no more right than one of the portraits would have, to step forth, as he now did, and meddle with a question of human guilt, passion, and anguish.”

The above passage, which refers to Reverend Wilson, encapsulates the novel’s attitude toward questions of sin and punishment. In comparing Wilson to a portrait, the narrator implies that there is ultimately something inhuman about the way he passes judgment on Hester. More specifically, the novel is critical of those who seek to punish sin from a position of supposed moral superiority; the problem isn’t that superiority is itself often questionable but that it’s precisely the shared experience of “human guilt, passion, and anguish” that gives a person the “right” to consider the failings of others. In other words, the novel asks readers to approach questions of guilt from a perspective of shared fallibility.

“She shuddered to believe, yet could not help believing, that [the letter] gave her a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts.”

Hawthorne often describes the letter Hester wears as a source of physical pain that throbs or burns with shame whenever someone rests their eyes on it. In some cases, however, the letter sends an “electric thrill” through Hester in response to the sins of those around her, alerting her to the secret crimes of others. Hester finds this ability disturbing because she doesn’t want to believe that so many apparently respectable members of society are in fact “guilty like herself” (79). Where the general narrative is concerned, however, this awareness of shared sin fosters a sense of empathy; in fact, with its focus on characters’ inner struggles, the novel provides just this kind of “sympathetic knowledge” to its readers.

“This outward mutability indicated, and did not more than fairly express, the various properties of her inner life. Her nature appeared to possess depth, too, as well as variety; but—or else Hester’s fears deceived her—it lacked reference and adaptation to the world into which she was born. The child could not be made amenable to rules.”

The idea that Pearl is somehow at odds with “the world into which she was born” is key to understanding her character and role in the novel. As this passage notes, Pearl doesn’t seem to care about the laws or norms that define human society; she’s not disobedient, but she follows an “order” of her own “amidst which the point of variety and arrangement was difficult or impossible to be discovered” (81). This strikes Salem (and even Hester herself) as threatening: If Pearl exists outside a social order the Puritans see as divinely inspired, the logical conclusion is that she is evil. The novel doesn’t share this view of Pearl, but it does depict her as otherworldly, associating her with both the natural world and mythical creatures like fairies and mermaids. The reason for this becomes clear by the time Dimmesdale dies; up until this point, Pearl has in fact been “inhuman” in the sense that she has existed as a symbol of her parents’ guilt and not as a character in her own right.

“At that epoch of pristine simplicity, however, matters of even slighter public interest, and of far less intrinsic weight than the welfare of Hester and her child, were strangely mixed up with the deliberations of legislators and acts of state.”

The above passage gets to the heart of the Puritan system of justice and its implications for private life. Questions of whether Hester’s past sexual transgressions make her a morally unfit mother, or of whether Pearl’s supposed wickedness makes her a “stumbling block” to her mother’s repentance, may not seem like issues requiring Governor Bellingham’s personal attention. The Puritans, however, are “a people amongst whom religion and law are almost identical” (47). As a result, the law doesn’t distinguish between personal moral failings and crimes that threaten the general welfare; all are considered equally worthy of public interest and condemnation.

“[Dimmesdale] was often observed, on any alarm or other sudden accident, to put his hand over his heart with first a flush and then a paleness, indicative of pain.”

The narrator’s frequent references to Dimmesdale’s heart problems foreshadow the eventual revelation that he was Hester’s lover. The location of his illness mirrors the placement of the letter on Hester’s bodice, and it recalls Chillingworth’s earlier warning that he will recognize Hester’s lover by “read[ing] [the letter] on his heart” (69). The figurative notion of the heart as the location of a person’s inner self is, in Dimmesdale’s case, very literal. However, as is often the case in the novel, even this clear sign of Dimmesdale’s guilt is liable to be misread. Because the community at large holds Dimmesdale in such high esteem, they assume his sickness is caused by “his too earnest devotion to study, his scrupulous fulfillment of parochial duty, and, more than all, by the fasts and vigils of which he made frequent practice” (106).

“The minister well knew—subtle, but remorseful hypocrite that he was—the light in which his vague confession would be viewed. He had striven to put a cheat upon himself by making the avowal of a guilty conscience, but had gained only one other sin, and a self-acknowledged shame, without the momentary relief of being self-deceived. He had spoken the very truth, and transformed it into the veriest falsehood.”

Like his nighttime ascension of the scaffold, the confessions Dimmesdale makes in his sermons illustrate the double bind that torments him. The religious code that Dimmesdale lives by demands the public broadcasting of a person’s private self to prove they’re free from sin. Dimmesdale, however, lacks the courage to make a full confession, and the half-confessions he falls back on only make the situation worse by deepening the gap between how he is perceived and who he feels he is; his listeners actually “reverence him the more” (126) for his apparent willingness to draw attention to his own sinfulness. Of course, that Dimmesdale can make such confessions speaks to the fact that the relationship between public and private identity is far more complex than the Puritans believe or allow; Dimmesdale’s public declaration that he is a sinner is simultaneously an expression of and a mask for his private sense of himself.

“[T]here stood the minister, with his hand over his heart; and Hester Prynne, with the embroidered letter glimmering on her bosom; and little Pearl, herself a symbol, and the connecting link between those two. They stood in the noon of that strange and solemn splendor, as if it were the light that is to reveal all secrets, and the daybreak that shall unite all who belong to one another.”

Because he mounts the scaffold under the cover of nightfall, Dimmesdale’s attempt at penance is self-defeating. He feels he must openly atone for his sins, but he knows that this action will not expose them to the public. Notably, however, the darkness that conceals Dimmesdale’s presence on the scaffold (and, symbolically, his guilt) is momentarily lifted by a passing meteor. In this sense, Dimmesdale’s actions do constitute a kind of confession, if only to the reader; as the narrator describes it, the meteor’s light clarifies the relationship between Dimmesdale, Hester, and Pearl. The moment is also a turning point for Dimmesdale, who notices Chillingworth by the light of the meteor and recognizes his ill will for the first time. Even more importantly, the meteor symbolizes a moment of self-reckoning: Dimmesdale sees a red letter A in the sky, which the narrator describes as the product of Dimmesdale’s own conscience (in the sense that he interprets it as a sign of condemnation). Dimmesdale, in other words, is here brought face-to-face with his own guilt and hypocrisy.

“In all seasons of calamity, indeed, whether general or of individuals, the outcast of society at once found her place.”

The above sentence captures the paradox of the role Hester comes to occupy in Salem. Although the letter and what it represents bar her from polite society, the very fact that she is an outcast allows her to move freely amongst the poor, the sick, and others in distress. This freedom is partly practical in nature: Because Hester is already “fallen,” she doesn’t need to worry about how interacting with these people might hurt her reputation. However, it also speaks to the novel’s ideas about the nature of empathy. Hester’s “sin”—and the suffering she experiences as a result of it—make her compassionate and forgiving in a way supposedly purer people are not: “Her breast, with its badge of shame, was but the softer pillow for the head that needed one” (141).

“Standing alone in the world,—alone, as to any dependence on society, and with little Pearl to be guided and protected,—alone, and hopeless of retrieving her position, even had she not scorned to consider it desirable,—she cast away the fragments of a broken chain. The world’s law was no law for her mind.”

In cutting her off from society, Hester’s punishment has the ironic side effect of freeing her to pursue thoughts “which our forefathers, had they known of [them], would have held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the scarlet letter” (143). The narrator doesn’t specify what these speculations entail, but he goes on to mention Hester in association with Ann Hutchinson, a 17th-century spiritual reformer who argued that outward behavior could not be understood to say anything about the inner state of a person’s soul. The narrator also notes that Hester spends much of her time thinking critically about women’s position in society and how that impacts relationships between men and women. It seems likely that Hester is questioning the justice of punishing women for sexual transgressions like adultery and perhaps even critiquing marriage as an institution.

“In a word, old Roger Chillingworth was a striking evidence of man’s faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil’s office.”

Chillingworth’s character arc illustrates the dangers of approaching guilt with an eye toward punishment rather than forgiveness. In prying into Dimmesdale’s secrets, Chillingworth initially believes himself to be pursuing justice: “He had begun an investigation, as he imagined, with the severe and equal integrity of a judge, desirous only of truth” (113). However, the process of “punishing” Dimmesdale has a corrupting influence on Chillingworth’s own character, as he takes sadistic pleasure in Dimmesdale’s suffering and guilt. Chillingworth even ends up facilitating the immorality he’s supposedly punishing by working to ensure that Dimmesdale never atones for what he has done. This tendency is also present in the Puritan justice system, which primarily seeks to make an example of “sinners” rather than to rehabilitate them.

“My old faith, long forgotten, comes back to me, and explains all that we do, and all we suffer. By thy first step awry, thou didst plant the germ of evil; but, since that moment, it has all been a dark necessity […] It is our fate. Let the black flower blossom as it may!”

When Hester confronts Chillingworth about his treatment of Dimmesdale, he claims that his actions are the inevitable result of Hester’s own sin. This is clearly self-serving: If Chillingworth has no control over his actions, then he would seem to bear little or no responsibility for the revenge he’s exacting. Nevertheless, his words do echo the novel’s broader depiction of the past as a kind of destiny. In referencing his “faith,” Chillingworth even draws on the Christian framework the narrator tends to use in his discussions of the past; here, Hester’s “first step awry” constitutes a form of original sin tainting and dictating everything that has followed.

“[S]he thought of those long-past days, in a distant land, when he used to emerge at eventide from the seclusion of his study, and sit down in the fire-light of their home, and in the light of her nuptial smile. He needed to bask himself in that smile, he said, in order that the chill of so many lonely hours among his books might be taken off the scholar’s heart.”

Hester’s reassessment of her relationship with Chillingworth is in many ways a critique of 19th-century gender roles. At the time Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter, wives were expected to do what Hester describes above: provide a calm, domestic environment where their husbands could seek refuge from the demands of their work. Hester, however, has come to believe that it was unfair of Chillingworth to relegate her to this supportive role, or to expect that she would find happiness simply in catering to his needs. Having now experienced love and passion in her relationship with Dimmesdale, Hester realizes how incomplete her life with Chillingworth truly was. At the same time, Hester arguably continues to fill much the same role in her interactions with Dimmesdale. When the couple meet in the forest, for instance, their conversation centers almost entirely on Dimmesdale’s needs and feelings. This is perhaps one reason why Hester believes women’s position in society needs reforming: Even in the relatively fulfilling relationship she enjoys with Dimmesdale, she isn’t on equal footing.

“With sudden and desperate tenderness, she threw her arms around him, and pressed his head against her bosom; little caring though his cheek rested on the scarlet letter.”

When Dimmesdale grows angry with Hester for her part in his predicament, Hester responds with a maternal gesture, drawing him to her as if he were a child in need of soothing. The “tenderness” she displays is very much in keeping with women’s traditional role as nurturers in Western society, but the appearance of it in this scene is nevertheless worth noting. Hawthorne associates this positive vision of femininity not only with a fallen woman, but with her feelings for her lover. In this way, the passage lends credence to Hester’s later defense of her love for Dimmesdale as pure and ennobling.

“‘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!’

‘Never, never!’ whispered she. ‘What we did had a consecration of its own. We felt it so! We said so to each other!’”

The comparison Dimmesdale draws between his (and Hester’s) actions and those of Chillingworth brings together two of the novel’s central themes: personal identity and the nature of sin. Hester goes so far as to say that her relationship with Dimmesdale was in its own way sacred—presumably because it was motivated by love. Dimmesdale isn’t quite willing to endorse this view (though he apparently did in the past), but he does suggest that certain kinds of sin are worse than others. More specifically, he criticizes Chillingworth for seeking vengeance in a way that “violates the sanctity of a human heart”—that is, for prying into and meddling with Dimmesdale’s innermost thoughts and feelings. This echoes the value the novel places on the inner world and self; for the narrator, this private sphere is so sacred that intruding into it is one of the worst sins possible.

“The flowers appeared to know it; and one and another whispered, as she passed, ‘Adorn thyself with me, thou beautiful child, adorn thyself with me!’”

Pearl’s affinity for the natural world is especially apparent in the chapters that take place in the forest. In this passage, for instance, the woods become an Eden-like environment where nature offers itself up for Pearl’s use, and where everything exists in harmony and peace: “A wolf, it is said, […] came up, and smelt of Pearl’s robe, and offered his savage head to be patted by her hand” (178). Overall, the episode places Pearl’s relationship to human society in a new context; she is unbound by law and convention not because she’s evil but because she belongs to a world where those things are meaningless.

“Hopefully, but a moment ago, as Hester had spoken of drowning it in the deep sea, there was a sense of inevitable doom upon her, as she thus received back this deadly symbol from the hand of fate.”

For a moment in the forest Hester believes she can make a clean break with her past; she plans to leave Salem with Dimmesdale and removes the scarlet letter as a sign that she will no longer allow her past sins to define her. However, when Pearl returns and demands that her mother refasten the letter to her dress, it becomes clear that Hester isn’t free to simply set the past aside; in the above passage, the narrator even describes her as fated to take the letter back. This is clearly a bittersweet realization for Hester, but it reflects that her past experiences are integral components of the person she has become. Most obviously, she can’t “undo” the letter without also denying Pearl and her own identity as a mother.

“Satan, that afternoon, had surely led the poor young girl away from her mother’s side, and thrown her into the pathway of this sorely tempted, or—shall we not rather say?—this lost and desperate man.”

As soon as Dimmesdale decides to leave Salem with Hester, he struggles to suppress several cruel, petty, or profane impulses. Here, for instance, he is tempted to corrupt the “stainless” love a young woman in his congregation feels for him, presumably by suggesting that her feelings are sexual or trying to plant some sexual idea in her head: “the arch-fiend whispered him to condense into small compass and drop into her tender bosom a germ of evil that would be sure to blossom darkly soon” (191). Despite this reference to the “arch-fiend,” the episode downplays the idea that Dimmesdale’s behavior stems from the “sin” of choosing to leave. The narrator revises his initial description of Dimmesdale as “tempted” to merely “lost and desperate”—two more morally neutral terms. This suggests that Dimmesdale’s behavior is not so much the product of corruption as it is his belief that he is corrupted; deep down, Dimmesdale feels that he has violated his religious convictions, so he begins to act the way he believes a sinful man would. As is often the case in the novel, the focus is therefore not on whether a character’s action is “truly” right or wrong, but on whether it aligns with their sense of who they are and what they value.

“The fathers and founders of the commonwealth—the statesman, the priest, and the soldier—deemed it a duty then to assume the outward state and majesty, which, in accordance with antique style, was looked upon as the proper garb of public or social eminence.”

In The Scarlet Letter, clothing often exists at the intersection of public and private identity. The clothes characters wear are to some extent a matter of personal choice and preference, but they also reflect wider cultural ideas about gender, class, religion, and so on. This social function of clothing is especially clear during official events like the Election Day parade; those who hold positions of power in the army, government, or church consciously dress in a way they believe will communicate their authority to spectators.

“With a convulsive motion he tore away the ministerial brand 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.”

Dimmesdale’s public confession marks the climax of the novel, but the moment itself is in some ways anticlimactic. After repeatedly hinting that Dimmesdale has some sort of mark on his chest, the narrator refuses to describe it, saying it would be “irreverent” to do so. This, however, is one of the clearest indications of the value the novel locates in its characters’ inner worlds. What matters to the narrator is not the external sign of Dimmesdale’s guilt but Dimmesdale’s own understanding of his confession as a moment of spiritual “victory” and redemption.

“After many days, when time sufficed for the people to arrange their thoughts in reference to the foregoing scene, there was more than one account of what had been witnessed on the scaffold.”

The fact that a supposedly straightforward sign of Dimmesdale’s guilt—the branded letter on his chest—sparks multiple interpretations speaks to the inherent ambiguity of symbols like the scarlet letter, and (more generally) to the self a person presents to the world. Some of those present in the crowd are so certain of Dimmesdale’s goodness that they don’t remember seeing the mark at all and view the entire episode as yet another sign of his saintliness: “After exhausting life in his efforts for mankind’s spiritual good, he had made the manner of his death a parable, in order to impress on his admirers the mighty and mournful lesson, that, in the view of Infinite Purity, we are sinners all alike” (224). Even those who agree the letter was present can’t come to a consensus on its significance: some believe Dimmesdale made the mark himself, some believe Chillingworth conjured it through black magic, and some believe a higher power (presumably God) inscribed it. These explanations all have very different implications when it comes to interpreting Dimmesdale’s inner character; if he made the mark himself, for instance, it would suggest he felt remorse and guilt, whereas a mark made by God might be a judgment on an unrepentant sinner.

“None knew—nor ever learned, with the fulness of perfect certainty—whether the elf-child had gone thus untimely to a maiden grave; or whether her wild, rich nature had been softened and subdued, and made capable of a woman’s gentle happiness.”

The conclusion strongly implies that Pearl goes on to marry and have children, noting that after returning to Salem, Hester often received letters from Europe and was once “seen embroidering a baby-garment, with such a lavish richness of golden fancy as would have raised a public tumult, had any infant, thus apparelled, been shown to our sombre-hued community” (226-27). Nevertheless, the rumor that Pearl died young is significant. Figuratively speaking, the change Pearl undergoes after Dimmesdale’s death is so dramatic that it does constitute a kind of death; Pearl goes from being a symbol to being a human, which in Hawthorne’s novel means learning to live in a society and adopt (to some extent) its laws and norms.