Scarlet Letter Lecture 3
The Individual and Society
Introduction
• In the British Museum, a bronze medal of the
Dutch theologian, Erasmus (1466-1536);
a portrait of Erasmus in profile is on the front of
the medal
• On the reverse, the smiling bust of Terminus,
the Roman god of boundaries, and the words
• “Concedo nulli” –
I yield to no one
• Erasmus kept the figurine of the god Terminus on
his desk
Wilhelm Richard Wagner (1813-1883)
German Composer
Respecting boundaries was not Wagner’s thing.
Transgression he took in his stride – stealing other
men’s wives when he needed them, spending other
people’s money without worrying much about
paying it back –
while his artistic ambitions knew no bounds.
There is something awe-inspiring about
his productivity under hostile conditions, the way,
though living on the breadline,
he turned out masterpieces…
Central Concern in relation to
The Individual and Society
• Radical, unconventional outsider, and outcast;
Hester Prynne’s rebellious autonomy;
Her intellectual independence and passionate desire
Radical thought and sexual intimacy
and
• Limits and Boundaries - of Puritan Society
• And ironies: Dissenting from the Dissenters—
Hester Prynne as a Puritan heretic
• The clash between Individual and Society
• Parallels with other unconventional characters
• Ways in which Hester Prynne is presented;
such as through the use of suggestive language
Narrative Techniques
Narrative Point of View and Methods
• Narrator’s implicit symbolic advocacy,
• Also more overt advocacy, and musings
• Narrative interjections [to ‘point-of-view’
Hester’s mind] on the part of the narrator
• Narrator’s abstracted interjections heighten
our sense of Hester’s sustained independence;
• Presents different versions of the same event
Features of Style
Choice and form of words e.g. notable use of latinisms
e.g. contagious, condemnation, conjuration, retribution
• Anachronistic diction
• Use of Verbal Patterns e.g. repeated use of ‘tremulous’
‘an autobiographical impulse’
It was Dimmesdale’s ‘genuine impulse to adore
the truth’
• Imagery and Symbolism e.g. the wild rose bush;
Characters as tropes: Pearl symbolizes wild, lawless
energy ; Light and Darkness
• Irony
Narrator-Reader Relationship
• Narrator strives to stand in some true relation
with his audience
• Fictionalizing his reader as
• kind and apprehensive, though not the closest
friend
• Without such a reader-narrator relationship
• Thoughts are frozen and utterance benumbed
(Extracted from the ‘Custom-House’ chapter)
Hester in Disgrace and Shame
First four chapters focus on Hester’s disgrace;
Chapter 1
• Narrator directs our attention to the door
of Boston’s prison;
• Crime exists ‘whatever utopia of human virtue’
• Opening scene presented - sets the stage for the
entrance of all the main characters;
• Sets the tone for the narrative
• A tale of human frailty and sorrow
• The narrator himself implicitly presents
himself as having abdicated a patriarchal
authoritative posture;
• The narrator’s rhetorical strategies
awaken reader expectations as well as
reader sympathies
Opening Sentence
Structure and Meaning
A throng of bearded men,
in sad-coloured garments
and
gray, steeple-crowned hats,
intermixed with women,
some wearing hoods,
and
others bareheaded,
was assembled
in front of a wooden edifice,
the door of which was heavily timbered with oak,
and
studded with iron spikes
The nature of this society;
Effective use of Language
• An event is anticipated and human actors, but the
work of the sentence is done by colours and
textures
• arranged in a series of descriptive phrases
• The men are seen as beards; and as dressed in
grey;
• Connotations of this adjective?
• Connoting somber and sad hues;
• leading to a passive action: “was assembled”
Point of View
Sentence Focus; Reader Attention
What we do see
• A dark and heavy door having the attributes of a
weapon
• “studded with iron spikes”
• The door is presented as the most aggressive
actor;
• Its spikes are aimed at Society
• Symbolical Significance? Symbolizing
“the early severity of the Puritan character.”
Multiple other points of view
of Puritan Women Characters
• Such malefactresses as this Hester Prynne
• At the very least, they should have put the
brand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne’s
forehead.
• This woman has brought shame
upon us all, and ought to die.
• Attitude suggestive - if they had power
themselves, their response – more punitive
Point of View and Diction
• The young woman was tall, with a figure of
perfect elegance, on a large scale. She had dark
and abundant hair
• Characterized by a certain state of dignity and
grace
• But the point which drew all eyes, was that
SCARLET LETTER, so fantastically embroidered
and illuminated on her bosom.
• ‘It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the
ordinary relations of humanity, and inclosing her
in a sphere by herself.’
Hester’s Disgrace
• ‘Knowing well her part,
she ascended a flight of wooden steps, and was
thus displayed
to the surrounding multitude.’ Chapter 3 p52
• Hester presented - a figure of pride and strength;
• Astounds and infuriates the crowd; Why?
• Puritan Society – blinded by their morality;
• Ch 2 Narrator observes how they contrast
favourably with later society having ‘grown
corrupt enough to smile, instead of shuddering”
at a person’s guilt and shame.’
Chapter 3 p53
Method: Counterfactual Contexts
Had there been a Papist among the crowd of
Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful
young woman, so picturesque in her attire and
mien, and with the infant at her bosom, an object
to remind him of the Divine Maternity, which so
many illustrious painters have vied with one
another to represent; something which should
remind him, indeed, but only by contrast, of that
sacred image of sinless motherhood, whose infant
was to redeem the world.
At this point
• The narrator has established a broad mixture
of sympathies
• Feminism, nature, youth, the body, and
imaginative life
• Opposed to patriarchal and Puritanical
oppression
What of presentation of Pearl
in relation to Hester?
• Pearl is presented as Hester’s
hidden nature;
• She symbolically mirrors the lawless and
impetuous rages constrained in her mother
Hester released into the Community
Chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8
• After her ordeal on the scaffold,
• Hester is free to leave the colony;
• However, chooses to remain in the
community, taking up residence in an
abandoned cottage
Chapter 5
Hester and her Needle p73
Hester Prynne, therefore, did not flee. On the outskirts of
the town, within the verge of the peninsula, but not in
close vicinity to any other habitation, there was a small
thatched cottage. Its comparative remoteness put it out
of the sphere of that social activity which already marked
the habits of the emigrants.
In this little, lonesome dwelling, with some slender
means, she possessed, and by the license of the
magistrates, who still kept an inquisitorial watch over her,
Hester established herself, with her infant child.
Commentary
• Critical significance of location of cottage
between town and wilderness,
• Physically isolated away from the community
• Symbolically suggestive of her outcast status
vis-à-vis society;
• The Scaffold Scene in Chapter 1?
Chapter 6
Pearl
Narrative Point of View; and Ironic Juxtaposition
• Notes Hester’s fellow community members
• “Man had marked this woman’s sin by a scarlet
letter, which had such potent and disastrous
efficacy that no human sympathy could reach her,
save it were sinful like herself”
• “God, as a direct consequence of the sin which
man thus punished, had given her a lovely
child…to be finally blessed in heaven.”
Chapter 8
The Elf-Child and the Minister
Significance of Pearl’s response to her religious
interrogation by the Minister
• The offspring of a radical thinker
• Symbolically an externalization of Hester
• Similar to the blooming wild rose by the prison
symbolical of Anne Hutcheson,
alluded to in Chapter 1
• Suggestively links Hester to other women who
philosophically / reflectively opposed the strict
controls of Puritan society
Hester as a Sexual Outlaw
Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were in
desert places, where she roamed freely as the wild
Indian in his woods. For years past she had looked
from this estranged point of view at human
institutions, whatever priests or legislators had
established; criticizing all with hardly more
reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical
band, the judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the
fireside, or the church. The tendency of her fate and
fortunes had been set free. The scarlet letter was
her passport into regions where other women
dared not tread.
Represented as an ‘Indian’
• Hester escapes the social control and surveillance of
the community
• She has, at least temporarily, access to the forest
• Not the demonized forest of the Puritans
• But the “mother-forest” of nature rather than social
custom
• As a stranger she is able to see the arbitrary nature of
signs;
• As the fallen woman like the prostitute to whom she is
linked,
• She can see first hand all of its hypocrisy.
The course of her life
Returns and Resumes
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 surer ground of mutual happiness.
• Here we see her awareness of the recalcitrant
reality of human nature and relationships
• And the need for reconstructing society.