April 12, 2011
Shandong University

• The Scarlet Letter opens with an expectant crowd standing in front of a Boston prison in the early 1640s. When the prison door opens, a young woman named Hester Prynne emerges, with a baby in her arms and a scarlet letter "'A" richly embroidered on her breast. For her crime of adultery, to which both the baby and the letter attest, she must proceed to the scaffold and stand for judgment by her community.

• “A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooded edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.
• The founders of a new colony, whatever
Utopian of human virtues and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion fo the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.”(47)

• Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, appleperu, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But, on the other side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of
June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prosier as he went in, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him. (48)

• Rigidity of New England law: “Meager, indeed, and cold, was the sympathy that a transgressor might look for, from such bystanders at the scaffold. On the other hand, a penalty which, in our days, would infer a degree of mocking infamy and ridicule, might then be invested with almost as stern a dignity as the punishment of death itself.” (50)
• There was, moreover, a boldness and rotundity of speech among these matrons, as most of them seem to be, that would startle us at the present day, whether in respect to its purport or its volume of tone…. ‘At the very least, they should have put the brand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne’s forehead….But she, --- the naughty baggage, --- little will she care what they put upon the bodice of her gown! Why, look you, she may cover it with a brooch, or such like heathenish adornment, and so walk the streets as brave as ever! ”(51)

• The appearance of Hester in public: “…on the threshold of the prison-door, she repelled him, by an action marked with natural dignity and force of character, and stepped into the open air, as if by her own freewill….When the young woman --- the mother of this child --- stood fully revealed before the crowd, it seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the infant closely to her bosom; not so much by an impulse of motherly affection, as that she might thereby conceal a certain token, which was wrought or fastened into her dress….On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A. It was so artistically done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore; and which was of a splendor in accordance with the taste of the age, but greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony ”(52)

• While on the scaffold, Hester remembers her past. In particular, she remembers the face of a
"misshapen" man, "well stricken in years," with the face of a scholar. At this moment, the narrator introduces an aged and misshapen character, who has been living "in bonds" with
"Indian" captors. He asks a bystander why
Hester is on the scaffold. The brief story is told: two years earlier, Hester had preceded her husband to New England. Her husband never arrived. In the meantime, she bore a child; the father of the infant has not come forward. As this stranger stares at Hester, she stares back: a mutual recognition passes between them.

• On the scaffold, Boston's highest clergyman,
John Wilson, and Hester's own pastor, Rev
Dimmesdale, each ask her to reveal the name of her partner in crime. Reverend Dimmesdale makes a particularly powerful address, urging her not to tempt the man to lead a life of sinful hypocrisy by leaving his identity unnamed.
Hester refuses.
• After the ordeal of her public judgment, the misshapen man from the marketplace —her long lost husband —visits her, taking the name
Roger Chillingworth. When she refuses to identify the father of her child, he vows to discover him and take revenge. He makes
Hester swear to keep his identity a secret.

• Now freed, Hester and her baby girl, Pearl, move to a secluded cabin. The narrator explains that “There is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime.” Whether for this reason, or for others, Hester stays in the colony.
She earns a living as a seamstress. Hester has "in her nature a rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic" that shows in her needlework. Although the Puritans' sumptuary laws (which regulate personal expenditure and displays of luxury) restrict ornament, she finds a market for her goods —the ministers and judges of the colony have occasion for pomp and circumstance, which her needlework helps supply.

• She uses her money to help the needy, although they scorn her in return. Hester focuses most of her love, and all of her love of finery, on her daughter, her "pearl of great price." Pearl grows up without the company of other children, a wild child in fabulous clothing.
• Chillingworth has billed himself as a physician, and therefore able to care for Dimmesdale, who is in very poor health. In a rare moment when
Dimmesdale lets his guard down, Chillingworth discovers an open, self-inflicted wound on
Dimmesdale's chest.

• Dimmesdale's health continues to decline, and
Chillingworth's character changes noticeably. He becomes a demon-like presence in Dimmesdale's life.
Hester notices this change in Chillingworth and confronts him. It is suddenly clear that Chillingworth has determined that Dimmesdale is Pearl's father, and that Chillingworth intends to make Dimmesdale's life a living hell. Hester understands the gravity of the situation and decides to tell Dimmesdale who
Chillingworth really is. At first, when Chillingworth first entered the settlement, he had sworn Hester to secrecy about his true identity. Hester decides that, for the sake of Dimmesdale's sanity, she must warn him about Chillingworth's character.

• In a surprise and secret meeting with Arthur
Dimmesdale, Hester reveals her secret, and begs a defeated and angry Dimmesdale for forgiveness. He eventually grants forgiveness, and agrees to leave the colony with Hester and Pearl as soon as possible.
Unfortunately, somehow Chillingworth manages to find out about their secret plan to leave, and books passage on the same boat bound for Europe. In the meantime, Dimmesdale prepares for his final sermon, the Election Sermon given on the day the local officials are sworn into office. He writes and re-writes a dramatic speech which proclaims his sinful nature, which none of his parishioners can understand or accept. Dimmesdale is known as a brilliant and inspirational preacher, and his congregation is convinced of his godliness.

• After the exhausting sermon is over,
Dimmesdale leaves the church and approaches the town scaffold. As he climbs the steps, he comes upon Hester and Pearl standing in the shadows, and pulls them onto the scaffold with him. In that moment, the Reverend Arthur
Dimmesdale bares his chest wound to the congregation, and takes Pearl's hand to confess his fatherhood. He then dies. After this dramatic admission and Dimmesdale's death,
Chillingworth no longer has anything to live for.
He dies shortly thereafter.

• Hester and Pearl go to Europe for many years, and Hester eventually returns without her daughter. No one knows where Pearl is, although Hester is seen sewing extravagant baby clothing that no one in the colony would ever use. In addition, Hester continues to receive letters from a man of great means throughout the rest of her life. She lives a long life, and serves as counselor to many troubled women, as well as a giver of charity. When she dies, Hester is buried next to Dimmesdale's sunken grave under a tombstone that says "On a Field, Sable, the Letter A, Gules."

• “The great black forest ---stern as it showed itself to those who brought the guilt and troubles of the world into its bosom --- became the playmate of the lonely infant, as well as it knew how. Somber as it was, it put on the kindness of its moods to welcome her….A wolf, it is said, --but here the tale has surely lapsed into the omprobable, --came up, and smelt of Pearl’s robe, and offered his savage head to be patted by her hand. The truth seems to be, however, that the mother-forest, and these wild things which it nourished, all recognized a kindred wildness in the human child. (204-205)

• Ironically, it is a novel in which, in terms of action, almost nothing happens. In fact, the story excludes even the representation of the passionate moment which enables the entire novel. It begins at the close of Hester's imprisonment many months after her affair and proceeds through many years to her final acceptance of her place in the community as the wearer of the scarlet letter.

• Hester Prynne: Although The Scarlet Letter is about
Hester Prynne, the book is not so much a consideration of her innate character as it is an examination of the forces that shape her and the transformations those forces effect. We know very little about Hester prior to her affair with Dimmesdale and her resultant public shaming. We read that she married Chillingworth although she did not love him, but we never fully understand why. The early chapters of the book suggest that, prior to her marriage, Hester was a strong-willed and impetuous young woman — she remembers her parents as loving guides who frequently had to restrain her incautious behavior. The fact that she has an affair also suggests that she once had a passionate nature.

• But it is what happens after Hester’s affair that makes her into the woman with whom the reader is familiar. Shamed and alienated from the rest of the community, Hester becomes contemplative. She speculates on human nature, social organization, and larger moral questions. Hester’s tribulations also lead her to be stoic and a freethinker.

• Hester also becomes a kind of compassionate maternal figure as a result of her experiences. Hester moderates her tendency to be rash, for she knows that such behavior could cause her to lose her daughter,
Pearl. Hester is also maternal with respect to society: she cares for the poor and brings them food and clothing. By the novel’s end, Hester has become a protofeminist mother figure to the women of the community. The shame attached to her scarlet letter is long gone. Women recognize that her punishment stemmed in part from the town fathers’ sexism, and they come to Hester seeking shelter from the sexist forces under which they themselves suffer.
Throughout The Scarlet Letter Hester is portrayed as an intelligent, capable, but not necessarily extraordinary woman. It is the extraordinary circumstances shaping her that make her such an important figure .

• “The very law that condemned her—a giant of stern features, but with vigor to support, as well as to annihilate, in his iron arm —had held her up, through the terrible ordeal of her ignominy.”(78)
• What she compelled herself to believe,—what, finally, she reasoned upon, as her motive for continuing a resident of New England, —was half a truth, and half a self-delusion. Here, she said to herself, had been the scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly punishment; and so, perchance, the torture of her daily shame would at length purge her soul, and work out another purity than that which she had lost; more saint-like, because the result of martyrdom.

• Hester’s patience and tolerance:”The poor, as we have already said, whom she sought out to be the objects of her bounty, often reviled the hand that was stretched forth to succor them. Dames of elevated rank, likewise, whose doors she entered in the way of her occupation, were accustomed to distil drops of bitterness into her heart; sometimes through that alchemy of quiet malice, by which women can concoct a subtile poison from ordinary trifles; and sometimes, also, by a coarser expression, that fell upon the sufferer’s defenceless breast like a rough blow upon an ulcerated wound. Hester had schooled herself long and well; she never responded to these attacks, save by a flush of crimson that rose irrepressibly over her pale cheek, and again subsided into the depths of her bosom. She was patient, —a martyr, indeed,—but she forebore to pray for enemies; lest, in spite of her forgiving aspirations, the words of the blessing should stubbornly twist themselves into a curse. “(84-85)

• Arthur Dimmesdale: Like Hester Prynne, he is an individual whose identity owes more to external circumstances than to his innate nature. The reader is told that Dimmesdale was a scholar of some renown at Oxford University. His past suggests that he is probably somewhat aloof, the kind of man who would not have much natural sympathy for ordinary men and women. However, Dimmesdale has an unusually active conscience. The fact that Hester takes all of the blame for their shared sin goads his conscience, and his resultant mental anguish and physical weakness open up his mind and allow him to empathize with others. Consequently, he becomes an eloquent and emotionally powerful speaker and a compassionate leader, and his congregation is able to receive meaningful spiritual guidance from him.

• Ironically, the townspeople do not believe
Dimmesdale’s protestations of sinfulness. Given his background and his penchant for rhetorical speech,
Dimmesdale’s congregation generally interprets his sermons allegorically rather than as expressions of any personal guilt. This drives Dimmesdale to further internalize his guilt and self-punishment and leads to still more deterioration in his physical and spiritual condition. The town’s idolization of him reaches new heights after his Election Day sermon, which is his last.
In his death, Dimmesdale becomes even more of an icon than he was in life. Many believe his confession was a symbolic act, while others believe
Dimmesdale’s fate was an example of divine judgment.

• …”a young clergyman, who had come from one of the great English universities, bringing all the learning of age into our wild forestland. His eloquence and religious fervor had already given the earnest of high eminence in his profession. He was a person of very striking aspect, with a white, lofty, and impending brow, large, brown, melancholy eyes, and a mouth which, unless when he forcibly compressed it, was apt to be tremulous, expressing both nervous sensibility and a vast power of selfrestraint.”

• Notwithstanding his high native gifts and scholar-like attainments, there was an air about this young minister,
--- an apprehensive, a startled, a half-frightened look, -
-- as of a being who felt himself quite astray and at a loss in the pathway of human existence, and could only be at ease in some seclusion of his own.”(66)
• “…I charge thee to speak out the name of the fellowsinner and fellow-sufferer! Be not silent from any mistaken pity and tenderness for him; for, believe me,
Hester, though he were to step down from a high place, and stand there beside thee, on thy pedestal of shame, yet better were it so, than to hide a guilty heart through life. What can thy silence do for him, except it tempt him --- yea, compel him, as it were --- to add hypocrisy to sin?” (67)

• With a convulsive motion he tore away the ministerial band 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 concentred 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. Then, down he sank upon the scaffold! Hester partly raised him, and supported his head against her bosom. Old
Roger Chillingworth knelt down beside him, with a blank, dull countenance, out of which the life seemed to have departed.
• “Thou hast escaped me!” he repeated more than once. “Thou hast escaped me!”
• “May God forgive thee!” said the minister. “Thou, too, hast deeply sinned!”

• He withdrew his dying eyes from the old man, and fixed them on the woman and the child.
• “My little Pearl,” said he feebly,—and there was a sweet and gentle smile over his face, as of a spirit sinking into deep repose; nay, now that the burden was removed, it seemed almost as if he would be sportive with the child, —“dear little
Pearl, wilt thou kiss me now? Thou wouldst not yonder, in the forest! But now thou wilt?”

• Pearl kissed his lips. A spell was broken. The great scene of grief, in which the wild infant bore a part, had developed all her sympathies; and as her tears fell upon her father’s cheek, they were the pledge that she would grow up amid human joy and sorrow, nor for ever do battle with the world, but be a woman in it.
Towards her mother, too, Pearl’s errand as a messenger of anguish was fulfilled.
• “Hester,” said the clergyman, “farewell!”(255-
256)

• As his name suggests, Roger Chillingworth is a man deficient in human warmth. His twisted, stooped, deformed shoulders mirror his distorted soul. From what the reader is told of his early years with Hester, he was a difficult husband. He ignored his wife for much of the time, yet expected her to nourish his soul with affection when he did condescend to spend time with her. Chillingworth’s decision to assume the identity of a “leech,” or doctor, is fitting. Unable to engage in equitable relationships with those around him, he feeds on the vitality of others as a way of energizing his own projects. Chillingworth’s death is a result of the nature of his character. After Dimmesdale dies,
Chillingworth no longer has a victim. Similarly, Dimmesdale’s revelation that he is Pearl’s father removes Hester from the old man’s clutches. Having lost the objects of his revenge, the leech has no choice but to die.

• “He was small in stature, with a furrowed visage, which, as yet, could hardly be termed aged.
There was a remarkable intelligence in his features, as of a person who had so cultivated his mental part that it could not fail to mould the physical to itself, and become manifested by unmistakable tokens.”

• “OLD Roger Chillingworth, throughout life, had been calm in temperament, kindly, though not of warm affections, but ever, and in all his relations with the world, a pure and upright man.
He had begun an investigation, as he imagined, with the severe and equal integrity of a judge, desirous only of truth, even as if the question involved no more than the air-drawn lines and figures of a geometrical problem, instead of human passions, and wrongs inflicted on himself. But, as he proceeded, a terrible fascination, a kind of fierce, though still calm, necessity seized the old man within its gripe, and never set him free again, until he had done all its bidding.”(129)

• He now dug into the poor clergyman’s heart, like a miner searching for gold; or, rather, like a sexton delving into a grave, possibly in quest of a jewel that had been buried on the dead man’s bosom, but likely to find nothing save mortality and corruption. Alas for his own soul, if these were what he sought!”(129)

• But with what a wild look of wonder, joy, and honor!
With what a ghastly rapture, as it were, too mighty to be expressed only by the eye and features, and therefore bursting forth through the whole ugliness of his figure, and making itself even riotously manifest by the extravagant gestures with which he threw up his arms towards the ceiling, and stamped his foot upon the floor! Had a man seen old Roger Chillingworth, at that moment of his ecstasy, he would have had no need to ask how Satan comports himself, when a precious human soul is lost to heaven, and won into his kingdom.
But what distinguished the physician’s ecstasy from Satan’s was the trait of wonder in it!(138)
• He is a demonized victim by his obsession with revenge.

• The Scarlet Letter is essentially a story of crime/sin and punishment. It tells of the
“ignominy” (the loss of name) of a woman who has broken scriptural and statutory law in a community dedicated to the maintenance of the authority of the law.

• the scarlet letter "A" stands as his most potent symbol, around which interpretations of the novel revolve. At one interpretive pole the "A" stands for adultery and sin, and the novel is the story of individual punishment and reconciliation.
At another pole it stands for America and allegory, and the story suggests national sin and its human cost. Yet possibly the most convincing reading, taking account of all others, sees the
"A" as a symbol of ambiguity, the very fact of multiple interpretations and the difficulty of achieving consensus.

• The narrator’s strategy in telling his story us to conceal as much as to reveal. He makes historical allusions that seem significant, but he declines the role of authoritative commentator or interpreter, leaving the reader to speculate on their meaning.
• Eg. The allusion to the death of Governor Winthrop in the second scaffold scene, which takes places seven years after the opening events, sets the date of
Hester’s appearance in the market-place at 1642, little more than a decade after the beginning of the Great
Migration that peopled the Massachusetts Bay colony with settlers.

• “But, one idle and rainy day, it was my fortune to make a discovery of some little interest. Poking and burrowing into the heaped-up rubbish in the corner; unfolding one and another document, and reading the names of vessels that had long ago foundered at sea or rotted at the wharves, and those of merchants, never heard of now…,—I chanced to lay my hand on a small package, carefully done up in a piece of ancient yellow parchment. This envelope had the air of an official record of some period long past, when clerks engrossed their stiff and formal chirography on more substantial materials than at present. There was something about it that quickened an instinctive curiosity, and made me undo the faded red tape, that tied up the package, with the sense that a treasure would here be brought to light. (29-30)

• “But the object that most drew my attention, in the mysterious package, was a certain affair of fine red cloth, much worn and faded. There were traces about it of gold embroidery, which, however, was greatly frayed and defaced; so that none, or very little, of the glitter was left. It had been wrought, as was easy to perceive, with wonderful skill of needlework; and the stitch (as I am assured by ladies conversant with such mysteries) gives evidence of a now forgotten art, not to be recovered even by the process of picking out the threads. This rag of scarlet cloth, —for time, and wear, and a sacrilegious moth, had reduced it to little other than a rag, —on careful examination, assumed the shape of a letter. It was the capital letter A.” (31)

• By adopting the role of a reporter who has limited access to the truth (to the events and to their significance) the narrator distinguishes his function from that of the author of a fiction whose authority over his creation is absolute and godlike.

• “Mr Hawthrone…seeks to excuse Hester
Prynne, a married woman, for loving the Puritan minister, on the ground that she had no love for her husband.” (Orestes Brownson, 1850)
• Similar moralistic critics believed, with differing degrees of certainty, that “Hawthrone” endorsed
Hester’s immorality and challenged the biblical prohibition of adultery.

• Darel Abel believes that “Hawthorne disapproved of
Hester”, and that Hester is to be held morally responsible for her wrongdoings. The reader is expected to love Hester, but not to condone her fault.
• Austin Warren believed that Hawthrone’s ambivalent feelings towards Hester manifested themselves in a tangled relationship in the text between the Victorian commentator, who disapproved of the fallen woman, and the myth-maker who created in Hester a natural creature belonging to the pagan forest. Both are evident in the forest scene where a celebration of
Pearl’s wild freedom is juxtaposed with the moralist’s judgment on the “unredeemed, unchristianized forest”, which, being wild and heathen, was “never subjugated by human law, nor illuminated by higher truth”(p203).

• “Such was the sympathy of Nature --- that wild, heathen Nature of the forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illuminated by higher truth --with the bliss of these two spirits! Love, whether newly born, or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create a sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world.(203)