Notes on Chapters 16-24 (Conclusion)
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. NY: Oxford University Press, Oxford
World's Classics, 1998.
Overall themes/questions:
Shifting stance of the narrator: in the end, what is his stance or judgment on the events in
the novel?
Forest as an alternative to Puritan law, a place for right and wrong according one's inner
sense of morality
Is Hester a rebel or does she agree with the Puritan's judgment that she is deeply sinful?
Pathetic fallacy--nature responds to characters' emotional states
Light and dark -- sunshine and shadow -- what do these signify?
Transformation of Pearl from wild child to a fully human member of society
Comparison/contrasts between the 3 scaffold scenes
(Many readers consider chapters 16-19 to be the most memorable part of the novel -- its
emotional core.)
Chapter 16--"A Forest Walk"
p. 182 "…both the minister and she would need the whole wide world to breathe in,
while they talked together" -- why they must meet in the forest
p. 183 "It straggled onward into the mystery of the primeval forest" (Hester enters a
different emotional space, a place where different rules apply)
p. 183, "Mother," said little Pearl, "the sunshine does not love you. It runs away and
hides itself, because it is afraid of something on your bosom…It will not flee from me;
for I war nothing on my bosom yet!" (as they leave the town, does the Puritan code still
apply or is there another reason why the sunshine will not favor Hester?)
p. 184 Sunshine vanishes from Hester
p. 186 -- description of the forest -- "All those giant trees and boulders of granite seemed
intent on making a mystery of the course of this small brook; fearing, perhaps, that with
its never-ceasing loquacity, it should whisper tales out of the heart of the old forest where
it flowed." a small stream "like the voice of a young child that was spending its infancy
without playfulness, and knew not how to be merry among sad acquaintance and events
of somber hue." The description matches the dynamic of the Puritan village which stifles
individual feeling and Pearl's childhood in the midst of these somber influences.
p. 188 view of Dimmesdale, clearly diminished and suffering
Chapter 17--"The Pastor and His Parishioner"
p. 190 speak of inconsequential things at first
p. 191-192 open v. hidden sin "Happy are you, Hester, that wear the scarlet letter openly
on your bosom! Mine burns in secret!"
p. 192 confesses Chillingworth's true identity
p. 194 D" Woman, woman, thou are accountable for this! I cannot forgive thee!"
"Thou shalt forgive me!" cried Hester, flinging herself on the fallen leaves beside him.
"Let God punish! Thou shalt forgive!" Hester refuses to be judged by the standards of
society.
p. 195 H: "What we did had a consecration of its own. We felt it so! We said so to each
other! Hast thou forgotten it?" (One of the most important lines of the book. Hester is
placing the importance of love even beyond God's law--since one of the commandments
forbids adultery. Personal law vs. public law.)
p. 196 living with open sin, Hester has grown stronger as Dimmesdale has grown weaker
p. 197 -- run away?!!
198 "Thou shalt not go alone!"…Then, all was spoken!
Chapter 18--"A Flood of Sunshine"
p. 199 H's bravery to consider this new course: "The scarlet letter was her passport into
regions where other women dared not tread."
p. 200 Dimmesdale's dilemma: "fleeing as an avowed criminal, and remaining as a
hypocrite…"
p. 201 after choosing to flee: "It was the exhilarating effect--upon a prisoner just
escaped from the dungeon of his own heart--of breathing the wild, free atmosphere of an
unredeemed, unchristianized, lawless region."
p. 202-3 H takes off the S. letter. "O exquisite relief! She had not known the weight,
until she felt the freedom!" takes off her cap, lets down her hair: "All at once, as with a
sudden smile of heaven, forth burst the sunshine…" (Why does the sunshine now favor
Hester?)
p. 203 "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...must always create a sunshine…"
p. 204 Pearl, also in sunshine: "now like a real child, now like a child's spirit…" (Pearl,
without formal acknowledgment in society of her paternity, is not fully human, not fully
part of the everyday world.)
p. 204-05 legend of Pearl with the animals and Pearl adorned like the fairies with
flowers
Chapter 19--"The Child at the Brook-side"
p. 206-07 "In her was visible the tie that united them. She had been offered to the world,
these seven years past, as the living hieroglyphic…"
p. 208 Pearl at the other side of the brook" "herself, meanwhile, all glorified with a ray
of sunshine that was attracted thitherward as by a certain sympathy."
Pearl insists her mother put on the Scarlet letter again -- and Hester puts it back on (p.
211) "The forest cannot hide it! The mid-ocean shall take it from my hand, and swallow
it up for ever!"
p. 211 "As if there were a withering spell in the sad letter, her beauty, the warmth and
richness of he womanhood, departed, like fading sunshine; and a gray shadow seemed to
fall across her."
Pearl comes to her: "Now thou art my mother indeed! And I am thy little Pearl!"
p. 212 Pearl kisses the scarlet letter
p. 212-213 Dimmesdale says he will not go back to the village hand in hand with her.
He kisses Pearl and "Pearl broke away from her mother, and, running to the brook,
stooped over it, and bathed her forehead, until the unwelcome kiss was quite washed
off…"
Chapter 20--"The Minister in a Maze"
p. 215 stance of narrator: "Now why the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale considered it so
very fortunate, we hesitate to reveal. Nevertheless, -- to hold nothing back from the
reader, -- it was because of the third day from the present, he was to preach the Election
Sermon…"
As Dimmesdale returns to the forest, he is changed by his encounter with Hester and sees
3 people -- 1. deacon, wants to whispher blasphemies about communion; elderly
woman: wants to tell her there may be no immortality; 3. young girl--wants to corrupt her
purity with poisonous thoughts. Then he thinks to teach Puritan children bad words.
Why does Dimmesdale want to behave in this manner?
p. 221 "Mistress Hibbins, the reputed witch-lady, is said to have been passing by…"
here narrator identifies D's changed outlook on the world with sin
p. 222 "And his encounter with old Mistress Hibbins, if it were a real incident, did but
show his sympathy and fellowship with wicked mortals and the world of perverted
spirits."
p. 223 D. dismisses C.: "I think to need no more of your drugs, my kind physician, good
though they be, and administered by a friendly hand."
Chapter 21-- "The New England Holiday"
Hester's last day of publicly wearing the scarlet letter" "She now, for one last time more,
encountered it freely and voluntarily, in order to convert what had so long been agony
into a kind of triumph. 'Look your last on the scarlet letter and its wearer'--the people's
victim and life-long bond slave, as they fancied her might say to them…" bond slave = 7
year term and Hester has worn the s. letter for 7 years.
p. 228 description of Pearl emphasizes her wildness: "flit with a bird-like
movement…She broke continually into shouts of a wild, inarticulate, and sometimes
piercing music."
p. 232 "Their immediate posterity, the generation next to the early emigrants, wore the
blackest shade of Puritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all the
subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up. We all have yet to learn again the
forgotten art of gayety." (Do you agree with this?)
p. 233 the mariners also associated with the wildness of nature: "But the sea, in those
old times, heaved, swelled, and foamed very much at its own will, or subject only to the
tempestuous wind, with hardly any attempts at regulation by human law."
p. 234-235 Hester learns that C. has booked passage on the same ship as she and
Dimmesdale had planned to flee on
Chapter 22--"The Procession"
p. 239 H. sees D. and he seems incredibly remote: "He, moving proudly past, enveloped
as it were, in the rich music, with the procession of majestic and venerable fathers; he, so
unattainable in his worldly position, and still more so in that far vista of his
unsympathizing thoughts, through which she now beheld him!"
240 Pearl notices the same: "Mother…was that the same minister that kissed me by the
brook?"
H: "We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest."
p. 241-242 Meet Mistress Hibbins to Hester: "Couldst thou surely tell, Hester, whether
he was the same man that encountered thee on the forest-path!"
p. 243-44 Dimmesdale's sermon. His melodious voice. "The complaint of a human
heart, sorrow-laden, perchance guilty, telling its secret, whether of guilt or sorrow, to the
great heart of mankind" -- this is what gives his sermon its power.
p. 244-45 The Indians and the mariners react to Pearl's wildness -- "they gazed
wonderingly and admiringly at Pearl, as if a flake of the sea-foam had taken the shape of
a little maid…"
246-247 (last par. of chapter) emphasis on how low H. is in society in contrast with D's
heightened position
Chapter 23--"The Revelation of the Scarlet Letter"
The final scaffold scene -- contrasts with two earlier scaffold scenes. First few pages
emphasize how much D. is valued by the crowd around him.
p. 250-251 "Were there not the brilliant particles of a halo in the air about his head?"
(contrast with description of Hester in first scaffold scene)
weakness of D. (contrasted with strength in description of Hester in scaffold scene #1)
Wilson, Bellingham, Hester, Pearl, Chillingworth: same cast of characters
p. 252" Belllingham wants to assist D. because he looks so weak: "judging from Mr.
Dimmesdale's aspect that he must otherwise inevitably fall." (using fall in more than one
sense of the word?)
"The earthly faintness was, in their view, only another phase of the minister's celestial
strength; nor would it have seemed a miracle too high to be wrought for one so holy, had
he ascended before their eyes, waxing dimmer and brighter, and fading at last into the
light of heaven" (like Scaffold scene #2, the scarlet A in the sky)
D. calls up Hester and Pearl to stand with him on the scaffold; C. tries to stop him, telling
him not to call up Hester and Pearl: "I can yet save you!" (why would Chillingworth try
to stop this public confession?)
p. 253: Chillingworth on seeing the three on the scaffold: ""Hadst thou sought the whole
earth over…there was n one place so secret,--no high place nor lowly place, where thou
couldst have escaped me,--save on this very scaffold!" (What does C. mean by this?)
p 254 in contrast to the judgmental crowd in scene #1, the crowd were "overflowing with
tearful sympathy"
p. 255 Once again, our narrator goes coy: "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." (so, in the chapter called "The Revelation" the narrator refuses
to tell us what actually is revealed, and instead, reports various rumors of what the crowd
has seen in the final chapter. Why does the narrator do this?)
p. 255: "Roger Chillingworth knelt down beside him, with a blank, dull countenance, out
of which the life seemed to have departed" (and indeed, he dies less than a year after D's
death. What does Hawthorne imply by this?)
p. 256 D. asks Pearl to kiss him:
"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, not 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 all fulfilled."
Hester wonders if they will spend eternity together. Reread penultimate (next to last)
paragraph of chap. 23. What is the stance of the narrator here? What is his attitude
toward their sin?
Chapter 24--"Conclusion"
Various responses to what seen -- H's own penance, letter carved into chest; C's work
through magic and drugs; or "the effect of the ever active tooth of remorse, gnawing form
the inmost heart outwardly"
259--"the reader may choose between these theories"
others say there was no mark and his dying words indicated no guilt
260 -- C: "All his strength and energy--all his vital and intellectual force--seemed at once
to desert him; insomuch that he positively withered up, shriveled away, and almost
vanished from mortal sight, like an uprooted weed that lies wilting in the sun." (like the
weeds that lived outside the prison in chap. 1)
261 when C. dies he leaves his fortune to Pearl
H & P leave -- presumably for Europe
262 H. returns while Pearl stays in England presumably married with a child
263 H. takes up the scarlet letter again of her own free will "Women, more especially,-in the continually recurring trials of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and
sinful passion,--or with the dreary burden of a heart unyielded because unvalued and
unsought,--came to Hester's cottage, demanding why they were so wretched, and what
the remedy!" She assures them that eventually the "whole relation between man and
woman [would be established] on a surer ground of mutual happiness."
She had thought she would be the prophet of this new truth (like Ann Hutchinson) but her
connection with sin made this impossible for her
264 buried along side H., but with a space between: concluded legend; so somber is it,
and relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow:--"On a
field, sable, the letter A, Gules."