The Scarlet letter

(1850)

Set in Boston in the 1640s, the novel describes how the town’s rigidly Puritan community punished an attractive young woman named Hester Prynne for committing adultery and for giving birth to an illegitimate daughter named Pearl. Hester’s much-older husband had sent her from Europe to America with plans to join her later; when he, however, did not appear after a long time, he was presumed dead, and Hester secretly became involved with a young and highly respected local minister, Arthur Dimmesdale. Although the tormented preacher cannot make himself admit his affair with Hester publicly, Hester herself is willing to keep his secret, even though she must bear the public badge of her adultery in the form of a large scarlet letter A sewn onto her clothing. When her old husband (passing himself off as a doctor named Roger Chillingsworth) unexpectedly and secretly appears on the scene, he soon suspects Dimmesdale’s guilt. Swearing Hester to silence about his identity, Chillingsworth befriends Dimmesdale and begins a long process of psychological torture—a process that eventually leads not only to Dimmesdale’s public confession and sudden death but also to a brief but meaningful connection with Hester and with Pearl, who earlier had withheld her affection until he admitted his sin.

The Scarlet Letter is universally regarded not only as Hawthorne’s masterpiece, but as one of the most important novels in the history of American literature. The book has never gone out of print since its very first publication, and its status as a significant work of art was recognized almost immediately. Even the relatively few early critics who disliked the book (because of its alleged immorality, historical inaccuracy, and use of personal satire in the introductory “Custom-House” section) nevertheless paid it the compliment of serious attention, and most of Hawthorne’s initial audience was impressed (as have been most subsequent readers) by the profound moral issues the book raised, by its shrewd ethical and psychological insights, and by its memorable characters, skillful symbolism, and suspenseful plot. With the publication of The Scarlet Letter, American literature had at last come of age, and the book was perhaps even more warmly greeted in Britain than it had already been received in the United States.

The novel opens with a long introductory section titled “The Custom-House”—a section added at the suggestion of Hawthorne’s publisher, who thought that the novel was otherwise too short. Based in part on Hawthorne’s own experiences working in the Custom House in Salem, Massachusetts, this section has always been one of the most controversial portions of the work. Many early reviewers thought that Hawthorne had used the introduction mainly to take satirical revenge on his personal political enemies, whom he blamed for the loss of his job as a customs offi cer. Other readers, meanwhile, have considered the introduction an unnecessary addition to the main text, and teachers sometimes advise students to skip this segment and proceed directly to the main narrative. The more common recent tendency among critics, however, is to explore the various ways in which the introduction is relevant to the main body of the book, particularly in the ways both the introduction and the book itself focus on relations between the individual and society and especially on the impact of political power on private lives. According to the excellent summation provided by Kimberly Muirhead, recent critics often cite thematic similarities between the two works that link them (such as isolation, alienation, guilt over sins of the past, and tensions between solitude and sociability, the past and the present, public and private interests, and artistic and social responsibilities); [in addition, such critics] show how Hawthorne’s personal and political experiences during and after the Custom-House scandal [in which he was fi red from his job] parallel Hester’s and Dimmesdale’s experiences in the novel; and they frequently extend those comparisons by illustrating that Hawthorne projects his own artistic temperament, personality, or state of mind onto one or more of his primary characters. (xxvi–xxvii)

In all the ways and for all the reasons just mentioned, then, “The Custom House” is well worth including in any serious reading of The Scarlet Letter. Certainly the occasional humor of the introduction adds an extra dimension to the book. Meanwhile, the narrator’s claim that he discovered historical manuscripts describing the basic events on which the plot of the novel is based was a typical device of fiction writers in the 17th through 19th centuries, when creative writers often tried to give their fictional works historical credibility. Hawthorne, with his keen interest in New England’s Puritan past and his ambivalent attitudes toward his own Puritan ancestors, had special reasons to want to set his book in early colonial times, especially since the Puritan era was a period when matters of sin, guilt, and moral responsibility (key themes in much of Hawthorne’s fiction) were central to the public culture. By setting his story in the remote past, Hawthorne (paradoxically) could not only explore his interest in history and give his narrative plausibility but also gain a measure of imaginative freedom: His text would not be tied to the mundane facts of everyday life in an all-toofamiliar 19th-century America; instead, the book could take on legendary coloring and an imaginative tone by describing events set in a bygone era. The past thus provided him an anchor, but it was also a source of creative liberation.

Hawthorne’s decision to set The Scarlet Letter in the legendary past was also appropriate to the particular kind (or genre) of work he was writing. Although the book is often referred to as a novel, in the strict sense it is more accurately labeled a romance. Of these two kinds of works, novels were expected to be more realistic in setting, plot, characterization, and tone. Novels, in fact, often described the daily lives of people not much different from those of the people who read them. Romances, on the other hand, afforded their authors greater range and fl exibility; a romance writer could approach his materials in a more imaginative, less literal fashion; he could include elements of fantasy and the supernatural (although not to excess). Above all, he needed to be less concerned with presenting absolutely credible facts and more adept at depicting the “truth of the human heart” (the phrase Hawthorne himself memorably used when justifying romances in his “Preface” to The House of the Seven Gables, 1). The writer of romances is less concerned with reporting external data than with probing the inner workings of his characters’ minds and emotions, and the writer of romances also tends to be more concerned with larger, more universal, more timeless issues than with a merely accurate description of the daily life of a particular time and place. All these characteristics are especially relevant to the kind of work Hawthorne was composing in The Scarlet Letter, which is not only a romance but also a romance with strong gothic elements. Gothic fiction often features a tone that is grim, gloomy, and foreboding. Mystery, suspense, and even aspects of the supernatural are often traits found in such writings, which frequently contain at least one major “evil” fi gure whose often puzzling behavior threatens the well-being and often even the sanity of more sympathetic characters. Gothic writing often explores the dark inner recesses of the human psyche and frequently involves a fascination with characters who are both intriguing and morally repellent. The people in gothic works are often socially isolated and psychologically tormented, and certainly in all these ways The Scarlet Letter is a classic example of gothic fiction.

Hawthorne’s decision to write a “gothic romance” also gave him license to employ many of his favorite fictional techniques, including a heavy emphasis on symbolism and allegory, strong patterns of repeated images (especially images of light versus darkness), the use of evocative settings and suggestive names, and a decided stress on ambiguity and mystery. All these features and devices helped him create a work that relies prominently on suggestion, connotation, indirection, and implication to convey its often shadowy and ambiguous meanings. The Scarlet Letter is a memorable book as much for the questions it raises and the speculation it provokes as for any answers it offers; it is effective as much for the mysterious moods it creates as for any straightforward “meanings” it definitively provides. Each of the main characters, for instance, is given an evocative name, yet none of the names completely explains the full complexity of the characters Hawthorne creates. Hester’s name associates her with the psychological strength and physical attractiveness of the biblical queen Esther, who was famous for keeping a secret; Dimmesdale’s name links him with the darkness and gloom that increasingly characterize his own perception of himself; Chillingsworth’s name implies the coldness at the heart of his dealings with other people; Pearl’s name suggests something both beautiful and precious but also purchased at a great price. The names are obviously, in some respects, allegorical: They encourage us to think of the characters not as completely realistic individuals but as persons who are symbolic to one degree or another. Yet the names do not begin to exhaust the full significance of the characters to whom they are attached—characters who exist partly as credibly rendered persons and partly as figures in a highly evocative and symbolic narrative. The same is obviously true of the novel’s varied settings: The novel’s Boston is, in various respects, a believable recreation of the actual early New England town, but in other ways it also symbolizes the constricted, ordered life of a tightly knit community, in which the society’s values can be harshly imposed on any individual who dares to question or reject them. Likewise, the woods that surround the town are in some ways merely a credible forest, while in other respects they also symbolize the freedom (but also perhaps the wildness and moral dangers) that result from distance from communal supervision. Hester, significantly, lives most of her existence outside the confining borders of the town and just at the edge of the forest, and in this respect, as in so many others, she is a marginal being—someone whose existence calls attention to the very same social constrictions she partially manages to evade.

When we first glimpse Hester, of course, she is anything but unconfined or unconstricted. She has just emerged from jail, carrying the infant Pearl in her arms and wearing a bright scarlet letter A sewn onto the breast of her dress. She is soon taken to a public scaffold, where she is subjected to hours of public display and humiliation. The scaffold, in fact, is one of the most important and most pivotal of all the settings described in the novel; “scaffold scenes” appear at crucial points throughout the book, thereby providing a sense of continuity and structure while also helping to advance the plot, usually by placing many of the main characters together in one location while also setting the stage for some signifi cant change in the action. The scaffold, as a symbol of public exposure and punishment, is at the fi gurative heart of this Puritan community, and scenes involving the scaffold are often juxtaposed with scenes involving the forest (the symbol of privacy and mysterious secrets). Hawthorne’s use of the scaffold scenes typifies the economy and skill with which the novel is structured; the design of the work is relatively simple, with no elaborate subplots, no huge cast of characters, and no wide variations in atmosphere or tone. The mood of the work is consistently somber and serious, as befi ts its central concern with issues such as sin, guilt, hypocrisy, and revenge. The repeated scaffold scenes, as do the repeated alternations between the settings of town and forest, help give the work an impressive symmetry and coherence, while the relatively small cast of characters and the general absence of exciting physical action help keep the focus where Hawthorne clearly wants it: not so much on what the characters physically do as on their thoughts, emotions, motives, and psychological complexities.

Each of the four major characters has been analyzed in multiple ways. Chillingsworth, for instance, has generally been seen as an almost Satanic personifi cation of evil and revenge. He is associated with frigid rationality and with the mind rather than the heart, and in his desire to torment Dimmesdale he has often been interpreted as the dark villain of the book. In his obsession with discovering and punishing the secret sins of others, he becomes ever more sinful himself, and as his character degenerates, his body also becomes literally more distorted and crippled. As with Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost (a book to which Hawthorne alludes frequently), Chillingworth’s physical degeneration matches his increasing moral corruption, and it is clearly ironic that he adopts the role of a physician. Rather than caring for others or helping to cure them, he tortures and sickens them, both psychologically and physically, and in the process he himself descends into a kind of mental and moral illness. He wins only a paradoxical victory in the end of the book, for although he succeeds in destroying and even (in a sense) killing Dimmes Dimmesdale, he himself soon dies, unloved and alone. He is both literally and fi guratively a “leech”—a word synonymous in Puritan times with “physician, ” but a word that also implies Chillingsworth’s role as a kind of blood-sucking parasite. He is te moral and metaphorical vampire in this darkly gothic novel. And yet it would be far too crude to see Chillingsworth as a villain pure and simple; he is, after all, also the victim of Hester’s adultery and of Dimmesdale’s secret hypocrisy, and his desire for revenge is, unfortunately, an all-too-human and all-too-common response to perceived injustice. Few readers can honestly or completely distance themselves from Chillingworth’s darker impulses, but in his elaborate and subtle persecution of another person’s corruption, Chillingsworth only makes himself seem the more fundamentally corrupt of the two. Paradoxically, in his efforts to scourge and affl ict Dimmesdale, Chillingsworth ultimately helps lead the minister to a kind of redemption, and so he becomes a kind of spiritual physician almost in spite of himself.

Dimmesdale, by the end of the novel, has become a more sympathetic character than he was at the beginning; his guilty conscience and his physical, mental, and emotional suffering, combined with his final public confession, help make him seem something more than merely the weak and frightened hypocrite he might have appeared to be at the start of the book. As Hester does, he feels the full force of external pressures to conform to rigid social expectations, yet he, of course, lacks her strength of character and her willingness to face the public consequences of their mutual sin. He is, in some ways, the weaker and even the more conventionally “feminine” of the two sinners, but just as Hawthorne is able to convey skillfully the complexities of Chillingsworth’s position, so he is able to do the same with Dimmesdale. Dimmesdale is not a character for whom we can ever afford to feel mere disdain, for just as Chillingsworth is full of a vengefulness most people will recognize in themselves, so Dimmesdale embodies familiar fears and common internal struggles. Like all the major characters of the book, Dimmesdale is a complex figure whose dilemma should stimulate complicated reactions rather than simple, self-righteous censure.

Pearl, too, is another of Hawthorne’s complicated creations, although commentators have often seen her as the most allegorical and symbolic (and thus as the least fully rounded) of the four major characters. She is obviously the living embodiment of her parents’ sin, and perhaps that is partly why she seems so willful, so mischievous, and so difficult to control. At the same time, however, she is also beautiful and intelligent, and of all the major characters she is the one who seems the least secretive, the least calculating, and the most impulsive. As a child who has been raised mainly on the outskirts of the town, she is the character who seems least concerned with the opinions of the community, and she is the character who is least conflicted by the need to adopt public postures. As does Chillingsworth, but in a different way and from different motives, Pearl plays a major role in Dimmesdale’s eventual confession and redemption, and Pearl herself seems transformed in positive ways by her father’s final transformation. At the end of the novel, it is Pearl who inherits Chillingsworth’s money and who manages to escape the restricted life of Puritan New England: As the work concludes, she is living a prosperous and apparently happy life as a wife and mother in Europe.

Of all the characters Hawthorne created, however, it is obviously Hester Prynne who is the most memorably complex, and it is certainly Hester who has been the subject of most of the critical commentary and debate the novel has inspired. Commentators have often been attracted by her independence, her dignity, her strength and resilience, her defiance of social prejudice, her practical ability to cope with hardship, her devotion to her sometimes-difficult daughter, and her enduring commitment to protecting the complicated man she loves. Hester has often been seen as more sinned against than sinning, and many critics (especially recent ones) have viewed her as a kind of feminist heroine—a self-assertive woman whose desire for autonomy wins the respect of both Hawthorne and his readers. Hester’s initial rejection of (and by) society has been seen by some as symbolizing the rise, during Hawthorne’s day, of a new kind of woman (one who would no longer be content with the confi ning strictures of the past), but Hawthorne’s attitude toward these new developments has been the subject of intense debate. Some commentators argue that the novel adopts a generally profeminist stance, while others contend that Hester is never as much a “feminist” as some critics claim, and that Hawthorne himself was, in any case, deeply skeptical of any kind of unbridled, romantic individualism. According to some analysts, even if Hawthorne did sympathize with Hester’s rebellion, he effectively “tames” her by the end of the book, after an absence of many years taking her back to Boston, where she resumes living in her small cottage, devotes herself to public charity, and wins the widespread respect of the very community that long ago persecuted her for her rebellious ways. According to this interpretation, Hawthorne ends the work by neutralizing Hester’s radical or revolutionary potential, either because he lost his nerve or because he never fully sympathized with her rebelliousness. Others, however, argue that Hester remains a subversive figure to the very end, particularly in the way she assures other troubled women (who go to her for counsel) “of her fi rm 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 a surer ground of mutual happiness” (166). According to this reading, Hester at the end of the book is a kind of feminist prophet. Other readers, however, argue that at the conclusion she is a far more conventional fi gure than she was at the beginning.

The fact that both Hester and the novel’s conclusion are open to such diverse interpretations should not be surprising, since many issues raised by the book have been the subject of much discussion and sometimes even heated debate. Is Hawthorne’s attitude toward the Puritans mostly negative, or is it more subtly ambivalent? Does the novel imply a consistent political philosophy, or does it tend to sidestep political questions? If the book does have a political agenda, is that agenda “liberal, ” “conservative, ” or some complex mixture of the two? How, if at all, is the work relevant to the tense sociopolitical controversies of Hawthorne’s own time, particularly the controversy over slavery (a debate that would soon result in civil war)? How does the novel position itself in relation to contemporary disagreements over transcendentalism, a popular philosophy of Hawthorne’s time, and to what degree is the book skeptical of almost any claim to truth rather than simply skeptical about particularly rigid and dogmatic judgments? What is the central theme of the text? Is that theme sin, love, or something else? Is the text fundamentally ambiguous, or does a coherent, consistent meaning emerge? How does the novel reflect Hawthorne’s own personality and character, and what (precisely) were his personal traits and attitudes? Was he a relatively well-adjusted and happy man, or was he a deeply, darkly tormented soul? Finally, can the work profi tably be read in light of recent interpretive theories, such as Freudian psychology or postmodern analysis? Or should it be read primarily in the context of its own particular time? These are just a few of the many questions that have been raised about the book in the century and a half since it was first published, and no doubt the discussion and debate will continue. One key trait of any literary classic is that it continues to provoke thought and stimulate dialogue (and even fierce argument). By that standard alone, The Scarlet Letter is defi nitely a classic, and although a few critics have faulted the book as a work of art (criticizing, for instance, its allegedly excessive emphasis on symbolism and the supposed artifi ciality of its characters and style), most readers have roundly disagreed. The Scarlet Letter has long been considered perhaps the first classic American novel—and certainly one of the most important—and that status seems, if anything, more secure today than at any time in the past.