PEARL GREY VERSUS SCARLET IN HAWTHORNE’S

“THE SCARLET LETTER”

COORDONATOR ŞTIINŢIFICProf.Univ.Dr.Felicia Burdescu

ABSOLVENT: Marinescu Denisa Floriana

CRAIOVA

-2007 –

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CONTENTS

ARGUMENT 3

CHAPTER I : Hawthorne and Puritanism 4

CHAPTER II : The Symbolism in The Scarlet Letter 8

CHAPTER III: Hawthorne’s masterpiece 55

CONCLUSION 61

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Argument

I have chosen Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter for my diploma paper,

because I consider it one of the first American great works. The writer belongs

to Transcendentalists and, as a representative of Puritanism, he critically and

objectively introduces the exaggerations, limits of the church.

The work has had an immense influence both on Americans and for

other cultures. In point of suggestivness, American symbolism seems to be

bound to colour and meaning. Not only Melville shows that black and white

are interchangeable but he also states that “Evil is in man”.

Hawthorne will show through the meaning of red that goes together with

love-hatered, love-creation(Pearl and grey) and the respect one can get for

Hester Prynne, an early feminist in America.

The text practically sustains A, the first letter of the alphabet is more

complex in meaning than Adultery.

Chapter I

Hawthorne and Puritanism

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A religious group which migrated from England to Massachusetts Bay

Colony in New England in the early 1600s, the Puritans believed in a “pure”

interpretations of the Bible which did not include some of the traditional

practices of the Church of England.

Although the Church did not officially control the state of Puritan

settlements; religion and government were closely interwined. The ministers

counseled the magistrates in all affairs concerning the settlement and the

citizens. The Puritan had strict rules against the theater, religious music,

sensuous poetry, and frivolous dress.

To illustrate the fact that Puritan has influenced American mentality,

literature and culture as a whose enormously we use Hawthorne’s works as an

example because he has been one of the most popular American writers, he

seems to have experienced a very strong influence of Puritanism and reflected

it in his works brilliantly.

Hawthorne rounds off the Puritan cycle in America writing-belief in the

existence of an active evil (the devil) and in a sense of determinism (the

concept of predestination).

Hawthorne’s literary reputation is inextricably linked with Puritanism

and the Puritans. The critics have made much of his puritan subject matter and

his symphatetic treatment of puritan themes. Some have come close to

identifying Hawthorne with Puritanism as though he was a spiritual

contemporary of Cotton Mather born out of his time.

Some major themes in Hawthorne’s fictions are:the problem of guilt –a

character’s sense of guilt forced by the puritanical heritage or by society; also

guilt versus innocence; the Puritan New England –used as a background and

setting in many tales; pride- Hawthorne treats preide as evil.

He illustrates the following aspects of pride in various characters:

physical pride(Robin), spiritual pride( Goodman Brown, Ethan Brand) and

intellectual pride (Rappaccini). Some important problems include : individual

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versus society; self-fulfilment versus accommodation or frustration; hypocrisy

versus integrity; love versus hate; exploration versus hurting and fate versus

free will.

Due to his family background, Hawthorne could not help being imbibed

Puritan ideas such as belief in the existence of the devil.

The influences of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s unbringing Salem,

Massachusetts and his Puritan ancestry are evident in his literary works. Many

of his writings are expressions of Puritan ideals and the correlation of those

ideals with the human nature. Considered serious and solitary by nature,

Hawthorne used these characters traits to clearly portray his feelings toward

Puritanism.

W.C. Brownell, saw in Hawthorne a genuine son of the Puritans and

called “The Scarlet Letter” “The Puritan Faust”. In a rather sweeping

generalization he asserted that Hawthorne’s writing were almost invariably

successful when they dealt with Puritan themes, almost always a failure when

they did not. He attributed the didactic tone of Hawthorne’s fiction to his

preoccupation, with Puritanism, and in many other ways related Hawthorne’s

literary accomplishments with Puritan subjects and influences.1

Herbert Schneider similarly sees Hawthorne as reviving the best in

Puritanism, “the empirical truth behind the Calvinistic symbols. He recovered

what Puritanism professed but seldom practiced the spirit of piety, humility and

tragedy in the face of the inscrutable ways of God”2

Hawthorne found himself haunted as well as intrigued by the history of

his hometown of Salem. Surrounded by the town’s past, he struggled to rectify

in his mind the incongruence of Puritan practice.

Further adding to the complexity of his situation was the reality of the

Puritan ancestry. Not only was he the descendent of Puritan emigrants, but had

a great-great grandfather who served as a judge for the Salem, which

trials( Pennell 2; Bloom 11). Perhaps a feeling of personal responsibility and

guilt led Hawthorne to select Puritanism as a theme for so many of his works.

1 American Prose Masters (New York,1909)123,115;76-782 .The Puritan Mind(New York,1930)262-263

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Exposing Puritan transgression and forcing the reader to acknowledge

the wrongdoings of the past gave Hawthorne an outlet for the misplaced blame

he laid on himself. According to Charles Ryskamp, Hawthorne had read

everything available to him about the Puritans.3 Part of that interest was a result

of two illustrations Puritan ancestors Hawthorne refers to in “The Custom

House”.

Other critics have found Hawthorne’s chief literary motivation in

criticism of Puritanism rather than emulation. Parrington saw him as a

criticizing the Puritans from a skeptical point of view4, while Stuard Pratt

Sherman called him “ a subtle critic and satirist of Puritanism from the

Transcendental point of view”5.

It is not that Hawthorne approved of Puritan excesses, but he came to

realize that they were probably necessary for survival, as he indicated in his

1832 sketch of Ann Hutchinson, as well as in the preface to “The Gentle Boy”

the same year.6

He noted that the Puritans seeking to establish a unified theocracy felt it

was necessary to be strict in discipline when it came to affairs of both church

and state. Since their concept of theocracy was drawn from the Bible,

especially important to his writing “The Scarlet Letter” was Hawthorne’s

knowledge of the holly book, as well as John Winthrop’s journal and the

writings of Cotton Mather.

Although Hawthorne found Calvinism distasteful, The Scarlet Letter

reveals that he knew the Bible well. Also, Theodore Maynard's A Fire Was

Lighted: The Life of Rose Hawthorne, reveals that Hawthorne set a Christian

example in his life and writings that influenced his daughter Rose eventually to

become a Catholic nun.7

3 Charles Ryskamp, "The New England Sources of The Scarlet Letter," American Literature 31 (1959), 257-72. 4 .The Romantic Revolution in America(New York,1927),442-4505 . Americans(New York,1922)137.We may wonder now, in view of Hawthorne’s bitter attack upon Transcendentalism in „The Celestial Railroad „; Sherman could apply the term Transcendental to its author. That story seems to call for a reversal of Sherman’s formula; it is clearly critical and satirical of Transcendentalism from an almost entirely orthodox Puritan point of view.6 . Seymour L. Gross, "Hawthorne's Revision of `The Gentle Boy,'" American Literature 26 ( 1954), 196-208.7 . Theodore Maynard, A Fire was Lighted: The Life of Rose Hawthorne (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1948), 258

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With his knowledge of Puritanism and its dependence on Scripture, he

realized The Scarlet Letter would necessitate a biblical orientation; so he made

plentiful allusions to biblical material.

In general, however, critics have ignored specific scriptural influence on the

work. Francis J. Bremer observes regarding the influence of the Bible on the Puritans,

"The Old and New Testaments were . . . the source of codes of behavior, belief and

worship."8 Unfortunately, their years in the wilderness had distorted their biblical

hermeneutics. Recent scholarship also suggests that Hawthorne's awareness of the

Puritans' spiritual condition resulting from their spiritual deterioration had identified

the declension that had taken hold by Mather's time, and in the struggles of Hester and

Dimmesdale he accounts for a principal cause of the declension. Their preoccupation

with physical life and the survival of the visible community had compromised their

commitment to important biblical concepts and what is essential to membership in the

invisible community.

Chapter II

The Symbolism of Colours in The Scarlet Letter

8 . Francis J. Bremen The Puritan Experience, rev. ed. (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1995), 16.

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Interpretations of “The Scarlet Letter” have been almost startlingly

various. This is not surprising, for Hawthorne has himself pointed the way to a

wide range of speculations.

In the three short paragraphs that make up his opening chapter,

Hawthorne introduces the three chief symbols that will serve to give structure

to the story on the thematic level, hints at the fourth, and starts two of the chief

lines of imagery.

The opening sentence suggests the darkness (“sad-colored”, “gray”),

the rigidity (“oak”, “iron”), and the aspiration (“steeple-crowned”) of the

people “amongst whom religion and law were almost identical”. Later

sentences add “weatherstains” , ” a yet darker aspect”, and “gloomy” to the

suggestions already begun through colour imagery.

In the opening “scene”, the women standing about the pillory serve as

a kind of “chorus”, expressing the outraged sense of community and especially

the female portion thereof, and Hawthorne digresses into a generalization that,

in a measure, anticipates the outrageous remarks about English women he

would later include in “Our Old Home”: ”The women, who were now standing

about the prison-door, stood within less than half a century of the period when

the mannish Elisabeth, had been the not altogether unsuitable representative of

her sex…”

The closing words of the chapter make the metaphorical use of

colours explicit: Hawthorne hopes that a wild rose beside the prison door may

serve “to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the

track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow”.

A large part of the opening chapter I allotted to this rose-bush and to

some weeds that also grow beside the prison. Having learned to respect the

economy with which Hawthorne worked in his tales, we should guess, even if

we had not read beyond this first chapter, that these will turn out not to be

merely “realistic” or “atmospheric” details. We should expect to meet them

again, with expanded connotations. Actually, the flower and weed imagery is

second in importance only to the colour imagery in this novel.

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In addition to the Puritans themselves, the jail before which they

stand, and the weeds and the rose, one other subject, and only one, is

mentioned in this first chapter. In the only generalized comment in a chapter

otherwise devoted to objective description, Hawthorne tells us that “ The

founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness

they might originally project, have invariably allot a portion of the virgin soil

as a cemetery , and another portion as the site of a prison ” . The three

climactic scenes of the novel take place before the scaffold in front of the

prison. The cemetery, by contrast, remains in the background. We are not

allowed to forget it, we learn that Chillingworth has a special interest in it, but

we are not encouraged to make it the center of our attention until the end, when

it moves into the foreground as the site of the tombstone with the strange

inscription.Hawthorne's answer is not a systematized treatment of the problem;

indeed, because of the author-narrator problems, one cannot be sure from

reading the book what Hawthorne's own theology of good and evil was at the

time of writing.1 But it is clear that Hawthorne's world is a dualistic one, in

contrast to Emerson's bland monistic world. It is significant that Hawthorne

begins the story with a pessimistic statement about the environment in which

Hester and Dimmesdale must find happiness: "The founders of a new colony,

whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project,

have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a

portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a

prison." Sin and death are the ever-present realities for human beings, whom

Dimmesdale, after committing adultery, perceives to be the "sinful brotherhood

of mankind."1

The cemetery, the prison and the rose, with their associated values

and the extensions of suggestion given tem by the image patterns that intersect

them, as the ugliest weeds are later discovered growing out of graves, suggest 1 D.H. Lawrence, in his Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Viking, 1961), was probably the first literary critic to emphasize Hawthorne's ambiguity in The Scarlet Letter. Lawrence remarks, "Old-fashioned Nathaniel, with his little-boy charm, he' II tell you what's what. But he'll cover it with smarm" (p. 96).1 Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 142.

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a symbolic pattern within which nearly everything that is most important in the

novel may be placed. The cemetery and the prison are negative values, in

some sense evils.

The rose is a positive value, beautiful, in some sense a good. But the

cemetery and the prison are not negative in the same sense: death, “the last

great enemy” , is a natural evil, resulting as some theologies would have it

from moral evil but distinguished by coming to saint and sinner alike; the

prison is a reminder of the present actuality of moral evil. Natural and moral

evil, then, death and sin, are here suggested.

The rose is “good” in the same sense in which the cemetery is an

“evil”: its beauty is neither moral nor immoral, but is certainly a positive value.

Like the beauty of a healthy child or an animal, it is the product not of choice,

but of necessity, of the laws of its being, so that it can be admired, but not

judged. Pearl, later in the story, is similarly immune from judgment. There is

no strong suggestion of moral goodness in this chapter, nor will there be in

what is to follow. The cemetery and the weeds contrast with the rose , but

only the suggestions of worship in the shape of the hats of the Puritans

contrast with the prison, and those steeple-crowned hats are grey , a colour

which later takes on strongly negative associations.

During the first third of the book, therefore, Hester, her glowing letter,

and Pearl are as lights shining in the darkness of the community. The minister,

meanwhile, fasts and vigils in the darkness and preaches words that place him

in a false light. He attains a new perspective, however, when he begins to live

with his guilt. When Chillingworth moves in with him, Dimmesdale finds in

the physician’s mind a remarkable depth and scope. “It was as if a window

were thrown open”, but “the air was too fresh and chill to be long breathed with

comfort”.

Later, as Chillingworth keeps probing for “God’s own truth”, both

men hear Pearl’s laughter outside. “Looking instinctively from the open

window”, the minister sees Hester and Pearl in the adjacent burial ground.

Here, seen from the new perspective and clearly outlined in the bright sunlight

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of the summer day, is the very truth that Chillingworth is seeking, but neither

man can perceive it. Chillingworth looks at Pearl and asks, “What, in Heaven’s

name, is she?” and Dimmesdale is unable to explain her “principle of being “.

The extremes of Mr. Wilson’s “ light “ and Chillingworth’s “

blackness “ meet not only in the gray of Hester’s dress and the Puritan hats, and

in the indeterminate drabness of the Puritan clothing, but also in the ambiguous

suggestions of red. Images of colour, and of light and shade, are more

numerous than any other images in the novel. Readers have always been aware

that Hawthorne has used these images “ artistically “, and sometimes that he

has used them “ expressively “; yet precisely what they express and how they

express it have never, even in the extended treatments of the subject, been

adequately analyzed.

Some of them Hawthorne makes explicitly symbolic, others seem

obscurely to be so, while still others resist every effort at translation into

abstract terms. Faced with this profusion and complexity of evidence, most

commentators have wavered between the opinion that the colour images are

used “ allegorically “ and the even less discerning opinion that they are only in

the vaguest sense, as realistic background, functional. Here, as on a number of

other aspects of Hawthorne’s work, criticism is forced to make something like

a fresh start. I think it will prove useful as a preliminary to later analysis to

distinguish among three ways in witch images of colour and light and shade

appear in the novel.

There is, first, the pure sensory image used literally, not figuratively,

though the literalness of its use will not destroy whatever intrinsic symbolic

value it may have. Second, there is the colour or shade of light or darkness that

must be taken literally, but that also has explicit symbolic value. Finally, there

is the image that has only, or chiefly, symbolic value, so that it cannot be taken

literally. These may be called pure, mixed and drained images.

There is a real basis in the novel for making such distinctions – or that

the data will lend themselves to such manipulations without forcing. A look at

the first several chapters will be enough to give us an answer. Thus on the first

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page the grayness of the hats and the “ weatherstains “ of the jail and pure

images, sense impressions to be taken quite literally. Only after we have

become conscious of the part played by the colour in the tale are we apt to be

aware of the appropriateness of these colours, though to be sure they may have

had their effect on us before we became conscious of that effect. So likewise

the “bright “morning sun and the “ruddy“ cheeks of the spectators in the next

chapter are first of all, and always fundamentally, to be understood in a

perfectly literal sense.

Again, the first time the scarlet letter is mentioned, the colour image

is pure : “ On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an

elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold – thread, appeared the

letter A”.

Hawthorne's notable and unique use of the inanimate

letter A, the scenery of the rose bush, and the settings of

forest to make the characters -Hester, Dimmesdale,

Chillingworth, and Pearl- into symbols in the novel in order to

portray his moral and theme of: Be true. Be true. Be true!

The red letter A is presented but whose meaning has to

be deciphered. What does the letter mean? It is a question

every character in the novel repeats who confronts the blatant

red token and who has to deal with it.

The letter A manifests in a variety of forms and places.

Not only does the A manifest in various forms, but it also

acquires a variety of meanings. It represents more than just

the sin of adultery. Even as the original mark of adultery, the

scarlet letter has a different individual meaning to the various

characters.

To Hester, the A is a symbol of unjust humiliation. The A

magnifies in an armor breastplate at the Governor's mansion

to exaggerated and gigantic proportions, so as to be acutely

the most prominent feature of [Hester's] semblance. In truth,

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she emerges absolutely hidden behind it.. The A grows to be

larger than Hester signifying the town's view of her sin. They

do not see the human being behind the scarlet letter, they only

see a sinner.

For Hester, the A is not only a symbol of adultery, but

also a symbol of alienation. She is an outcast from society and

the women treat her differently by constantly sneering at her

in public. The scarlet letter is a symbol of what society wants

to see and the decision to create a relativity. The townspeople

soon began to accept her and believe that letter had

supernatural powers. They decide that it meant able; so strong

was Hester Prynne, with a woman's strength, that they were

allowing her to remove it. Their opinion and vision of the

scarlet letter changes into its complete opposite within a short

period of under ten year's time. This opinion conforms

according to their worldly view of convenience. To the Puritan

community, it is a mark of just punishment. In the beginning of

the story the letter struck fear into the society's hearts. It

symbolizes the unfair humiliation she endures, such as

humiliation standing on the scaffold at noon in public view.

The ornately gold-embroidered A on Hester's heart, at

which Pearl throws wildflowers and decorates with a border of

prickly burrs. To Pearl, the A is a bright and mysterious

curiosity which symbolizes her existence and the meaning

behind it. In mockery, Pearl creates an A on her chest made of

green seaweed which represents purity and innocence, but

also signifies Pearl's future as the daughter of sinner.

For Chillingworth, the A represents the need for revenge

and is the spur to this quest. To Dimmesdale, the A is a

piercing reminder of his the guilt engulfing his concealed sin. It

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drives him to punish himself and endure Chillingworth's

torture.

In addition, the A also symbolizes attributes other than

adultery. On the night of his vigil on the scaffold, Dimmesdale

sees an immense red A in the sky.

It symbolizes Angel when a great red letter in the sky, -

the letter A, which [the townspeople] interpret to stand for

angel, as it manifests in the sky on the night of Governor

Winthrop's death. One of the most dramatic of the several A's

the book hints at is the A so frequently seen earlier and which

Dimmesdale finally reveals to be an A on his chest by most of

the spectators who witness his confession and death. At the

end of the novel, as a summary symbol, the scarlet A refers

against the black background on Hester and Dimmesdale's

tombstone.

Mixed images, on the other hand, have ore than that suggestion of

figurative extension that any image, however pure, will have: they may be said

to denote both literal and figurative colours, so that in them the natural

symbolism of the colour becomes explicit. The jail is “gloomy “, that is, both

physically and emotionally dark. The second time the letter is mentioned, its

colour has acquired a moral connotation from its context: Hester stood before

the crowd with “desperate recklessness“, while everyone looked at the sign of

her ignominy, “that SCARLET LETTER “.

More clearly an example of this mixed type of image is the beadle’s

statement that here in this righteous colony “iniquity is dragged out into the

sunshine “: for Hester has just been brought from the literal darkness of the jail

into the literal sunshine of the square, and this action is an example of “iniquity

“, which has been hidden or unknown being made public, brought into the

(figurative) light.

The speaker has meant his remark as a figure of speech, while the

reader sees that it is literally appropriate too; there is a two – way movement,

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from the literal to the figurative, and from the figurative back to the literal,

going on here and elsewhere in the colour images in the novel. One final

example in this preliminary survey of the mixed type of image: “his face

darkened with some powerful emotion “. Now powerful emotion may literally

darken the face by flushing it, but here the symbolic effect of darkness, as that

which is feared and evil, is also clear. This is the first reference to the

“darkness “ of Chillingworth.

The third of drained type of image is much less frequent than the

other two. On the first page, we hear of the “black flower “ of civilized society,

a prison, and we realize that “ black “ is here figurative, for though the jail has

been described as dark and weatherstained, it is not black in any literal sense.

Again, in the last sentence of the first chapter, we hear of the “ darkening close

“ of the table , and we read “ darkening “ to mean gloomy ( in the emotional

sense), sad.

Finally, when the Reverend Mr. Wilson speaks to Hester of the “

blackness “ of her sin, the primary significance of the word , both for Hester

and for the reader, is intensive and qualitative in a moral sense; the residue of

literal meaning merely adds to emotional overtones. Here, as in the “smile of

dark and self – relying intelligence “ displayed by Chillingworth, there is

hardly any literal meaning left.

The colours presented in these three types of images are associated

with natural good (beauty, health), moral and spiritual good (holiness), natural

evil (ugliness, death), and moral evil (sin). With the exception of the yellow

starch on the linen of Mistress Hibbens, in which we can discern only

historically verisimilitude, all the colours in the novel, including yellow as used

elsewhere, are associated with one or more natural or moral values, positive or

negative.

The most frequent colours are red, in its several shades and black,

pure or mixed, as in “ gray “, “ shadowy “, and “ darksome “. Red is

ambiguous throughout, suggesting both of sunlight and roses, on the other

hand, and the traditional associations called up by “the scarlet woman” on the

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other. Pearl, a “ natural “ child, is dressed in red, Hester’s letter is red, the roses

are red, the bloom of healthy cheeks is red, and a glow in Chillingworth’s eyes

is thought to be red with the light of infernal fires. Black, dark gray, brown, all

the darker shades, ordinarily suggest both natural and moral evil. Green and

yellow are associated with natural good, with life and beauty.

Light is of various kinds. Sunlight suggests both truth and health. It is

analogous to the spiritual Light of Revelation, which in Hawthorne’s scheme of

values should “illumine“ nature, and to the light of grace. But there are also the

“ false light “ of meteors and the “ red light “ of evil. Mr. Wilson, the most

saintly of the Puritan ministers and the most sympathetic of the lesser

characters, has “ white “ hair and light – coloured ( gray ) eyes, in marked

contrast to the only colours assigned to Governor Bellingham, who has a “ dark

“ feather and a “ black “ tunic. Thus too, Dimmesdale, a mixed figure of lofty

aspirations and base conduct, is seen as having a “ white “, lofty, and

impending brow and “ brown “, melancholy eyes. Dressed in “black “, he

walks by choice in the “shadowy” bypaths. Hester is seen as red (her letter and

vivid complexion), gray (her dress), and black (her hair and eyes), the first two

ambiguous in their associations, the last saved from being wholly negative by

the glints of sunlight often seen in her hair. Pearl, though she has her mother’s

black hair and eyes, is usually seen as a flash of red and light : the “ deep and

vivid tints “ of her “ bright “ complexion and “ gorgeous robes “ often throw an

absolute circle of “ radiance “ around her. Chillingworths is compounded of

shades of “ darkness “, except for the red, or reddish blue, glow thought to be

seen in his eyes.

The relationship between the three types of images, the several

colours, and their associated moral and natural values are highly complex. The

use of colours in the novel is rhythmic, but it is more than that, for the rhythm

is functional and expressive.

In “The Interior of a Heart “, for instance, there are twenty-two colour

images, all but two of which are black or white. The heart is Dimmesdale’s,

and Dimmesdale wavers between good and evil, we might almost say between

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the supernatural and the unnatural. It is conceptually right that he should be

associated with both the radiance of Wilson and the darkness of Chillingworth.

He is never associated with the greens and yellows and reds of sunlit nature.

Again, the chapter called “Hester at her Needle“ has eighteen colour

images, eleven of them red, seven black, dark and white. Hester stands in an

ambiguous position between Chillingworth and the white maidens, as

Dimmesdale does between Chillingworth and Wilson, but she differs from him

in her relation to nature. For a final example, on one page of “The Minister‘s

Vigil “, when the approach of Mr. Wilson and the threat of disclosure coincide,

there are nine colour images, eight of which are light or whiteness. Recalling

the beadle’s earlier remark about the Puritan effort to drag iniquity out into the

sunshine, in which light was associated with an uncharitable violation of the

human heart, we become aware of what is sometimes obscured in discussions

of Hawthorne : that colour imagery is functional in context, not static or

determined by some abstract scheme.

The most significant use of colour in the novel is in the three key

scenes, Hester on the scaffold with the infant Pearl, Dimmesdale with Hester

and Pearl on the scaffold at midnight, ant the three on the scaffold again at the

end.

In the first, Hester is dragged into the light ant stands there “with the

hot, mid-day sun burning down upon her face, and lighting up its shame; with

the scarlet token of infamy on her breast…“

In the second there is at first only the darkness of the “obscure night “,

which renders Dimmesdale’s gesture ineffectual.

The two kinds of light appear. First there is the gleam of the lantern of

the saintly Mr. Wilson, who appeared in his illuminated circle to be radiant

with the “ distant shine of the celestial city “; but Mr. Wilson’s light does not

reach Dimmesdale, who is thus “ saved “ by a narrow margin from disclosure.

After Mr. Wilson’s light recedes in the darkness, a meteor flames in the sky,

making all visible, but in a “false“ light, so that what Chillingworth sees by its

aid is not true.

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Neither light in this scene accomplishes the necessary revelation. That

is left for the final climactic scaffold scene, in which the three come together

voluntarily in the light of the sun.

The marked predominance of pure images keeps the mixed and

drained ones from loosing force by becoming abstractly figurative, and this in

turn is one of the reasons why the novel never becomes an allegory. Thought

we must say that there is a struggle going on in the novel between the forces of

darkness and of light, the preponderance of pure images keeps this struggle

from becoming neatly dichotomous.

When we read that Chillingworth had conceived “a new purpose,

dark, it is true, if not guilty”, we do not read this as a pleonasm, for darkness

has acquired many associations beyond the guilt it may hide.

Again, the “ light “ of the church is saved from being a mere figure

for “ the teaching of the church “ by the fact that light has become associated

with a cluster of positive values, both natural and moral, that cannot be

translated adequately as “ doctrine “.

Finally, two drained images will illustrate the point. “ The holy

whiteness of the clergyman’s good fame “, in reference to Dimmesdale, draws

a part of its meaning from the light constantly associated with Mr. Wilson and

Christian Revelation, but another part from the false light of the meteor, which

has only recently ceased to cast its distorting glare over the scene.

And the smile that “ flickered “ over Chillingworth’s face so “

derisively ” that the spectator could see his “ blackness “ “ all the better for it“

is also a false light which nevertheless may reveal some things truly, as the

light of the meteor had revealed “ the black, freshly turned earth “ of the garden

plots near the scaffold.

But the movement flows in another direction too, for the presence of

the mixed and drained images underlines the symbolic value of the pure

images.

When Pearl, inspired by her mother’s example, makes a letter out of

eelgrass for her own breast, and Hester says that “ the green letter, and on thy

18

childish bosom, has no purport “, we realize that the statement is true in several

different senses: from Hester’s point of view, the green letter has none of the “

purport “ that her own letter has, and she, of course, is preoccupied with just

that kind of meaning; but from the reader’s point of view, the greenness of the

letter is an appropriate reminder of Pearl’s association with nature.

And when we see the Indians in the square on Election Day, the

predominant reds and yellows of their barbaric finery and the black of their “

snakelike “ eyes carry associations with nature and with evil, but none at all

with “ celestial illumination “. Like the weathered wood of the jail, the Indian

costumes gather meaning from their context.

The point of view of the third generalization about the three types of

images has perhaps already become sufficiently clear from what has been said.

The movement of the different colours back and forth between pure and

drained images helps to keep what Hawthorne calls his “ mesh of good and evil

“, a true mesh, with the strands intricately interwoven.

Hawthorne usually presents a pure image first, establishing the sensed

colour, then expands it into a mixed image, exploring its connotations, then at

last uses the colour in a drained image that out of the total context of the novel

would be bare and lifeless, or merely whimsical, but that in context is rich in

associations it has acquired along the way.

But sometimes he reverses this process, and sometimes he jumbles the

order, so that the colours are never completely fixed in the degree of their

literalness or the extension of their symbolic values.

When we read, for instance, of the “ radiant halo “ surrounding the

head of Mr. Wilson as he walked through a “ gloomy night of sin “, the image

that we should expect to be merely figurative, the “ halo “ of sanctity, turns out

to be literal as well, for the light is shed by Mr. Wilson’s lantern; and the one

that we should at first expect to be literal – for we already known that it is a

dark night, and as we start reading “ this gloomy atmosphere night… “, we

think we are getting a mere restatement of the darkness – turns out to be also

figurative, forcing us to revise the reaction we had prepared.

19

The relation between the light and the colour images and their

symbolic values are, then, neither static and schematized nor wholly free and

arbitrary, but contextual within a general framework supplied by traditional

patterns of colour symbolism.

The traditional associations of light and dark, for example, are

apparently archetypal.

Literature is filled with the darkness of death and sin and the light of

life and goodness; and the common speech allows us to “ throw light “ upon a

problem as often as we “ explain “ or “ clarify “ it.

Perhaps the most nearly fixed on its symbolic values of all the colours

in the novel is black. Yet even it is sometimes used ambiguously. Hester’s

black hair, that glistened so often in the sunlight before she covered it with a

cap, and Pearl’s “ dark, glistening curls “, so well set off by her scarlet

costume, are examples.

On the other hand, the red that turns through the book as a motif is

almost always used ambiguously. Only a few examples, like the “red glare“ in

Chillingworth’s eyes, are wholly clear, with one set of suggestions canceled out

and another emphasized.

The wild roses and the scarlet letter, Pearl’s costume and her mother’s

complexion do not exhaust the possibilities.

Chillingworth’s light is thought to be a reflection of the infernal fires,

but Pearl is also said to be a flame. When the forest, seeking to recognize a

kindred spirit in Pearl, offers her partridgeberries, “ red as drops of blood “ the

gift carries with its memories not only of the rose bush, but of the scarlet letter.

The “ burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation”

growing beside the prison, that “ black flower of civilized society ”, where

grass should have been, begin the flower and weed imagery, which, in some

thirty images and extended analogies, reinforces and extends the implications

of the imagery of color and light. Since these implications have already been

drawn out, we shall simply focus to four relationships Hawthorne has set up.

20

First and most clearly, the unnatural flowers and unsightly vegetation

are aligned with moral evil and with Chillingworth in particular. He too with

his deformity is “unsightly”. Low, dark and ugly, he suggests to some people

the notion that his step must wither the grass wherever he walks. The sun

seems not to fall on him, but to create “a circle of ominous shadow moving

along with his deformity”.

It is natural enough then to find him explicitly associated with

“deadly nightshade” and other types of “vegetable wickedness”, to see him

displaying a “dark, flabby leaf” found growing out of a grave, and to hear that

prominent among the herbs he has gathered are some “black weeds” that have

“sprung up out of a buried heart”.

When his evil work was done “he positively withered up, shriveled

away… like an uprooted weed that lies wilting in the sun”. Flower and weed

imagery unites with light and colour imagery to define Chillingworth’s position

as that of chief sinner.

But Chillingworth is not the only one so aligned. Less emphatically,

the Puritans themselves are associated with weeds and black flowers. The

implications of colour imagery first set up the association: as their “Puritanical

gloom” increases in the second generation to “the blackest shade of Puritanism

“, we begin to see them as cousins to the “nightshade” and so are prepared for

Pearl’s pretense that the weeds she attacks in her solitary games are Puritan

children. Accustomed to her apparently infallible instinct for the truth, we see

in her game something more than childish imagination.

The second relationship deserving of note also starts in the first

chapter.

We recall Hawthorne’s saying of the wild rose-bush in bloom beside

the prison that he hoped it might “relieve the darkening close” of his tale. No

“sweet moral blossom” plays any significant part in the main story, but the

happy fortune of Pearl, related in the concluding chapter, does offer a contrast

with the “frailty and sorrow” of the tale proper.

21

Thus Pearl’s final role is foreshadowed in the first chapter. But

Hawthorne does not wait until the end to make this apparent.

He constantly associates her, not only with the scarlet letter on her

mother’s dress, but with the red rose. The rose bares “delicate gems” and Pearl

is the red-clad “gem” of her mother’s bosom. Her flowerlike beauty is

frequently underscored. And naturally so, for we are told that she had sprung,

“a lovely and immortal flower”, out of the “rank luxuriance” of a guilty

passion.

The position thus defined is repeatedly emphasized. Pearl cries for a

red rose in the governor’s garden. She answers the catechetical question who

made her by declaring that she had not been made at all, but “had been plucked

by her mother off the bush of wild roses that grew by the prison door”. She

decorates her hair with flowers, which are said to become her perfectly. She is

reflected in the pool in “all the brilliant picturesqueness of her beauty, in its

adornment of flowers”. Her “flower-girdled and sunny image” has all the glory

of a “bright flower”. Pearl is a difficult child, capricious, unintentionally cruel,

unfeeling in her demand for truth, but she has both the “naturalness” and the

beauty of the rose and like the rose she is a symbol of love and promise.

These are the associations Hawthorne most carefully elaborates, but

there are two others worth noting briefly. Weeds or “black flowers” are on

several occasions associated with Hester. The most striking instance of this

occurs when Pearl pauses in the graveyard to pick “burrs” and arrange them

“along the lines of the scarlet letter that decorated the maternal bosom, to

which the burrs, as their nature was, tenaciously adhered”. The burrs are like

Pearl in acting according to nature, and what they suggest in their clinging

cannot be wholly false. Hester implicitly acknowledges the truth of what the

burrs have revealed when she suggests to Dimmesdale that they let the “black

flower” of their love “blossom as it may”.

But a more frequent and impressive association is set up between

Hester and normal flowers. Even the badge of her shame, the token of her

“guilty” love, is thus associated with natural beauty. The scarlet letter is related

22

to the red rose from the very beginning. As Hester stands before her judges in

the opening scenes, the sun shines on just two spots of vivid colour in all that

massed black, brown and gray: on the rose and the letter, both red. The

embroidery with which she decorates the letter further emphasizes the likeness,

so that when Pearl throws flowers at her mother’s badge and they hit the mark,

we share her sense that this is appropriate. Burrs and flowers seem to have an

affinity for Hester’s letter.

Hawthorne was too much of a Protestant to share the Catholic

attitude toward “natural law”: the imagery here suggests that moral law and

nature’s ways do not perfectly coincide, or run parallel on different levels; they

cross, perhaps at something less than a right angle.

At the point of their crossing the lovers’ fate is determined. No

reversal of the implied moral judgment is suggested when nature seems to

rejoice at the reaffirmed love of the pair in the forest: “Such was the sympathy

of Nature - that wild, heathen Nature of the forest, never subjugated by human

law, nor illumined by higher truth - with the bliss of these two spirits! Love,

whether newly born, or aroused from a death-like slumber, must always create

sunshine.”

Hester’s emblem, then, points to a love both good and bad. The

ambiguity of her gray robes and dark glistening hair, her black eyes and bright

complexion, is thus emphasized by the flower and weed imagery.

As Chillingworth is associated with weeds, Pearl with flowers and

Dimmesdale with no natural growing thing at all, so Hester walks her

ambiguous way between burdock and rose, neither of which is alone sufficient

to define her nature and her position.

There are almost twice as many heart images as there are flower and

weed images, but with one exception: Hawthorne insists upon them less. If they

are in some respects even more reveling, we may guess that that is because

they spring from Hawthorne’s deepest concerns and most abiding insights, not

from the top of his head, but from his own heart. It is even more difficult to

imagine Hawthorne’s style stripped of his heart images, than to imagine

23

Dimmesdale without his hand over his heart. The minister’s gesture is both

consciously emblematic and a stylistic reflex.

But the heart imagery begins before we meet the minister. When

Hester brings Pearl out of the dark “dungeon or … prison”, we have veiled

heart imagery, for the heart in Hawthorne is nearly as often a dungeon as it is a

cavern of tomb. But this bringing out of the heart’s secrets into the light is not

voluntary, it is forced. It cannot then in Hawthorne’s scheme of values be

beneficial. One must “be true”, but one cannot force the others to be true.

When the Puritans insist on “dragging” Hester into the public gaze – and get

clearly, a good deal of pleasure out of so doing – and then try to extort her

secret from her, what they are doing constitutes an attempt at what Hawthorne

calls everywhere “a violation of the human heart” – the sign of Brand,

Chillingworth, and other Hawthorne villains.

To those who might be inclined to think that society has a right to do

what the individual should not, Hawthorne has an answer, given in his

comment on the stocks, that more common Puritan instrument for pushing by

making the culprit publicly display his shame: “There can be no outrage,

methinks, against our common nature, - whatever be the delinquencies of the

individual, - no outrage more flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his face

for shame.”

The judges then stand in need for judgment. The Puritan people are

here playing the role later played by Chillingworth. The heart imagery of the

opening scenes establishes a tension that continues throughout the novel and is

central to its meaning.

That this interpretation does not constitute an over reading, is

suggested by the way light imagery reinforces heart imagery at this point: when

we first see her, Hester’s beauty shines out and makes a “halo”, and Hawthorne

says that to some she might have suggested an “image of the Divine

Maternity”. “The people’s victim and life-long bond-slave”, as Hawthorne calls

her, is not sinless, but neither is she a sinner among the righteous. She is

involved in a mesh between good and evil.

24

Many of the other uses of heart imagery are, as we should expect

them to be, casual, almost incidental. They serve chiefly to keep us aware that

we are here concerned finally with nothing less significant or permanent than

the truths of the heart. Running reminders of the central heart images, they

deepen and extend the reverberations of the action, sometimes into areas that

defy analysis. The governor’s mansion, for example, seems obscurely to be the

heart of the Puritan rulers:

Behind a façade that glitters with fragments of broken glass, there is a

suit of armor that reflects Hester’s badge in magnified and distorted form.

Despite the sunshine on the stucco walls, there would seem to be in this

mansion an exaggerated consciousness of sin and almost no awareness of

goodness, so that if we read the passage as a hart image we are reminded of

“Young Goodman Brown”.

Many of the others among the running heart images are clearer. The

heart is a grave, in which corpses are buried. The heart is a chamber, in which

the minister keeps his vigils in utter darkness; when Chillingworth enters the

chamber, he is violating the heart. The heart is a hearth, in which one is wise to

keep a fire. The heart is tomblike, or a niche in which images are set up and

surrounded by curtains. The heart (or breast or bosom) is the place where the

devil is most apt to set his mark.

But the images associated with Chillingworth are of special interest,

for, along with the imagery of light and colour and of weeds and flowers, they

are the chief indications of his place in the scheme of values in the novel. What

they do principally, of course, is once again to counter the judgment implied by

the overt situation. Chillingworth, the “wronged” husband, does not cease to be

the victim of injury when, he strives “to go deep into his patient’s bosom …

like a treasure seeker in a dark cavern”, but he makes it necessary to ask who is

more greatly injured, he or the man who has “wronged “him. As the images

continue the implication becomes clearer, so that, long before Dimmesdale has

risen through his final act of honesty and courage, Chillingworth is seen as

more sinning than sinned against, as more sinful even than the minister’s. “He

25

now dug into the poor clergyman’s heart, like a miner searching for gold; or,

rather like a sexton delving into a grave …”

He stole into the chamber of the heart like a thief and there turned

over, without valuing, “many precious materials, in the shape of high

aspirations for the welfare of his race, warm love of souls, pure sentiments,

natural piety, strengthened by the though and study, and illuminated by

revelation.” As he does so he imagines that his interest in what he finds is

purely objective and disinterested, even scientific: “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.” He is aided in his rationalization by the fact

that his own heart is like a “cheerless habitation”, cold in the absence of any

household fire. But all the while it is becoming clearer that he is like Ethan

Brand, who with “cold and remorseless purpose” conducted a psychological

experiment on the heart of a young girl and “wasted, absorbed, and perhaps

annihilated her soul, in the process”.

As Gordon Roper and John Gerber have argued2 , the subsequent

course of the story proceeds in a kind of chain reaction in which one character

or type dominates, expends its energy, and ignites the fuse that sets a new force

in motion. At first the Calvinist community dominates in punishing Hester;

then Chillingworth, recognizing Dimmesdale as his victim, begins to torture

him; next Hester acts to free her lover from his suffering; and finally the

delicate hero, Dimmesdale, takes control, makes his confession, and with a kiss

sets Pearl free of the spell that enthralled her. This, in a sentence, is the story of

the Puritan-American quest. We must consider each phase of it in detail, for

Hawthorne’s rendering is so rich that no incident or image is superfluous.

As a “type” of reason, he is disproportioned from the beginning; and

when he learns that he cannot rule the lush beauty, passion, and domestic

2 Gordon H. Roper, ed. , ‘Introduction’ to The Scarlet Letter and Selected Prose Works ( New York, 1949); John Gerber , ‘Form and Content in The Scarlet Letter’, New England Quarterly, XVII (March 1944), 25-55.

26

creativity typified by Hester, he becomes vengeful. In a second interview with

Hester he describes his relation with Dimmesdale: “A mortal man, with once a

human heart, has become a fiend for his especial torment.”3 And Hester

expresses her pity for “the hatred that has transformed a wise and just man to a

fiend!”

Hawthorne does not explain why Chillingworth decides to immigrate

to America, but it is clear that the Puritan reliance on law and reason are

agreeable to his temper, and that the community needs his talents. His tragedy

is that, when he fails to establish a true bond with Hester, he (like the Puritans)

condemns her passion as demonic, and vows to destroy the person or “type”

that was capable of winning her.

As his interest turns from healing to vengeance, he becomes wizened

and begrimed by the smoke of his furnace. At length he tells Hester that he

recalls his old faith; that their situation is “a kind of typical illusion” which he

is powerless to change. He has become the darkest, most deterministic Puritan

of them all.

Indeed Chillingworth is the darkest figure; Dimmesdale’s words

confirm that: “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.” As Harry Levin commented, “while their trespass has been sensual

passion, Chillingworth’s is intellectual pride.”4 Even his name betrays his frigid

nature, he is malevolence incarnated, possibly even the dark side of

Dimmesdale’s conscience, his private demon that torments him.

But Arthur is irresistibly attracted to Hester. Where he is pale and

ethereal, she is rich and voluptuous; where he is intellectual and imaginative,

she is earthy and material-skilled in domestic arts. In secret couple conceive a

child – a Pearl – who unites in herself their two natures.

3 C, I, 1724 Harry Levin, p. 89

27

Arthur resembles the moonlight-mirror types of Hawthorne’s mythological

tales; in Chillingworth’s words, “the Creator never made another being so

sensitive as this.”5

But, for all his mercurial ability, Dimmesdale is neither a demi-god,

nor a champion; far from the virile questing Bellerophon, he wanders in the

dim dale of a world which his faith assures him is depraved, bearing the burden

of a nature which he believes to be evil. As a type of spirit or imagination, his

place in Puritan society is the pulpit, and he feels a piercing guilt over the part

of his nature that draws him to the things of this world.

At the beginning of the romance, then, we have not a bipolar conflict

between Head and Heart, but a situation in which a fecund, richly creative Dark

Lady is “wedded” to two men, neither of whom, in Puritan New England, will

admit his connection with her. The minister lacks the courage to admit that his

nature has a passionate side; the scientist reviles the lady and swears her to

secrecy so that he can pursue an inhuman revenge. And the righteous

community brands the lady with a scarlet letter that has “the effect of a spell,

taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a

sphere by herself.”6

Chillingworth has always been recognized as a personification, but it

will not suffice to see him simply as evil incarnate, “Under the appellation of

Roger Chillingworth … was hidden another name,” and the name is not only

Prynne – it is Guilt.7Hawthorne’s portrayal of Chillingworth illustrates how

beautifully his imagination could weld the abstract to the concrete. For the

physician is interesting in his own right as an alchemist-psychiatrist manqué,

who tries to solve the riddle of man’s existence by logical or psychological

analysis.

As a symbol of guilt, Chillingworth is a leech, draining his patient of

nerve, will, and physical energy. But, as the whole book demonstrates, he is

also the healer. Only by knowing him, confronting him face to face, is moral

5 C, I, 1716 C, I, 547 This interpretation of Chillingworth’s role was suggested by Hillel Chodos and John L. Murphy.

28

growth possible. Not that moral growth is guaranteed or that having this

welcome guest is “fortunate” – it is simply inevitable in human existence. “The

breach which guilt has once made into the human soul is never in this mortal

state repaired. It may be watched and guarded; so that the enemy shall not force

his way again into the citadel, and might even, in his subsequent assaults, select

some other avenue, in preference to that where he had formerly succeeded. But

there is still the ruined wall.”8

The initiated phrases remove all doubt of Chillingworth’s identity. As

guilt he invades the dwelling place, which, as we know, is customarily a

symbol for the heart in Hawthorne’s fiction. “My home”, he tells Hester, “is

where thou art and where he (the minister) is.” Early in the book Chillingworth

appears from nowhere to confront Hester in the prison cell of her heart; by the

middle of the book he has insinuated himself into Dimmesdale’s abode. “A

deformed old figure, with a face that haunted men’s memories longer than they

liked “, he gradually shrives as Hester and Dimmesdale come closer to full

recognition of him.

The concluding words of “The Scarlet Letter” summarily dismiss the

more cheerful readings, of which there are a number. In describing the heraldic

device on the common tombstone of Hester and Dimmesdale, they describe

“our now concluded legend; so somber is it, and relieved only by on ever-

glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow:

‘On A Field, Sable, The Letter A, Gules’ “

These words alone are sufficient evidence for disproving the notion

that “The Scarlet Letter” is “about” Hester Prynne, the advanced feminist, or

that the story can be satisfactorily summarized either by the moral which

Hawthorne attaches to Dimmesdale, “Show freely to the world, if not your

worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!’ “ or by the doctrine

of felix culpa, “the fortunate fall”, that out of sin and evil comes good and that

8 VI, 241

29

Hester is educated and refined by her wrongdoing. The sentiment is too darkly

tragic to be appropriate to any of these conclusions, though Hawthorne at one

place and another in “The Scarlet Letter” has suggested the possibility of all of

them.

The true conclusion of “The Scarlet Letter” is an unresolved

contradiction – unresolved not from indecision or lack of thought, but from

honesty of imagination. Hawthorne gives the only answer that his formulation

of the terms permits. If we consider that the problem of “The Scarlet Letter” is

primarily the problem of Hester Prynne, the verdict is at best suspension of

judgment after full examination of the evidence. And, as we know, Hester

emerges from trial in better condition than her codefendants Dimmesdale and

Chillingworth.

This is the contradiction, and a very widely representative

contradiction it is: the sin of “The Scarlet Letter” is a symbol of the original

sin, by which no man is untouched. All mortals commit the sin in one form or

another, which is perhaps the meaning of “your worst” in the exhortation

occasioned by the death of Dimmesdale. Hester, having sinned, makes the best

possible recovery; and the crime itself is of all crimes the most excusable,

coming of passionate love and having “a consecration of its own”. Yet the sin

remains real and inescapable, and she spends her life in retribution, the death of

her lover Dimmesdale having finally taught her that this is the only way. This

is the dilemma: human beings by their nature must fall into error – and yet it

would be better if they did not.

The letter, an “ever-glowing point of light,” is gloomier than the shadow

of its background. The shadow, the “Field, Sable”, is roughly the atmosphere of

the sin. These are the odds, and no absolute superiority is granted to either.

The Puritan doctors are no fit judges of a woman’s heart; nor, on the

other hand, is Hester to be absolved. The letter is glowing, positive, vital, the

product of genuine passion, while the sable may certainly be taken as the

negation of everything alive. Yet the letter is gloomier.

30

These shades are both of hell, and there is no hue of heaven in “The

Scarlet Letter” that really offsets them. Sunlight is the nearest approach to it,

and its sway is too fleeting to have any great effect. In the forest scene of

chapters XVI-XIX sunshine, “as with a sudden smile of heaven”, bursts over

Hester and Dimmesdale, but this is merely a momentary relief. The hope that

accompanies it is short-lived, delusory, and dangerous. A more steadfast light,

“The sun, but little past its meridian”, shines down upon Dimmesdale as he

stands on the scaffold to confess his guilt. This is triumph, indeed, but little to

counterbalance the continual power of the “bale fire” and “lurid gleam” of the

letter. Hope and regeneration are sometimes symbolized in Hawthorne by the

celestial colours of dawn, transfigured by light: blues, greens, and golds.

Only introducing the supernatural level of heaven, the sphere of absolute

knowledge and justice and – hesitantly – of complete fulfillment can solve the

problem of The Scarlet Letter. This may seem to be another paradox, and

perhaps a disappointing one. Without doubt “The Scarlet Letter” pushes

towards the limit of moral judgment, suggesting many possible conclusions.

It is even relentless in its search in the depths of its characters. There is

yet, however, a point beyond which Hawthorne will not go; ultimate solutions

are not appropriate in the merely human world. His sympathy with Hester and

Dimmesdale is clear enough, but he allows them only to escape the irrevocable

spiritual ruin that befalls Chillingworth.

Figuratively his good wishes pursue them beyond life, but he does not

presume himself to absolve them. Even in the carefully staged scene of

Dimmesdale’s death, where every impulse of both author and reader demands

complete forgiveness, Hawthorne refuses to grant it. With his “bright dying

eyes” Dimmesdale looks into eternity, but nothing he sees there permits him to

comfort Hester. To her questions, “Shall we not meet again...? Shall we not

spend our immortal life together?’ “, he can answer only, ‘The law we broke! –

the sin here so awfully revealed! – let these alone be in thy thoughts! I fear! I

fear!’ “ A grim and unflinching conclusion, considering everything.

31

Dimmesdale is not of course Hawthorne, but the very preservation of dramatic

propriety at this crucial point is significant.

There are four states of being in Hawthorne: one subhuman, two human

and one superhuman. The first is Nature, which comes to our attention in “The

Scarlet Letter” twice.

It appears first in the opening chapter, in the wild rosebush which stands

outside the black browed Puritan jail, and whose blossoms might be imagined

to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to

the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep

heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.

The second entrance of Nature comes in the forest scene, where it

sympathizes with the forlorn lovers and gives them hope. “Such was the

sympathy of Nature – that wild, heathen Nature of the forest, never subjugated

by human law, nor illuminated by higher truth…” The sentence epitomizes

both the virtues of Nature and its inadequacy. In itself good, Nature is not a

sufficient support for human beings.

The human levels are represented by Hawthorne’s distinction between

Heart and Head. The heart is closer to nature, the head to the supernatural. The

heart may err by lapsing into nature, which means, since it has not the

innocence of nature, into corruption. The danger of the head lies in the opposite

direction. It aspires to be superhuman, and is likely to dehumanize itself in the

attempt by violating the human limit. Dimmesdale, despite his considerable

intellect, is predominantly a heart character, and it is through the heart that sin

has assailed him, in a burst of passion that overpowered both religion and

reason.

The demoniac Chillingworth is of the head, a cold experimenter and

thinker. It is fully representative of Hawthorne’s general emphasis that

Chillingworth’s spiritual ruin is complete.

Hester Prynne is a combination of head and heart, with a preponderance

of the head. Her original sin is of passion, but its consequences expose her to

the danger of absolute mental isolation. The centrifugal urge of the intellect is

32

counteracted in her by her duty to her daughter Pearl, the product of the sin,

and by her latent love for Dimmesdale. Pearl herself is a creature of nature,

most at home in the wild forest: “ … the mother-forest, and these wild things

which it nourishes, all recognized a kindred wildness in the human child”. She

is made human by Dimmesdale’s confession and death: “The great scene of

grief, in which the wild infant bore a part, had developed all her sympathies…”

The fourth level, the superhuman or heavenly, will perhaps merely by

confused by elaborate definition. It is the sphere of absolute insight, justice and

mercy. Few of Hawthorne’s tales and romances can be adequately considered

without taking it into account. As Mark van Doren has recently emphasized, it

is well to remember Hawthorne’s belief in immortality. It is because of the very

presence of the superhuman in Hawthorne’s thinking that the destinies of his

chief characters are finally veiled in ambiguity. He respects them as he would

have respected any real person by refusing to pass the last judgment, by leaving

a residue of mysterious individuality untouched. The whole truth is not for a

fellow human to declare.

These four states are not mutually exclusive. Without the touch of

nature, human life would be too bleak.

The Puritans of “The Scarlet Letter” are deficient in nature, and they are

consequently dour and over righteous. Something of the part that nature might

play in the best human life is suggested in the early chapters of The Marble

Faun, particularly through the character Donatello.

The defects of either Heart or Head in a state of isolation have already

been mentioned. And without some infusion of superhuman meaning into the

spheres of the human, life would be worse than bestial.

Perhaps only the important character in all of Hawthorne’s works finds

it possible to dispense completely with Heaven – Westervelt, of The Blithedale

Romance – and he is essentially diabolic. In some respects the highest and the

lowest of these levels are most closely akin, as if their relationship were as

points of a circle.

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The innocence of nature is like the innocence of heaven. It is at times,

when compared to the human, like the Garden before the serpent, like heaven

free of the taint of evil. Like infancy, however, nature is a stage which man

must pass through, whereas his destination is heaven. The juxtaposition of

highest and lowest nevertheless involves difficulties, when perfect goodness

seems equivalent to mere deprivation and virtue seems less a matter of

choosing than of being untempted.

The intensity of “The Scarlet Letter”, at which Hawthorne himself

was dismayed, comes from concentration, selection, and dramatic irony. The

concentration upon the central theme is unremitting. The tension is lessened

only once, in the scene in the forest, and then only delusively, since the hope of

freedom which brings it about is quickly shown to be false and even sinful.

The characters play out their tragic action against a background in

itself oppressive – the somber atmosphere of Puritanism.

Hawthorne calls the progression of the story “the darkening close of a

tale of human frailty and sorrow”. Dark to begin with, it grows steadily deeper

in gloom. The method is almost unprecedentedly selective. Almost every image

has a symbolic function; no scene is superfluous.

One would perhaps at times welcome a loosening of the structure, a

moment of wandering from the path.

The weedy grassplot in front of the prison; the distorting reflection of

Hester in a breastplate, where the Scarlet Letter appears gigantic; the tapestry

of David and Bathsheba on the wall of the minister’s chamber; the little brook

in the forest; the slight malformation of Chillingworth’s shoulder; the

ceremonial procession on election day – in every instance more is meant than

meets the eye.

The intensity of “The Scarlet Letter” comes in part from a sustained

and rigorous dramatic irony, or irony of situation. This irony arises naturally

from the theme of “secret sin”, or concealment. “Show freely of your worst”,

says Hawthorne; the action of “The Scarlet Letter” arises from the failure of

Dimmesdale and Chillingworth to do so. The minister hides his sin, and

34

Chillingworth hides his identity. This concealment affords a constant drama.

There is the irony of Chapter III, “The Recognition”, in which Chillingworth’s

ignorance is suddenly and blindingly reversed. Separated from his wife by

many vicissitudes, he comes upon her as she is dramatically exposed to public

infamy. From his instantaneous decision, symbolized by the lifting of his finger

to his lips to hide his tie to her, he precipitates the further irony of his sustained

hypocrisy.

In the same chapter Hester is confronted with her fellow-adulterer,

who is publicly called upon to persuade her as her spiritual guide to reveal his

identity. Under the circumstances the situation is highly charged, and his words

have a double meaning – one, to the onlookers, another far different to Hester

and the speaker himself. “If thou feelest it to be for thy soul’s peace, and that

thy earthly punishment will therefore be made more effectual to salvation, I

charge thee to speak out the name of thy fellow-sinner and fellow-sufferer!”

From this scene onward Chillingworth, by living a lie, arouses a

constant irony, which is also an ambiguity. With a slight shift in emphasis all

his actions can be given a very different interpretation. Seen purely from

without, it would be possibly to regard him as completely blameless. Hester

expresses this ambiguity in Chapter IV, after he has ministered to her sick

baby, the product of her faithlessness, with tenderness and skill. “Thy acts are

like mercy”, said Hester, bewildered and appalled.

“But thy words interpret thee as a terror!” Masquerading as a

physician, he becomes to Dimmesdale a kind of attendant fiend, racking the

minister’s soul with constant anguish. Yet outwardly he has done him nothing

but good. “What evil have I done the man?” asked Roger Chillingworth again.

“I tell thee, Hester Prynne, the richest fee that ever physician earned from

monarch could not have bought such care as I have wasted on this miserable

priest!”

Even when he closes the way to escape by proposing to take passage

on the same ship with the fleeing lovers, it is possible to consider the action

merely friendly. His endeavor at the end to hold Dimmesdale back from the

35

saving scaffold is from one point of view reasonable and friend like, although

he is a devil struggling to snatch back an escaping soul. “All shall be well! Do

not blacken your fame, and perish in dishonor! I can yet save you! Would you

bring infamy on your sacred profession?”

Only when Dimmesdale has successfully resisted does Chillingworth

openly reveal his purposes. With the physician the culminating irony is that is

seeking to damn Dimmesdale he has himself fallen into damnation. As he says

in a moment of terrible self-knowledge, “a mortal man, with once a human

heart, has become a fiend for his especial torment!” The effect is of an

Aristotelian reversal, where a conscious and deep-laid purpose brings about

totally unforeseen and opposite results.

Chillingworth’s relations with Dimmesdale have the persistent

fascination of an almost absolute knowledge and power working their will with

a helpless victim, a fascination which is heightened by the minister’s awareness

of an evil close beside him which he cannot place. “All this was accomplished

with a subtlety so perfect that the minister, though he had constantly a dim

perception of some evil influence watching over him, could never gain

knowledge of its actual nature”. It is a classic situation wrought out to its fullest

potentialities, in which the reader cannot help sharing the perverse pleasure of

the villain.

From the victim’s point of view the irony is still deeper, perhaps

because we can participate still more carefully in his response to it.

Dimmesdale, a “remorseful hypocrite”, is forced to live a perpetual lie in

public. His own considerable talents for self-torture are supplemented by the

situation as well as by the devoted efforts of Chillingworth. His knowledge is

an agony. His conviction of sin is in exact relationship to the reverence in

which his parishioners hold him. He grows pale and meager – it is the

asceticism of a saint on earth; his effectiveness as a minister grows with his

despair; he confesses the truth in his sermons, but transforms it “into the veriest

false-hood” by the generality of his avowal and merely increases the adoration

of his flock; every effort deepens his plight, since he will not – until the end –

36

make the effort of complete self-revelation. His great election-day sermon

prevails through anguish of heart; to his listeners divinely inspired, its power

comes from its undertone of suffering, “the complaint of a human heart,

sorrow-laden, perchance guilty, telling its secret, whether of guilt of sorrow, to

the great heart of mankind…”

While Chillingworth at last reveals himself fully, Dimmesdale’s

secret is too great to be wholly laid bare. His utmost efforts are still partially

misunderstood, and “highly respectable witness” interpret his death as a

culminating act of holiness and humility.

Along with this steady irony of situation there is the omnipresent

irony of the hidden meaning. The author and the reader know what the

characters do not. Hawthorne consistently pretends that the coincidence of the

action or the image with its significance is merely fortuitous, not planned, lest

the effect be spoiled by over insistence. In other words, he attempts to combine

the sufficiently probable with the maximum of arrangement. Thus the waxing

and the waning of sunlight in the forest scene symbolize the emotions of Hester

and Dimmesdale, but we accept this coincidence most easily if we can receive

it as chance.

Hawthorne’s own almost amused awareness of his problem helps us

to do so. Yet despite the element of play and the deliberate self-deception

demanded, the total effect is one of intensity. Hawthorne is performing a

difficult feat with sustained virtuosity in reconciling a constant stress between

naturally divergent qualities.

The character of Pearl illuminates this point. Pearl is pure symbol, the

living emblem of the sin, a human embodiment of the Scarlet Letter.

In Hawthorne's descriptions of Pearl as an infant and toddler, nature

imagery emphasizes Pearl's startling beauty and unpredictable, yet innocent,

character. Pearl's beauty and innocence are apparent from the time of her birth.

Hawthorne describes Pearl's "innocent life as a lovely and immortal

flower”.Even though Pearl is a product of the "guilty passion" between Hester

and Dimmesdale, both her soul and her body are untainted and flawless.

37

Hester notices that Pearl has no physical defects, but Pearl's character

has an unexplainable aspect of oddity and unpredictability. When she plays

near Hester's cottage, Pearl "smites down and uproots most unmercifully the

ugliest weeds" which she pretends are the Puritan children. Hester believes that

Pearl is so emotional and temperamental because the passion which Hester and

Dimmesdale experienced during their sinful act somehow transferred into

Pearl's soul.

However, Pearl's antipathy for the Puritans is justified; the children often

torment her for no good reason. When Hester and Pearl go into town, the

Puritan children stop playing and either surround Pearl and stare at her or

prepare to hurl mud at the unfortunate pair. Both actions by the Puritans result

in a fit of outrage by Pearl. One reason that the Puritans treat Pearl badly is

because of her mother's sin.

The Puritans believe that since Pearl is the product of adultery, she is

automatically evil and depraved. The Puritan hatred for Pearl is also due to the

fact that she, like Hester's scarlet letter, is beautiful, and they are in a way

jealous of both. Supposedly, Hester's scarlet 'A' is a punishment, but she

embroiders it richly and wears it with subtle pride. When the Puritans first see

the 'A', they want to replace it with an 'A' made out of rheumatic cloth. The

Puritans look at Pearl in the same way; they do not think Hester deserves such

a beautiful child. The Puritans like simple, bland things and shun beauty

because it is tempting.

This view of the Puritans appears again when the Reverend Mr. Wilson

first sees Pearl in Governor Bellingham's mansion. Mr. Wilson calls her a

"little bird of scarlet plumage”and asks her "what has ailed her mother to

bedizen her in this strange fashion". Mr. Wilson first compares Pearl to a bird,

something from nature, which the Puritans distrust, then implies that something

is wrong with Hester for tastelessly dressing Pearl in such beautiful, striking

clothing. In this instance, Mr. Wilson's comments are hypocritical because

Governor Bellingham, the leader of the Puritans, decorates his mansion

lavishly and enjoys many worldly pleasures. Hawthorne, who lived in the

38

Romantic period, included this passage to indicate that in his eyes, Pearl

is beautiful and the Puritans are wrong in thinking that Pearl is wicked. When

Pearl tells Mr. Wilson that her name is Pearl, he answers ,"'Pearl?-Ruby,

rather!- or Coral!-or Red Rose'". Even though Mr. Wilson disapproves of

Pearl's attire, he still acknowledges her beauty by comparing her to beautiful

things in nature. At the same, time, he shows his disapproval because he, like

most Puritans, distrusts nature.

Later on, Mr. Wilson asks Pearl if she knows who made her. She replies

by saying that "she had not been made at all but had been plucked by her

mother off the bush of wild roses that [grows] by the prison-door". Pearl's

answer tells the reader that she understands both her physical beauty and her

internal wildness because she compares herself to a wild rose. The answer's

creativity and unexpectedness also reveal Pearl's unusual, whimsical character.

At this point in the novel, the reader can already discern Pearl's fundamental

character traits.

As Pearl grows older, her isolation from the Puritans leads her to spend

more time with nature, and she continues to remind Hester of her sin. When

Hester goes to the seashore to talk to Chillingworth, she tells Pearl to go "to the

margin of the water and play with the shells and tangled sea-weed". In

response, Pearl "flies away like a bird" to the margin of the sea. Pearl is eager

to play with nature. She has grown used to having nature as a playmate and

finds playing with it enjoyable. Pearl builds "boats out of birch-bark...seize[s] a

live horseshoe [crab] by the tail...catches several five-fingers...lays out a jelly-

fish to melt in the warm sun", throws foam, and pelts sea-birds with pebbles.

When Pearl thinks that she actually hit a bird, however, she feels remorse for

having "done harm to a little being that was as wild as...herself".

While Pearl is wild and unpredictable at times, she has a kind heart. Pearl's

kinship with nature becomes apparent through the seashore imagery. Pearl

obviously is at ease with and delights in nature. She has chosen nature as an

ideal playmate because of her isolation from other humans.

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The Puritan children treat her as an outcast and the only interaction

between them and Pearl is malicious. After she stops throwing pebbles at birds,

Pearl uses some eel-grass to make a "freshly green" letter 'A' on her bosom and

runs back to Hester. When she sees Hester, Pearl laughs and points to the 'A' on

her bosom. Pearl's A reminds Hester of her sin, but the reader learns that Pearl

does not make the 'A' to hurt her mother. Instead, she does it because she is

curious about the nature of her mother's 'A'. Pearl has grown more mature and

kind since her toddler years. Nature has taught her to be sensitive and curious.

Pearl's closeness to nature and her innocence develop further as the novel

approaches its conclusion. While Hester and Pearl stroll through the forest on

their way to meet Dimmesdale, Pearl observes that the sunshine "'does not love

Hester'". The sunshine seems to "run away and hide itself because it is afraid of

something on Hester's bosom". Pearl, however, easily catches the sunshine

because she "wears nothing on her bosom yet". As soon as Hester gets close to

Pearl, the sunshine vanishes and it appears as if Pearl absorbs the energy.

Hawthorne uses the sunshine as a judge of innocence. The sunshine,

which is part of nature, never graces Hester and even avoids her because she is

a sinner and has a tainted soul. Pearl is the opposite. The sunshine loves her so

much that it plays enthusiastically with her. The mother and daughter soon

come upon a babbling brook. The brook sounds "kind, quiet, soothing, but

melancholy", like an unhappy child or a person who knows only sadness. Pearl

calls the brook "foolish and tiresome" and asks it why it is so sad. Pearl is like

the brook in some ways. She has been through hardships in her life such as

isolation and insults, but she is still too young to understand how to be

unhappy. Therefore, Pearl is actually quite different from the brook. The brook

has experienced many things and has existed long enough to understand the

world. Pearl, on the other hand, is young, naive, and innocent. She knows only

how to be happy. Hester points out that if Pearl "had a sorrow of her own, the

brook might tell [her] of it even as it is telling Hester of hers". Hester

comprehends the brook's melancholy mood because she has been through

hardships herself and has enough experience to be sorrowful. When

40

Dimmesdale arrives and Hester talks to him, Pearl goes off on her own to play.

Pearl is so close to nature that a wolf comes up and "smells of Pearl's robe, and

offers his savage head to be patted by her hand"

. Wolves can be as large as grown men and are aggressive hunters. This

image is effective because it accentuates the kindred relationship between Pearl

and nature. Pearl, like nature, is wild and uncontrollable. The Puritans can not

understand either one and therefore equate both to evil and the Devil. These

similarities bring Pearl and nature closer and let them understand each other.

Once again, Hawthorn contrasts his Romantic view of nature with that of the

Puritans.

While the Puritans see nature as wicked and tempting, Hawthorne sees it

as something benevolent and compassionate.

In the end, Dimmesdale finally decides on the course of action that he

must take to free his, Hester's, and Pearl's souls. On the holiday to welcome a

new governor to his office, Dimmesdale makes his fateful decision. He knows

that he is going to die and will not be able to follow through on the plans that

he and Hester made. He also realizes that no matter where he goes in the whole

world, Chillingworth, his tormentor, will be able to follow him, so the only

place he can go is into the afterlife. After giving his sermon, Dimmesdale asks

Hester to support him. They and Pearl walk onto the scaffold. After asking

Dimmesdale to stand with her and her mother numerous times, Pearl finally

receives her wish. Dimmesdale confesses his sin to the audience, then falls

down. Before he dies, he asks Pearl to kiss him, and she complies. At this

point, a complete change in Pearl occurs. She starts to cry, her first taste of

human joy and sorrow. She does not have to constantly struggle against society

anymore, and her duty as a messenger of anguish to Hester is also done. With

her father's confession and sacrifice of his life, Pearl is able to begin a new

existence.

Hawthorne's utilization of nature imagery illustrates Pearl's character,

whose beauty excites fear in the Puritans and whose eccentricity reminds

Hester of her sin. The Puritans seem negative and ignorant. Everything that

41

they can not explain is evil to them. The Enlightenment caused people to think

rationally, so in Hawthorne's time, many things that the Puritans knew nothing

about were understood and people were able to view the world more

optimistically. Pearl's character is a perfect example of something that is

completely different when seen from two points of view.

Her mission is to keep Hester’s adultery always before her eyes, to

prevent her from attempting to escape its moral consequences.

Pearl’s childish questions are fiendishly apt; in speech and in action

she never strays from the control of symbolic function; her dress and her looks

are related to the letter. When Hester casts the letter away in the forest, Pearl

forces her to reassume it by flying into an uncontrollable rage. Yet despite the

undeviating arrangement of every circumstance that surrounds her, no single

action of hers is ever incredible or inconsistent with the conceivable actions of

any child under the same conditions. Given the central improbability of her

undeviating purposiveness, she is as lifelike, as the brilliantly drawn children of

Richard Hughes’s “The Innocent Voyage”.

These qualities of concentration, selectivity and irony, which are

responsible for the intensity of “The Scarlet Letter”, tend at their extreme

toward excessive regularity and a sense of over-manipulation, although irony is

also a counteragent against them. This tendency toward regularity is balanced

by Hawthorne’s use of ambiguity. The distancing of the story in the past has

the effect of ambiguity.

Hawthorne so employs the element of time as to warn us that he

cannot guarantee the literal truth of his narrative and at the same time to

suggest that the essential truth is the clearer; as facts shade off into the

background, meaning is left in the foreground unshadowed and disencumbered.

The years, he pretends, have winnowed his material, leaving only what is

enduring. Tradition and superstition, while he disclaims belief in them, have a

way of pointing to truth.

Thus the imagery of hell-fire that occurs throughout “The Scarlet

Letter” is dramatically proper to the Puritan background and is attributed to the

42

influence of superstitious legend. It works as relief from more serious concerns

and still functions as a symbol of psychological and religious truth.

In Chapter III, as Hester is returned from the scaffold to the prison,

“It was whispered, by those who peered after her, that the scarlet letter threw a

lurid gleam along the dark passage-way of the interior”.

The imagery of the letter may be summarized by quoting a later

passage: “The vulgar, who, in those dreary old times, were always contributing

a grotesque horror to what interested their imaginations, had a story about the

scarlet letter which we might readily work up into a terrific legend.

They averred, that the symbol was not mere scarlet cloth, tinged in an

earthly dye-pot, but was red-hot with infernal fire, and could be seen glowing

all alight, whenever Hester Prynne walked abroad in the nighttime. And we

must needs say, it seared Hester’s bosom so deeply, that perhaps there was

more truth in the rumor than our modern incredulity may be inclined to admit”.

The lightness of Hawthorne’s tone lends relief and variety, while it

nevertheless reveals the function of the superstition. “The vulgar”, “dreary old

times”, “grotesque horror”, “work up into a terrific legend” – his scorn is so

heavily accented that it discounts itself and satirizes the “modern incredulity”

of his affected attitude. The playful extravagance of “red-hot with infernal fire”

has the same effect. And the apparent begrudging of the concession in the final

sentence – “And we must needs say” – lends weight to a truth so reluctantly

admitted.

Puritan demonology is in general used with the same effect. It has the

pathos and simplicity of an old wife’s tale and yet contains a deep subterranean

power which reaches into daylight from the dark caverns of the mind.

The Black Man of the unhallowed forest – a useful counterbalance to

any too-optimistic picture of nature – and the witch woman Mistress Hibbins

are cases in point.

The latter is a concrete example of the mingled elements of the

superstitious legend. Matter-of-factly, she is a Puritan lady of high rank, whose

ominous reputation is accounted for by bad temper combined with insanity. As

43

a witch, she is a figure from a child’s storybook, an object of delighted fear and

mockery.

Yet her fanciful extravagance covers a real malignity, and because of

it she has an insight into the secret of the letter. With one stroke she lays bare

the disease in Dimmesdale, as one who sees evil alone, but sees it with

unmatched acuteness: “When the Black Man sees one of his own servants,

signed and sealed, so shy of owning to the bond as is the Reverend Mr.

Dimmesdale, he hath a way of ordering matters so that the mark shall be

disclosed to the eyes of all the world”.

This use of the past merges into a deep-seated ambiguity of moral

meaning. Moral complexity and freedom of speculation, like the lighter

ambiguity of literal fact, temper the almost excessive unity and symmetry of

“The Scarlet Letter” and avoid a directed verdict.

The judgment of Hawthorne upon his characters is entirely clear,

although deliberately limited in its jurisdiction. But he permits the possibility of

other interpretations to appear, so that the consistent clarity of his own

emphasis is disguised9. Let us take for example the consideration of the heroine

in Chapter XIII, “Another View of Hester”.

After seven years of disgrace, Hester has won the unwilling respect

of her fellow-townsmen by her good works and respectability of conduct. From

one point of view she is clearly their moral superior: she has met rigorous

cruelty with kindness, arrogance with humility.

Furthermore, living as she has in enforced isolation has greatly

developed her mind. In her breadth of intellectual speculation she has freed

herself from any dependence upon the laws of Puritan society. “She cast away

the fragments of a broken chain”. She pays outward obedience to a system that

has no further power upon her spirit. Under other conditions, Hawthorne

suggests, she might as this juncture have become another Anne Hutchinson, the

founder of a religious sect, or a great early feminist.

9 Male, Roy R., Hawthorne’s Tragic Vision, the University of Texas Press, 1964, p. 117

44

The author’s conclusions about these possibilities, however, are

specially stated: “The scarlet letter had not done its office”. Hester is wounded

and led astray, not improved, by her situation. Hawthorne permits his reader, if

he wishes, to take his character from his control, to say that Hester Prynne is a

great woman unhappily born before her time, or that she is a good woman

wronged by her fellow men. But Hawthorne is less confident.

In the multiple interpretations, which constitute the moral ambiguities

of “The Scarlet Letter”, there is no clear distinction of true and false, but there

is a difference between superficial and profound. In instances where

interpretation of observed fact fuses with interpretation of moral meaning,

conclusions are generally relative to those who make them.

After Dimmesdale’s climactic death scene, most spectators testified to

having seen, on the breast of the unhappy minister, a scarlet letter – the very

semblance of that worn by Hester Prynne – imprinted in the flesh. As regarded

its origin, there were various explanations, all of which must necessarily have

been conjectural. Some affirmed that the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the

very day when Hester Prynne first wore her ignominious badge, had begun a

course of penance – which he afterwards, in so many futile methods, followed

out – by inflicting a hideous torture on himself.

Others contended that the stigma had not been produced until a long

time subsequent, when old Roger Chillingworth, being a potent necromancer,

had caused it to appear, through the agency of magic and poisonous drugs.

Others, again – and those best able to appreciate the minister’s peculiar

sensibility, and the wonderful operation of his spirit upon the body – whispered

their belief, that the awful symbol was the effect of the ever-active tooth of

remorse, gnawing from the inmost heart outwardly, and at last manifesting

Heaven’s dreadful judgment by the visible presence of the letter. Most singular

is the fact that some spectators have seen no letter at all.

The presence of so many possibilities hints strongly that the whole

truth is not to be found in any single choice, but Hawthorne’s own preference is

clearly indicated by “those best able to appreciate”.

45

In a different case all interpretations are equally false, or at least equally erring.

In Chapter XII, “The Minister’s Vigil”, a meteor flashes across the sky, which

to the morbid eye of Dimmesdale takes the form of a gigantic A. This vision is

attributed to the disordered mental state of the minister, though we cannot

accept even this disclaimer with complete simplicity. This being the night of

Governor Winthrop’s death, one good old Puritan interprets the portent as A

for Angel – an observation which has the effect of giving objective support to

Dimmesdale’s vision.

There is also the ambivalence of the Puritans. It is easy to pass them

by too quickly. One’s first impression is doubtless, as Hawthorne says

elsewhere, of a set of “dismal wretches”, but they are more than this.

The Puritan code is arrogant, inflexible, over righteous; and it is

remarked of their magistrates and priests that “out of the whole human family,

it would not have been easy to select the same number of wise and virtuous

persons, who would be less capable of sitting in judgment on an erring

woman’s heart…”

Nevertheless, after finishing “The Scarlet Letter” one might well ask

what merely human society would be better. With all its rigors, the ordeal of

Hester upon the scaffold is invested with awe by the real seriousness and

simplicity of the onlookers.

Hawthorne compares the Puritan attitude, and certainly not favorably,

to “the heartlessness of another social state, which would find only a theme for

jest in an exhibition like the present”. And it is counted as a virtue that the chief

men of the town attend the spectacle without less of dignity.

Without question they take upon themselves more of the judgment of

the soul than is fitting for men to assume, but this fault is palliated by their

complete sincerity. They are “a people amongst whom religion and law were

almost identical, and in whose character both were so thoroughly interfused,

that the mildest and the severest acts of public discipline were alike venerable

and awful”. By any ideal standard they are greatly lacking, but among erring

humans they are, after all, creditable.

46

Partly then as a result of the impact of the heart imagery, the reader

feels his principal concern altered once again. First he was in suspense about

the identity of Hester’s partner in sin. Then, as that question begins to be

answered, he wonders whether the minister will be publicly exposed and justice

be done. But almost immediately, in “The Leech” and “The Leech and his

Patient”, he becomes concerned to have the minister escape somehow the

persecutions of his tormentor. The central chapter of the relation between the

two men, “The Leech and his Patient”, begins and ends in heart imagery.

The most extended heart imagery is the forest scene. The forest in

which Hester and Pearl take their walk has all the attributes common to normal

human hearts in Hawthorne’s work. It is black, mysterious, dismal, dim,

gloomy, shadowy, obscure, and dreary. It is thought by the public to be where

the Black Man meets his accomplices. It has in its depths a stream which as it

mirrors the truth whispers “tales out of the heart of the old forest”. But when

Hester and Dimmesdale decide to follow the dictates of their hearts and,

escaping man’s law, live by nature, then “the wood’s heart of mystery”

becomes a “mystery of joy” and sunshine lights up the gloomy spot. In the four

chapters concerned with this meeting, heart imagery plays a leading part, so

that no analysis of the incident is likely to be adequate which does not take into

account.

Probably the implications contained in the names of the characters are

more important than the remaining patterns of imagery. Pearl, of course, gets

her name from the “pearl of great price” used in St. Matthew to suggest the

incomparable value of the hope of heaven. Hester’s initial mood of bitter

rebellion against her situation is clear in the naming of her child. And the other

chief characters too have significant names.

To the Puritans, Pearl is an imp, a demonic child, or a witch; she is

outside the law; unrestrained, apparently, by any of the strictures which shape

little Puritans, Hester, in her defiance of the Puritan interpretation, as if to

underline the absurdity of regarding as evil an infant who “was worthy to have

47

been brought forth in Eden; worthy to have been left there, to be the plaything

of the angels, after the world’s first parents were driven out.”

The scarlet or crimson colour links Pearl to roses, the traditional

symbol of beauty and love. The rose imagery helps us to understand why Pearl

must go to Europe at the end of the romance. She cannot thrive in the black-

flowering garden of New England, where English roses flourish but feebly and

native roses are unregarded.

“Hester” is a modern form of “Esther”; and in the Old Testament,

Esther is gifted with beauty, strength and dignity. Courageous and loyal, she

defends weak and oppressed people. The obvious parallel between the two

women contributes one more implication that Hester is to be seen as finally “in

the right”. And it offers another bit of evidence to those who like to stress the

feminist implications of the novel, for we may see the “weaker sex” defended

by Hester as but a variant of the weak people defended by Esther.

The minister’s name, Arthur, tends to suggest the devotion to a high

ideal associated to King Arthur. It is at once descriptive and ironic as the name

of Hester’s partner in adultery. His last name falls naturally into two parts, with

the root of the first part, “dim”, suggesting both weakness and darkness, and

the second part, “dale”, suggesting in its meaning of valley, the heart, of which

Hawthorne is so frequently reminded by any hollow, opening, or cavity.

Finally, “Chillingworth” is also made up of two parts, the first of

which suggests coldness and the second merit or worthiness. It is a name more

transparently descriptive of this man than Dimmesdale is of the minister. For

Chillingworth has, as he acknowledges to Hester, a cold heart, and his sin is

one of the cold sins. Yet he was once a worthy man: decent, self-controlled,

law-abiding, scholarly, “good” as the world tend to measure goodness, with

nothing lacking except the most important thing of all, the ability to love.

Names, then, are symbolic here, as they so frequently are in Hawthorne’s

works.

But Hawthorne’s richest symbol remains the scarlet “A”. Hawthorne

discovered the “A” in the Custom House, that deadening institution whose rigid

48

commitment to routine, mechanical measurement, and rules, threatened the

complete annihilation of his imagination. As a man “who felt it to be the best

definition of happiness to live throughout the whole range of his faculties and

sensibilities”, Hawthorne regarded the “A” as a bright point of hope – a release

from the latter day Puritan “custom” house of his age, and a promise of

imaginative fulfillment.

From the outset the A is an ambivalent symbol.

Its “scarlet woman” meaning for the Puritans is clear, but by the last

line of the story, when we see it as a heraldic “A Gules” on Hester’s and

Dimmesdale’s common tombstone, it has assumed a meaning that is beyond

the philosophy of any Puritan. All of the meanings with which Hawthorne

invests it are relevant; and all are united organically in Pearl, the living

embodiment of the “A”. The scarlet letter, finally, becomes Hawthorne’s

emblem of the human heart – of its imperfection, and its labyrinthine mixture

of good and evil. The letter is blood red (gules) rather than scarlet, for it

betokens “our common nature”.

From the Puritan point of view, the “A” stands specifically for

adultery and, in general terms, for sin – for the fallen aspects of man’s nature,

which must be brutally suppressed: sexual knowledge, sensory indulgence, and

the area of fancy and intuition which Puritanism labeled ”witch-craft”. The “A”

is further associated with the sin of Adam, with hell, infernal fire, Satan,

demons, fairies, and so on.

Hester’s understanding of the scarlet emblem comes slowly and

painfully, but Hawthorne’s treatment of the “A” leads the reader fairly quickly

to question its Puritan meaning and consider other possibilities. The sympathy

which the Madonna-like young mother of the first scaffold scene feels for

Hester suggests that the emotions of motherhood are perhaps closer to the truth

of human nature than the stern legality of “the righteous Colony of

Massachusetts, where iniquity is dragged out into the sunshine!”

If Governor Bellingham’s hollow steel armor reflects only glaring

sun, an enormously exaggerated “A”, and Pearl’s impish smile, the simple

49

Puritan “folk”, guided more by human feeling than doctrine and law,

sometimes think of Hester’s A as meaning able or angel. The A, it is rumored,

looks like “a nun’s cross”; it repels the devilish arrows of the Indians; as

embroidered by Hester, it is a work of art, it is a portent in the sky which the

“disease” in the minister’s “own heart and eye”10 makes him see as a cosmic

revelation of his depravity, but which Hawthorne sees as a sign of “the

daybreak that shall unite all who belong to one another”.

The point to be made here is that Hawthorne, however “tasteless” his

critics find his symbolism, is not merely fanciful. Every “A” image that he uses

adds a new shade of meaning to the symbol. The “A” becomes the center

towards which all extremes tend. And it is a living center, for Pearl represents it

in the flesh.

Pearl is also a victim of the Puritans' embracing works salvation in place

of Jesus' love ethics. A legalistic, works-oriented society must scrupulously

follow the law and perform the works prescribed. Failure to do so is believed to

bring down severe punishment.

The salient Old Testament concept in Pearl's case is described in

Exodus: "I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the

fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate

me" .A case that clearly demonstrates this is Achan's in the book of Joshua. He

violates God's injunction to take nothing sacred in a raid against Ai: he does

take some forbidden items and hides them in his tent. In a law-oriented society

what is the punishment for violating a commandment and keeping secrets from

the community? Not only does the community execute Achan but also his

family, who had no part in the sin.

In the same fashion, Pearl is alienated from the community because of

her mother's sin. In the chapter titled "Pearl," the narrator proclaims, "The child

could not be made amenable to rules. In giving her existence, a great law had

10 The Puritan ethos

50

been broken; and the result a being, whose elements were perhaps beautiful and

brilliant, but all in disorder. . . ."12 He goes on to discuss her passion and notes,

"All this enmity and passion had Pearl inherited by inalienable right, out of

Hester's heart. Mother and daughter stood together in the same circle of

seclusion from human society."13 He even suggests that at times "an evil spirit

possessed the child" and later that she was "the scarlet letter endowed with

life,"14 clearly a kind of punishment; but unlike Achan's punishment it is also an

instrument of salvation for her family because Hester's love and dedication to

the child "saved her [Nester] from Satan's snare."15

Hawthorne's "Conclusion" shows that Pearl turns out all right, though he

does not divulge the details of her development except to say that she is rich

because of the money left to her by Chillingworth. When the object of his

hatred dies, he is able to do something decent in taking care of his wife's child.

It is significant that Pearl, an illegitimate child, never assimilates into the

community that will not forget the stigma; instead, she establishes a good life

in England, where she marries a nobleman and sends expensive gifts of love to

Hester.

Pearl's turnaround is consistent with an often overlooked Old Testament

teaching about inherited sin from Ezek 18:19-20: "The soul that sinneth, it shall

die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father

bear the iniquity of the son; the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon

him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him." Ezekiel further 12 Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 91.

13Ibid., 94

14Ibid,102

15Ibid,117

1

51

notes that this son will be saved by good works. He does not mention grace or

love, which are vitally important to Christianity but often ignored or distorted

by the Puritans.

Although Hawthorne was aware of the sobriety and severity of

Puritanism, in some ways he found it more appealing than alternatives offered

by his contemporaries. For one thing, he must have realized that happiness was

a condition that Europeans and Americans came to believe they had a right to a

century after the events in The Scarlet Letter. In her time and place, being right

was more important than being happy, and being right consisted of keeping

one's covenants with God and with one's fellow humans.

Certainly, the Puritans believed that is how one overcomes the power of

evil in the universe. Puritanism, then, with its acceptance of the weakness of

the human and the presence of a powerful, corrupting evil force, was, for

Hawthorne, the most realistic arena in which to establish an understanding of

how to keep one's name, not in the invisible church as understood by the

Puritans, but on "the roll of mankind," to avoid breaking "the magnetic chain of

humanity." Less than forty years after The Scarlet Letter, Joseph Conrad in his

preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus ( 1897) articulates the same concept:

He [the artist] speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense

of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to

the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation-and to the subtle but invincible

conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts,

to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in

hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all

humanity-the dead to the living and the living to the dead.16

Puritanism was instructive for Hawthorne but too extreme, so he

modified it, suggesting that all who love and live honestly, keeping no vital 16 Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus: A Tale of the Sea (New York: Harper. 1951), 38.

52

secrets from the community, can experience a kind of redemptive love.

Hawthorne's closing admonition to the reader is not unlike the conclusion to a

sermon on the essence of loving and being loved: "Be true! Be true! Be true!"17

Chapter III

Hawthorne’s Mastership

“The scarlet letter was [Hester’s] passport into

regions where other women dared not tread. Shame,

Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers –

stern and wild ones – and they had made her

strong ...” 1Arthur Dimmesdale said: “Then, and

there, before the judgment sea t, thy mother, and

thou, and , must stand together. But the daylight of

this world shall not see our meeting!”2

Since its publication in 1850, Hawthorne’s masterpiece romance The

Scarlet Letter has been hailed by average readers and literary critics alike as

one of the finest pieces of literature ever to have come out of the pen of an

American writer. Not only regarded as “Hawthorne’s most widely read and

admired novel”3, The Scarlet Letter has also given numerous generations of

17 58Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 260

1.Hawthorne, p. 1702.ibid, p. 130.

3. Waggoner, p. 118

4. Ripley, p. 26.

53

critics bountiful opportunity for in-depth analysis of the novel’s plot,

characters, and meaning. A fair amount of scholarly attention has, for instance,

been devoted to Hawthorne’s “imposing splendor of portraiture”4.

In the case of The Scarlet Letter, this has been evidenced by critics´

particular interest in Hawthorne’s portrayal of two of the novel’s central

characters: the Boston townswoman Hester Prynne and the pastor Arthur

Dimmesdale.

Against the backdrop of mid-17th century Puritan society in the newly

founded American colonies, Hawthorne describes how these two characters´

lives are, each in its very own way, dramatically changed by one moment of

adulterous passion. It is the aim of the present paper to deliver a careful

analysis of Hester and Arthur at the center of which shall be the difficult social

and psychological circumstances the two characters encounter in the wake of

their adultery. It will equally be shown that Hester and Arthur embrace

different strategies in dealing with their situation. A plo t analysis reveals a

clear dilemma and duality of a confession versus concealment theme which

impacts greatly on the two characters and their behavior. Having been forced to

confess to adultery charges, Hester manages to reshape her life by confronting

pre sent demands while also hoping for future opportunities.

By contrast, Arthur is tormented and obsessed by his moment of moral

weakness in the past, wavering between reve - lation and dissimulation of his

deed as he doubletalks his way through the novel’s plo t. The first chapter of

this study intends to establish a framework for the ensuing character analysis.

Its aim will be to portray Puritan society as shown in Hawthorne’s work, so

that Hester’s and Arthur’s situation in the novel’s plot will become clear. An

interpretation of the two characters will follow in chapter two.

First, Hester’s behavior and the role she plays in the novel shall be

analyzed under the aforementioned confession theme. The second part will

54

render a similar analysis of Arthur, albeit under a concealment perspective. Part

three will focus on the revelatory elements of the forest and final scaffold scene

as central culmination points in the novel. The remarks in the conclusion will

sum up this paper’s line of argumentation while also pointing to areas that

might present further worthwhile opportunities for research into The Scarlet

Letter’s intriguing plot and meaning.

At the moment when The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850, the

American literary scene was dominated by the Transcendentalist movement;or

better by the influence of a certain personality that despite his efforts to avoid

publicity and assume the leadership of the movement, ended by being

considered the very representative of it: R. W. Emerson. Though

Transcendentalism lost coherence and force after the disappearance of The

Dial, it came to its last days after the collapse of Brook Farm, in 1847, after

unsuccessfully going over to Fourierism. Yet its impact was so powerful that

the movement acquired new forms and meanings with Thoreau and Whitman.

It is important to envisage the whole atmosphere of this period, not only

because Poe and Hawthorne, as contemporaries of Emerson,were compelled to

take it into consideration, but also because it simply put its mark on an entire

decade in such an authoritative way that it has to be pointed out.

Beyond the three mains reasons that stood at the bottom of the

movement-utopianism,revulsion against capitalism and technology, and the

attraction of the American “pastoral ideal”5 -Transcendentalism imposed itself

by focusing on a single personality,considered as exponential. Nowadays,

Emerson the master has been put aside in favour of Thoreau the disciple, on

account of the latter’s more direct and appealing writings.

But in the epoch of Nathaniel Hawthorne the literary scene was different

in opinion, and the publications of this important novel occurred in a special

climate. In form a Victorian novel, it cannot be expected to bear behind the

5 Lawrence Buell. The Transcendentalists in Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliot, Columbia U.P.,New York,1988,p.364

55

words chams of meaning and symbols. The conventionality of the writings

hides the unexpected and dizzing net of ideas teem beneath the apparently calm

and traditional phrases6.

The title itself invites a more profound pluge into the matter, becoming

step by step a sort of huge tower that closes inside a cluster of private

loneliness and private grief, all kept together by the feeling of guilt. While the

novel goes horizontally with the story, the author never ceases to look inwardly

in the hearts of his characters, in their conscience as mere mortals subjected to

errors.

Throughout the novel, 'The Scarlet Letter,'; Nathaniel Hawthorne

illustrates the themes with various dramatic colors. Of the array are the colors

green and gold, where green symbolizes different aspects of nature such as

tranquility, security, and gloominess, whereas gold represents all that pertains

to luxuriance, serenity and goodness. In certain chapters, it seems as if one

color is codependent with the other.

Light and darkness, sunshine and shadows, noon and midnight, are all

manifestations of the same images. Likewise, colors—such as red, gray, and

black—play a role in the symbolic nature of the background and scenery. But,

similar to the characters, the context determines what role the light or colors

play. The Scarlet Letter’s first chapter ends with an admonition to “relieve the

darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow” with “some sweet moral

blossom.” These opposites are found throughout the novel and often set the

tone and define which side of good and evil envelop the characters.

In Chapter 16, Hester and Dimmesdale meet in the forest with a “gray

expanse of cloud” and a narrow path hemmed in by the black and dense forest.

The feelings of the lovers, weighed down by guilt, are reflected in the darkness

of nature. Every so often, sunshine flickers on the setting. But Pearl reminds

her mother that the sun will not shine on the sinful Hester; it does shine,

6 Michael Davitt Bell. Nathaniel Hawthorne, in Columbia Literary History of the United States,p.420

56

however, when Hester passionately lets down her hair. The sun is the symbol

of untroubled, guilt-free happiness, or perhaps the approval of God and nature.

It also seems to be, at times, the light of truth and grace.

Darkness is always associated with Chillingworth. It is also part of the

description of the jail in Chapter 1, the scene of sin and punishment. The

Puritans in that scene wear gray hats, and the darkness of the jail is relieved by

the sunshine of the outside. When Hester comes into the sunshine from the

darkness, she must squint at the light of day, and her iniquity is placed for all to

see. Noon is the time of Dimmesdale’s confession, and daylight is the symbol

of exposure. Nighttime, however, is the symbol of concealment, and

Dimmesdale stands on the scaffold at midnight, concealing his confession from

the community. In the end, even the grave of Dimmesdale and Hester is in

darkness. “So sombre is it, and relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light

gloomier than the shadow ….” The light, of course, is the scarlet letter, shining

out of the darkness of the Puritanic gloom.

Colors play a similar role to light and darkness. One of the

predominant colors is red, seen in the roses, the letter, Pearl’s clothing, the

“scarlet woman,” Chillingworth’s eyes, and the streak of the meteor. At night

and always with the physician, the letter is associated with darkness and evil; in

the other associations, it is a part of nature, passion, lawlessness, and

imagination. The context determines the meaning.

Black and gray are colors associated with the Puritans, gloom, death,

sin, and the narrow path of righteousness through the forest of sin. Three

chapters that contain a multitude of color images are Chapters 5, 11, and 12.

The implication of the color green was most abundant in chapter sixteen,

where Hawthorne used much description to depict the dreariness within the

woods, yet adding a sense of security to it all. 'Here they sat down on a

luxuriant heap of moss, which, at some epoch of the preceding century, had

57

been a gigantic pine, with its root and trunk in the darksome shade”.There is,

apparently, plenty of references to the color green. Not only does green

represent nature in general, its reference to the forest is also the very depiction

of freedom. Nobody watches in the woods to report misbehavior, thus it is here

that people may do as they wish.The color gold is of dominance in this novel. It

is used frequently to describe richness and luxuriance. 'On the breast of her

gown, in fine red cloth surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic

flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter 'A.''; However, it carries an even

more important reference to the sun in chapter sixteen, the sun also

symbolizing guilt-free happiness. Pearl seems to absorb the sunlight while it

flees from Hester and her mark of sin. In chapter eighteen, the two colors,

green and gold, intertwines and implicates pure serenity. Amidst the green, lush

forest, Hester takes the letter off her bosom and instantly transforms into a new

person, a person finally revealing herself from under a shield of shame.

The sunlight, which had previously shunned her, now seeks her out as

the forest seems to glow, the golden sunshine pouring 'a very flood into the

obscure forest, gladdening each green leaf, transmuting the yellow fallen ones

to gold, and gleaming adown the gray trunks of the solemn trees.

In this novel, the colour red acquires other connotations than usually,

standing not only for love, but also for life. On the other hand, black is death,

and Hester is compared in the beginning to a black flower (“It is our fate. Let

the black flower blossom as it may!”), while in the end, on the reverend‘s tomb

only black weeds grow at leisure. The fruit of their sinful relationship is black-

eyed Pearl, whose name brings in the whiteness and brilliancy of the pearl – in

the Christian tradition it symbolizes the absolute purity and sacredness, being

used to adorn Virgin Mary’s icons. It is the only shaft of light in the novel, the

rest of the writing is very much like the paintings of Rembrandt.

Red, black, grey, sunlight, firelight, and less frequent green, yellow,

blue, and purple are not simply descriptive of the setting and characters. In a

very real sense they are themselves actors in the story that moves through and

58

behind the story. Even in their absence they help to tell the tale. When we find

that the most strongly and frequently presented colours are those most

commonly associated with negative or ambiguous moral values, or with

positive natural values, and that the light of positive moral and spiritual values

is both less vivid and less frequent, we are not surprised. The first chapter

prepared us for this. Perhaps the largest generalization we may draw from a

study of the approximately four hundred and twenty-five light and colour

images is that Hawthorne conceived, but when writing the novel did not

strongly feel, the possibility of escape from evil and the past.

The technique Hawthorne uses underlines the idea that the past is not

a problem, and “The Scarlet Letter” is a transition to the present time, “though

that convention of the historical novel which evokes the story from faded relics

and fictitious documents”.11 The piece of embroidered cloth that still retains

some of the splendor of the stitch-work is very much similar to the cloth of

time, on which these possible events have traced a complicated pattern.

11 Agostino Lombardo, American Literature to 1900, The Penguin History of Literature, ed. By Marcus Cunliffe, vol. 8, London, 1993, p. 180.

59

Conclusion

Published in 1850, The Scarlet Letter met a warm reception being the

tragic story of a woman’s shame and the cruel treatment she suffers at the

hands of the Puritan society in which she lives.Hester Prynne as a character

proves that morality is not what conventions claim to be, and the symbol she is

forced to wear loses its firm contours. Chaucer’s Prioress wore a similar letter

„A”, but it signified sacred love, under the heading „Amor vincit omnia”.Due

to her courage and constant love, Hester could wear as proudly „A”for

„Admirable”. The same could not be said about Arthur Dimmesdale who

behaved like a hypocrite and only in the end, by means of the open confession,

redeems himself and Hester.

The scene of the gigantic projection of his inner anguish and shame

acquires thus a new dimension, even if the interpretation was centered on him

as an epicentre of the circular ripples created by his sin. The projection moves

outwards from within, expanding to the boundaries of the sky; the movement is

reversed in comparison with the movement of the meteor. But once again the

writing proposes two contradictory images, yet perfectely compatible.

Though on the scaffold the reader places Hester and Pearl too, what is

explicitly shown is the reverend; somewhere in front of him but on the bare

ground, there appears Chillingworth. Nothing is mentioned about any other

witness of the scene; it is as if the author simply effaced anybody else just to

concentrate better on the two men: the lover and the husband. It is an unusual

situation, and the injured party is represented as having an evil dimension in

60

spite of the Christian morals. It is the husband who reveals the darkest chasm, a

situation that could be guessed from his own name that gathers two antithetical

notions: „Chill” and „Worth”; each word has a semantic sphere of its own: the

first is bound to coldness and a lack of heart/human feelings, and moreover is

associated with the inflexible mind, the latter is linked with moral values,

human warmth and appreciation of merits.

Hawthorne foregrounds on various parts of the human structure: about

Dimmesdale he says that „we impute it, therefore, solely to the disease in his

own eye and heart” that the reverend saw the huge letter in the sky. As for the

physician, the „disease”is in his intellect, giving birth to a different kind of sin:

that of the pride of the mind.

Between the two men there stands only the image of the red

letter,already becoming of a heraldic element and less of a shameful mark. The

heraldry accepts few colours, and the red „A” is set against a background of

black and grey, but the final words engraved on Hester’s tombstone could be

accepted as the motto of this emblem: „ On a field, sable, the letter A, gules”.

The convension of the historical novel that springs up from a

supposedly found old document sustains the impression of veridicity, and the

novel is only an insight into the allegedly true ancient story. The proof the

narrator found-an old cloth embroidered lavishly with an „A”—introduces the

reader to a world lone gone from which only the red embroidery survuved. It is

then only love that braved time, since red is the colour of love and life, unlike

black which stands for death.

61

Selected Bibliography:

1. *** American Literature, The Penguin History of Literature, ed. By

Marcus Cunliffe, vol. 8, London, 1993.

2. Francis J. Bremen The Puritan Experience, rev. ed. (Hanover:

University Press of New England, 1995)

3. Burdescu, Felicia – American Literature, Tipografia Universităţii din

Craiova, 2003.

4.Burdescu, Felicia—Tracing American Literature,Scrisul Românesc

Craiova, 2004

5. Lawrence Buell. The Transcendentalists in Columbia Literary History

of the United States, ed. Emory Elliot, Columbia U.P.,New York,1988,

6.Michael Davitt Bell. Nathaniel Hawthorne, in Columbia Literary

History of the United States,

7.Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus: A Tale of the Sea (New

York: Harper. 1951)

8.Elder, Marjorie J. – Nathaniel Hawthorne. Transcendental Symbolist,

Ohio University Press, 1969

9.John Gerber , ‘Form and Content in The Scarlet Letter’, New England

Quarterly, XVII (March 1944)

62

10. Fogle, Richard Harter – Hawthorne’s Fiction: The Light and the Dark,

University of Oklahoma Press, 1964

11. Gollin, Rita K. – Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Truth of Dreams,

Louisiana State University Press, 1979

12. D.H. Lawrence, in his Studies in Classic American Literature (New

York: Viking, 1961),

13. Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter. A Romance, with a

Introductory by Alfred Kazin, David Campbell Publishers, 1992

14. Levin, Harry – The Power of Blackness, Alfred A. Knopf, New York,

1976

15. Male, Roy R. – Hawthorne’s Tragic Vision, The University of Texas

Press, 1957

16.Charles Ryskamp, "The New England Sources of The Scarlet Letter,"

American Literature 31 (1959),

17.Gordon H. Roper, ed. , ‘Introduction’ to The Scarlet Letter and

Selected Prose Works ( New York, 1949)

18. Martin, Terence – Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twayne Publishers, 1965

19. McPherson, Hugo – Hawthorne as Myth-Maker. A Study in

Imagination, University of Toronto Press,

1953

20. Wagenknecht, Edward – Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Man, His Tales

and Romances, The Continuum

Publishing Company, 1998

21. Waggoner, Hyatt H. – Hawthorne. A Critical Study, Harvard

University Press, 1963.

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