The Scarlet Letter
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
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eNotes: Table of Contents
1. The Scarlet Letter: Introduction
2. The Scarlet Letter: Overview
3. The Scarlet Letter: Nathaniel Hawthorne Biography
4. The Scarlet Letter: Summary
5. The Scarlet Letter: Summary and Analysis
♦ Chapter 1 Summary and Analysis
♦ Chapter 2 Summary and Analysis
♦ Chapter 3 Summary and Analysis
♦ Chapter 4 Summary and Analysis
♦ Chapter 5 Summary and Analysis
♦ Chapter 6 Summary and Analysis
♦ Chapter 7 Summary and Analysis
♦ Chapter 8 Summary and Analysis
♦ Chapter 9 Summary and Analysis
♦ Chapter 10 Summary and Analysis
♦ Chapter 11 Summary and Analysis
♦ Chapter 12 Summary and Analysis
♦ Chapter 13 Summary and Analysis
♦ Chapter 14 Summary and Analysis
♦ Chapter 15 Summary and Analysis
♦ Chapter 16 Summary and Analysis
♦ Chapter 17 Summary and Analysis
♦ Chapter 18 Summary and Analysis
The Scarlet Letter
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♦ Chapter 19 Summary and Analysis
♦ Chapter 20 Summary and Analysis
♦ Chapter 21 Summary and Analysis
♦ Chapter 22 Summary and Analysis
♦ Chapter 23 Summary and Analysis
♦ Chapter 24 Summary and Analysis
6. The Scarlet Letter: Quizzes
♦ Chapters 1-4 Questions and Answers
♦ Chapters 5-8 Questions and Answers
♦ Chapters 9-12 Questions and Answers
♦ Chapters 13-15 Questions and Answers
♦ Chapters 16-19 Questions and Answers
♦ Chapters 20-22 Questions and Answers
♦ Chapters 22-24 Questions and Answers
7. The Scarlet Letter: Essential Passages
♦ Essential Passages by Character: Hester Prynne
♦ Essential Passages by Theme: Moral Cowardice
8. The Scarlet Letter: Characters
9. The Scarlet Letter: Themes
10. The Scarlet Letter: Style
11. The Scarlet Letter: Historical Context
12. The Scarlet Letter: Critical Overview
13. The Scarlet Letter: Essays and Criticism
♦ A Characterization of the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale
♦ What is Sin? The Art of Forgiveness in The Scarlet Letter
♦ Is Hester Prynn a Role Model?
♦ The Evolution of Symbols in The Scarlet Letter
♦ Historical Concerns and the Emblem
♦ The Scarlet Letter
♦ Arthur Dimmesdale as Tragic Hero
14. The Scarlet Letter: Suggested Essay Topics
15. The Scarlet Letter: Sample Essay Outlines
16. The Scarlet Letter: Compare and Contrast
17. The Scarlet Letter: Topics for Further Study
18. The Scarlet Letter: Media Adaptations
19. The Scarlet Letter: What Do I Read Next?
20. The Scarlet Letter: Bibliography and Further Reading
The Scarlet Letter: Introduction
Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter is famous for presenting some of the greatest interpretive
difficulties in all of American literature. While not recognized by Hawthorne himself as his most important
work, the novel is regarded not only as his greatest accomplishment, but frequently as the greatest novel in
American literary history. After it was published in 1850, critics hailed it as initiating a distinctive American
literary tradition. Ironically, it is a novel in which, in terms of action, almost nothing happens. Hawthorne's
emotional, psychological drama revolves around Hester Prynne, who is convicted of adultery in colonial
Boston by the civil and Puritan authorities. She is condemned to wear the scarlet letter "A" on her chest as a
permanent sign of her sin. The narrative describes the effort to resolve the torment suffered by Hester and her
co-adulterer, the minister Arthur Dimmesdale, in the years after their affair. In fact, the story excludes even
the representation of the passionate moment which enables the entire novel. It begins at the close of Hester's
eNotes: Table of Contents
2
imprisonment many months after her affair and proceeds through many years to her final acceptance of her
place in the community as the wearer of the scarlet letter. Hawthorne was masterful in the use of symbolism,
and the scarlet letter "A" stands as his most potent symbol, around which interpretations of the novel revolve.
At one interpretive pole the "A" stands for adultery and sin, and the novel is the story of individual
punishment and reconciliation. At another pole it stands for America and allegory, and the story suggests
national sin and its human cost. Yet possibly the most convincing reading, taking account of all others, sees
the "A" as a symbol of ambiguity, the very fact of multiple interpretations and the difficulty of achieving
consensus.
The Scarlet Letter: Overview
Background
The years in which Nathaniel Hawthorne lived and wrote were turbulent ones for the young nation. The
country did share a cultural harmony based on strong community values linking hard work and virtue to
success. In addition, the majority of citizens shared the idea that the United States, under divine guidance, was
destined for greatness. Among the negatives, however, was the sense that some of the original values of the
Revolution were being lost. Political reform movements sprang up. Utopian experiments were tried. New
religious sects, unhappy with old theologies, broke away from the established churches. Over the course of
Hawthorne’s life, the United States was engaged in three wars, skirmishes with the Native American peoples,
economic depressions, and problems with newly arriving immigrants. Looming large on the horizon and
eventually leading to civil war was the conflict over slavery. Like that of many writers, Hawthorne’s work
reflects the times in which he lived.
The idea of writing as a career was also evolving. Increased literacy was creating a market for mass-produced
books. Fiction became increasingly popular with readers, and the young nation was looking for writers who
might compete on the cultural level of the Europeans. Writing became a way to possible fame and fortune. To
be financially successful, however, a writer had to be very good and productive at his craft. Most writers had
to work at occupations other than writing to support their families.
The Scarlet Letter was well received when it was published in 1850. It is one of those rare works which,
recognized as a “classic” immediately upon publication, has remained in print and impressed generations of
readers. Despite the desire of the reading public in 1850 for a balance of humor and pathos in new works, the
publisher was enthusiastic over what Hawthorne thought to be a defect— The Scarlet Letter stressed the dark
and somber side of human affairs.
The critics were nearly unanimous in their proclaiming The Scarlet Letter a major American novel. History
has proven these critics right; The Scarlet Letter has never been out of print in its century-and-a-half
existence. While very religious critics found his topic—a couple enmeshed in adultery—to be immoral, and
Hawthorne’s treatment of them too sympathetic, most commented on the novel’s stylistic perfection, its
intensity of effect, and its insight into the human soul. Hawthorne was quickly elevated to the position of the
nation’s foremost man of letters.
List of Characters
The narrator—Though he does not participate in the plot, the narrator is a storyteller who presents various
versions of events and, from the vantage point of 1850, comments on the characters and their actions.
The people of Boston in the 1640s—Puritan colonists who set out to purify their lives and who live under strict
moral codes. They punish the adulteress, Hester Prynne, by making her continually wear a scarlet letter “A”
as she lives among them.
The Scarlet Letter: Introduction
3
The town beadle—A town official who leads Hester to the scaffold, the place of public punishment, and reads
out her sentence.
Hester Prynne—A young Englishwoman who has given birth to a child out of wedlock and is now forced to
wear the scarlet letter “A,” publicly marking her as an adulteress. She refuses to make known the identity of
the father.
Pearl—The daughter of Hester Prynne and her unknown lover; she brings both pleasure and pain to Hester.
Roger Chillingworth—The assumed name of Hester’s husband who sent her ahead to Boston and who arrives
to witness her disgrace and his. He is determined to find the identity of her lover and to exact his revenge. He
has lived among the native peoples and learned their herbal medicines.
The Reverend Mr. John Wilson—The eldest clergyman of Boston who thinks highly of the Reverend
Dimmesdale. He is concerned that Pearl be properly raised.
Governor Bellingham—The royal appointee who oversees the political needs of the colony.
The Reverend Mr. Arthur Dimmesdale—A young clergyman, who agonizes for many years over his real or
imagined sinfulness and unworthiness.
Master Brackett—The jailer who summons Chillingworth to calm Hester and her child after the scaffold
ordeal.
Mistress Hibbins—A sister of the governor and a reputed witch. She taunts both Hester and Dimmesdale about
their secret.
The sea captain—A man known to Hester through her charity work. He agrees to take Hester, Pearl, and
Dimmesdale from Salem to Bristol, England.
Summary of the Novel
On a day in June 1642, the people of the Puritan colony of Boston await the public humiliation of a sinner
among them. Hester Prynne is to stand on the scaffold in the village square for three hours. The red letter “A”
which she has embroidered on her dress and the baby she holds in her arms brand her as an adulteress.
Hester refuses to name the father. Her husband, an old scholar, had sent her ahead two years earlier and is
now in the crowd observing the scene. Under the guise of a medical doctor and the assumed name of Roger
Chillingworth, Dr. Prynne demands unsuccessfully the name of the child’s father and vows revenge on him.
Hester takes up residence with her daughter Pearl at the edge of the village. Chillingworth remains as the town
physician and moves in with the young Reverend Dimmesdale, whose physical health is deteriorating but
whose sermons about sin are more powerful than ever. Chillingworth determines that Dimmesdale is indeed
the father of Pearl and torments the minister with innuendo and debate while keeping him alive with
medicines. During this period Hester successfully rebuffs efforts to remove Pearl from her keeping.
For seven years, Hester suffers her outcast state until the deterioration of the minister’s health forces her to
confront him. Arthur Dimmesdale, her lover, and Hester meet in the forest where they renew their love and
commitment and resolve to return to England together. However, the minister is unable to endure his spiritual
agony and mounts the public scaffold in the dark of night, confessing his sin where no one can hear him. He is
discovered by Hester and Pearl, and observed there by Chillingworth, who persuades him that his confession
is a symptom of his illness.
The Scarlet Letter: Overview
4
The next morning, however, the minister leaves a public procession to mount the scaffold in the light of day.
Joined by Hester and Pearl, and unsuccessfully restrained by Chillingworth, Dimmesdale confesses his guilt
and dies. Chillingworth, now deprived of his life’s purpose, dies within a year, leaving his fortune to Pearl.
Mother and daughter leave Boston, but many years later, Hester returns to take up quiet residence and resume
wearing the scarlet letter and doing good works.
Estimated Reading Time
Hawthorne prefaces his novel with an introductory essay entitled “The Custom-House” which an average
reader could finish in an hour and ten minutes. If you are assigned the essay to read, Hawthorne’s style and
vocabulary level will probably require that you read the essay in two or three sittings, taking notes as you
read.
Reading The Scarlet Letter by itself will require about ten hours for the average reader. Read the novel in its
entirety or in sections as presented in these Enotes. Keep notes as you read and compare them to the
summaries and comprehension questions that follow to confirm your understanding of ideas and events.
The Scarlet Letter: Nathaniel Hawthorne Biography
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s life seems characterized by continued efforts to make enough money to support
himself and his family interspersed with creative bursts of writing. He was born in Salem, Massachusetts on
July 4, 1804, the second of three children. His father, Captain Hathorne (the writer added the w to his name
when he began his writing career), was absent at his birth and died at sea when Nathaniel was four years old.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
From the ages of nine to twelve Nathaniel was unable to be active or to go to school due to a foot injury. Since
he had little interaction with children his own age, he developed a fondness for reading, especially the
classics. In the summer of 1816 his mother moved the family to Maine to live on family property there. Here
The Scarlet Letter: Nathaniel Hawthorne Biography
5
Nathaniel grew to love the freedom of the wilderness.
During the winters Nathaniel returned to Salem for schooling. From 1821 to 1823 he attended Bowdoin
College in Brunswick, Maine where he met three men who later influenced his life. One was Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, the well-known poet. The second, Franklin Pierce, became the fourteenth president
of the United States and later was able to help Hawthorne financially with a political appointment. The third,
Horatio Bridge, helped Hawthorne publish his first collection of stories.
After graduation Hawthorne spent the next twelve years at his mother’s house reading voraciously and
practicing his writing skills. During this time he had only a few short works published. In 1837 his college
classmate Bridge helped him publish Twice-Told Tales, a collection of stories which brought him some notice
as a writer, but not very much income.
When he became engaged to Sophia Peabody in 1839, Hawthorne, needing more income, took a position in
the Custom House at Boston. He did not enjoy the job and was not able to write very much during this period.
In 1841 he invested a thousand dollars in Brook Farm, an experimental community in Massachusetts where he
thought he could support himself with labor and be free to write. Finding himself too exhausted to write, he
left after a few months. Encouraged by increased income from magazine writing, Nathaniel and Sophia were
married in Boston on July 9, 1842.
The newly married couple moved to Concord, Massachusetts. There, while living in the now-famous “Old
Manse,” Hawthorne came to know many leading Transcendentalist thinkers such as Emerson, Thoreau, and
Alcott. During this time he was able to write and publish, but was still not able to support his family, which by
1844 included a daughter. Poverty even forced the family to break up briefly.
In 1846 Hawthorne secured an appointment as Surveyor of the Custom House at Salem through the influence
of his Bowdoin friend, Franklin Pierce. That same year a son was born, and Hawthorne was able to publish
Mosses from an Old Manse. A change in administrations forced Hawthorne out of the post, freeing him to
begin writing The Scarlet Letter. During this time he became friends with Herman Melville who was writing
Moby Dick.
In his years of reading, (supposedly, Hawthorne read almost every title and document in the Salem
Antheneum) Hawthorne researched the role in history of his ancestors, the Judges Hathorne of Salem, who
were among the original settlers of the colony. Judge Hathorne, the younger, had pronounced a sentence of
death on several persons found guilty of witchcraft in the legendary Salem Witchcraft Trials.
Hawthorne also learned, through his reading of the historical and court documents of Salem and Boston, that a
woman found guilty of adultery actually was sentenced to wearing a red letter “A” as a brand of her
sinfulness. This information was the seed of a novel wherein Hawthorne tries to imagine the times when such
a verdict would be possible and the sufferings of the people caught in such a harsh judgment.
The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850, was well-received, but again Hawthorne did not benefit financially to
any great extent. Over the next few years, as the family moved from place to place, Hawthorne published The
House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, A Wonder Book for Boys and Girls, Tanglewood Tales,
and A Life of Pierce. The last, a campaign biography for his former classmate, earned him an appointment as
United States Consul at Liverpool, England.
As Consul in England, Hawthorne kept extensive notebooks during the years 1853 to 1857, but was unable to
write any fiction. The next two years were spent in Italy where he began The Marble Faun, his last novel. In
1859 the family returned to England where Hawthorne published The Marble Faun. In 1860 the Hawthornes
returned to the United States.
The Scarlet Letter: Nathaniel Hawthorne Biography
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Hawthorne experienced failing health and was unable to complete any works over the next four years. He died
on May 19, 1864 while on a brief vacation with Franklin Pierce.
The Scarlet Letter: Summary
Part I
The Scarlet Letter opens with an expectant crowd standing in front of a Boston prison in the early 1640s.
When the prison door opens, a young woman named Hester Prynne emerges, with a baby in her arms and a
scarlet letter "'A" richly embroidered on her breast. For her crime of adultery, to which both the baby and the
letter attest, she must proceed to the scaffold and stand for judgment by her community.
While on the scaffold, Hester remembers her past. In particular, she remembers the face of a "misshapen"
man, "well stricken in years," with the face of a scholar. At this moment, the narrator introduces an aged and
misshapen character, who has been living "in bonds" with "Indian" captors. He asks a bystander why Hester is
on the scaffold. The brief story is told: two years earlier, Hester had preceded her husband to New England.
Her husband never arrived. In the meantime, she bore a child; the father of the infant has not come forward.
As this stranger stares at Hester, she stares back: a mutual recognition passes between them.
On the scaffold, Boston's highest clergyman, John Wilson, and Hester's own pastor, Rev Dimmesdale, each
ask her to reveal the name of her partner in crime. Reverend Dimmesdale makes a particularly powerful
address, urging her not to tempt the man to lead a life of sinful hypocrisy by leaving his identity unnamed.
Hester refuses.
After the ordeal of her public judgment, the misshapen man from the marketplace—her long lost
husband—visits her, taking the name Roger Chillingworth. When she refuses to identify the father of her child,
he vows to discover him and take revenge. He makes Hester swear to keep his identity a secret.
Part II
Now freed, Hester and her baby girl, Pearl, move to a secluded cabin. The narrator explains that
There is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which
almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot
where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime.
Whether for this reason, or for others, Hester stays in the colony. She earns a living as a seamstress. Hester
has "in her nature a rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic" that shows in her needlework. Although the
Puritans' sumptuary laws (which regulate personal expenditure and displays of luxury) restrict ornament, she
finds a market for her goods—the ministers and judges of the colony have occasion for pomp and
circumstance, which her needlework helps supply. She uses her money to help the needy, although they scorn
her in return. Hester focuses most of her love, and all of her love of finery, on her daughter, her "pearl of great
price." Pearl grows up without the company of other children, a wild child in fabulous clothing. Even her
mother questions her humanity and sees her as an ethereal, almost devilish, "airy sprite."
When Pearl is three, Hester discovers that certain "good people" of the town, including Governor Bellingham,
seek to "deprive her of her child." She goes to the governor and pleads her case. She and Pearl find the
governor in the company of Rev. Wilson, Rev. Dimmesdale, and his now close companion, Dr.
Chillingworth. Pearl inexplicably runs to Rev. Dimmesdale and clasps his hand. To the men, Hester argues
that God has sent Pearl both to remind her of her sin, and to compensate her for all she has lost. When they
seem unswayed, Hester throws herself on Rev. Dimmesdale's mercy. He endorses her argument: Providence
has bound up both sin and salvation in Pearl, whom Hester must be allowed to care for herself. The men
The Scarlet Letter: Summary
7
reluctantly agree.
Since his arrival, Roger Chillingworth has assumed the identity of a physician. His scholarly background,
combined with a knowledge of New World plants gained from his "Indian" captors, have prepared him well
for this role. But healing masks his deeper purpose: revenge. He "devotes" himself to Rev. Dimmesdale,
whose health has greatly declined. Chillingworth takes up lodging in the same house as the minister. As time
passes, an "intimacy" grows up between them, and they seem to enjoy the difference in their points of view, as
men of science and religion.
Unsuspected by his victim, Chillingworth digs into the "poor clergyman's heart, like a miner searching for
gold." The only clue to Dimmesdale's condition lies in a characteristic gesture: he frequently presses his hand
on his heart. One day, when Dimmesdale sleeps heavily (perhaps having been drugged), Chillingworth looks
under his shirt. He sees something that the reader does not—something that evokes a "wild look of wonder,
joy, and horror!" From that moment, their relationship changes for the worse. Having mastered Dimmesdale's
secret, Chillingworth grows increasingly ugly, increasingly diabolical, and his real purpose becomes more
perceptible. Many townspeople become convinced that Satan himself has sent him to torment the young
minister.
Part III
Dimmesdale's secret has a paradoxical effect on his religious career. He knows himself to be the worst of
sinners, and his sin makes his sermons more heartfelt, and more effective. This success intensifies his inner
torment, and increases his sense of hypocrisy. One night he wanders out and climbs onto the scaffold. He
considers waking the town and confessing his guilt. Hester and Pearl, after watching by a deathbed, find him,
and join him. By this time Pearl is seven years old, and Hester's reputation has improved; now many associate
the "A" with "Able," because of her good works. Pearl asks the minister if he will stand there with them the
next day at noon; he promises that they will stand together—not tomorrow—but on "judgment day." A light
suddenly bursts in the sky, appearing, to some, as the letter "A." Their vigil ends when Chillingworth appears
and takes Dimmesdale home. Hester, disturbed by Dimmesdale's obvious torment, confronts Chillingworth.
She entreats him to stop his vengeful scheme. He refuses. Pearl guesses at the connection between the
reverend and her mother, but cannot wholly understand. She fixates on her mother's scarlet "A" in an ominous
way. Worried that she has corrupted her child and both men, Hester decides to intervene and to tell
Dimmesdale the truth.
Hester waits for Dimmesdale with Pearl in the woods. In the forest, the sun shines on Pearl, but never on
Hester, who seems always enveloped in dark and shadow. Hester tells Dimmesdale all. The reader's
suspicions about Dimmesdale are confirmed. '"Oh Arthur,' |cries] she, 'forgive me! . . . he whom they call
Roger Chillingworth!—he was my husband!"' Dimmesdale realizes how full of deception his life has been. He
and Hester decide to leave together and start a new life. Hester removes her scarlet letter and lets down her
hair. For a moment, they are happy in their love. Seeing them, Pearl refuses to come until her mother resumes
her ordinary appearance; she obstinately washes off the kiss that her father plants on her forehead. Yet the
parents remain optimistic, and part with the promise to leave, secretly and by ship, in four days.
The day before their planned departure is Election Day, and Rev. Dimmesdale gives a sermon, intending it as
a triumphant farewell. His spirits are strangely high. During the sermon, Hester finds their plans going awry.
Chillingworth has guessed their intent and arranged to leave with them—they will never escape him. As
Dimmesdale leaves the church, his strength fails him. In front of the whole community, he reaches for Hester
and Pearl, and, with them, ascends the scaffold. He confesses his part in Hester's sin, and tears open his
minister's collar, exposing what looks like—to some—a letter "A." He asks for the crowd's forgiveness, and in
turn absolves his own tormentor, Chillingworth. Then he asks his daughter for a kiss and, when she gives it, "a
spell is broken":
The Scarlet Letter: Summary
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The great scene of grief, in which the wild infant bore a part, had developed all her
sympathies, and as her tears fell upon her father's cheek, they were the pledge that she would
grow up amid human joy and sorrow, nor forever do battle with the world, but be a woman in
it. Towards her mother, too, Pearl's errand as a messenger of anguish was all fulfilled.
His breast finally unburdened, Dimmesdale dies.
Chillingworth soon follows him to the grave, leaving his money to Pearl. Hester takes her daughter to Europe,
but returns alone years later. Hester resumes her scarlet letter "A" and her good works. When she dies, the
village buries her next to Dimmesdale.
The Scarlet Letter: Summary and Analysis
Chapter 1 Summary and Analysis
Summary
Our attention is focused on the door of Boston’s prison-house on a day in June 1642. The building, a
concession to the fact that crime exists even among a people dedicated to perfecting themselves, is itself very
ugly. The only hint of beauty is a rose bush blooming at one side of the door. The narrator suggests that it
sprang from the footstep of Anne Hutchinson, a woman persecuted for her religious beliefs and held in this
same prison. The narrator further suggests the moral of his story, like the solitary rose, may be the only bright
spot in the forthcoming tale of human sorrow.
Discussion and Analysis
In this short opening chapter, Hawthorne dramatically sets the stage for the entrance of his main characters
while also setting the tone for his story, “a tale of human frailty and sorrow” whose only bright spot is the
moral lesson we may learn from it. Hawthorne was aware that readers of his times expected stories to be
balanced with happiness and sadness, and he is preparing them for the tragic events about to unfold.
Chapter 2 Summary and Analysis
New Characters
Women in the crowd: Puritan women who comment on Hester’s punishment
The town beadle: the official who publicly pronounces Hester’s punishment
Hester Prynne: a young Englishwoman who, although her husband has been absent for two years, has given
birth to a daughter
Pearl: Hester’s infant daughter
Summary
After the narrator tells of earlier punishments carried out upon the scaffold, our attention is focused upon
several Puritan women in the waiting crowd and their reactions to Hester’s punishment. One suggests that the
women, if they had the power, would have given harsher judgments; another suggests a hot branding iron
should be placed on Hester’s forehead. A young wife suggests pity, but she is countered by another who
demands Hester’s death.
The Scarlet Letter: Summary and Analysis
9
Hester is now led into the sunshine after her three-month imprisonment. She is carrying her child and wearing
a scarlet letter “A” attached to her bodice with gold embroidery. Her first impulse seems to be to cower, but
she walks with grace and beauty to the scaffold and begins three hours of public humiliation. As she stands
upon the scaffold, her mind retraces her life from a poverty-stricken childhood in England to her arranged
marriage to an old, misshapen scholar, to her arrival alone in Salem, and to her present predicament.
Discussion and Analysis
In Chapter 2, Hester, one of the main characters in the novel, is shown as a person of sensitivity and pride.
The scarlet letter which she has been forced to wear has been attached with fanciful gold embroidery,
suggesting that a part of her rejects the shame attached to it. Her walk to the scaffold suggests a strength of
character which both astounds and infuriates many in the crowd. As her memories are revealed, we begin to
understand the forces which have brought her to this moment.
A close reading of this section reveals much about Puritan attitudes and about Hawthorne’s attitude toward
them. The majority of women in the crowd want a harsher judgment imposed upon Hester, while the town
beadle proclaims the virtue of a society in which sin was exposed and punished. Hawthorne, though he
characterizes the Puritans as coarse and unyielding, shows them to be acting for the good of the group and in
accord with their beliefs. They contrast favorably in his eyes with later society which has “grown corrupt
enough to smile, instead of shuddering” at a person’s guilt and shame.
Chapter 3 Summary and Analysis
New Characters
Dr. Roger Chillingworth: Hester Prynne’s husband who had sent her ahead to Salem. He has been
shipwrecked and held hostage by the Indians for nearly two years. Dr. Prynne assumes the name of
Chillingworth when he sees his wife being punished for adultery.
Governor Bellingham: political leader of Salem
The Reverend Mister Wilson: eldest clergyman of Salem who wishes Hester to reveal the identity of the father
The Reverend Mister Dimmesdale: young minister who has had an affair with Hester Prynne
Summary
From the scaffold Hester recognizes someone on the edge of the crowd. Her husband, who has been held
hostage by the Indians, has arrived at the settlement to be ransomed. He now recognizes his wife, whom he
signals to be quiet. Through conversation with a man from the town, Dr. Prynne learns that the identity of the
father of Hester’s child is still unknown. He vows to find the man’s identity and make it known.
Near the end of her three-hour stay upon the scaffold, the authorities direct Hester to reveal the father’s
identity. The Reverend John Wilson is first to demand she cooperate, noting that the young Reverend
Dimmesdale was opposed to forcing Hester to speak out. Governor Bellingham joins Wilson in beseeching
Dimmesdale to convince Hester to speak. Dimmesdale delivers an impassioned plea to Hester to consider her
actions and how they might affect the father, who may not himself have the courage to confess his sin. Hester
refuses to name the father and, after enduring an hour-long sermon by Reverend Wilson, is led back with her
crying child to the prison. Several report seeing the scarlet letter cast a lurid gleam as she walks through the
dark passageway.
Discussion and Analysis
Chapter 3 introduces the remaining major characters, Roger Chillingworth and Arthur Dimmesdale. Hester’s
Chapter 2 Summary and Analysis
10
husband, who will later be known as Dr. Roger Chillingworth, arrives in the settlement dressed in a mixture of
savage and civilized garb, perhaps symbolic of his nature. He hides his true identity and shows himself to be a
man who can mask his inner turmoil as well. His effect upon Hester is striking; we are told she would rather
stand in public shame than meet with him privately.
Several references to Dimmesdale have already suggested that he is the father whose identity is being sought:
he is reported to have been very disturbed at Hester’s situation, he has argued against forcing her to confess,
and ironically, he is named by Wilson as the person with whom “the responsibility of this woman’s soul lies
greatly. . . .” In this first of the novel’s three scaffold scenes, Dimmesdale, located above her on the balcony
with the other revered authorities, makes a plea to Hester to reveal the father but also to consider her actions
carefully. If he is speaking of himself when he speaks of the other sinner, Dimmesdale is admitting that he has
not the courage to confess. Part of him envies Hester for not evading public humiliation, while part of him is
afraid she will reveal his guilt to the townspeople.
Reporting that some had observed the scarlet letter glowing introduces a supernatural element to the scene,
suggesting that the story will be more than a mere retelling of history.
Chapter 4 Summary and Analysis
New Character
Master Brackett: the jailer
Summary
Hester and her child are visibly upset when they are returned to the prison, and Master Brackett decides they
would benefit from a doctor’s care. Now living within the jail while the authorities pay his ransom to the
Indians is such a man, Roger Chillingworth.
When left alone with Hester and her child, he gives a potion to calm the child. Hester drinks a potion herself
after hearing Chillingworth say that he could wish no better vengeance upon than she wear the scarlet letter
for the rest of her life. Chillingworth accepts part of the blame for their shame; he, a misshapen scholar,
should not have married such a young and passionate woman. They agree that each has wronged the other.
Chillingworth pressures Hester to reveal the identity of the father and, when she refuses, vows to find him.
Hester is sworn to keep Chillingworth’s true identity a secret so that he may move more easily about the
settlement to find the guilty party. He also wants to avoid the shame of having an unfaithful wife.
Discussion and Analysis
“The Interview” reveals Chillingworth to have a reasonable side to his nature. He may be angry but he will
not revenge himself upon the innocent child or a woman already being punished—in fact, he takes a portion of
the blame for Hester’s disgrace upon himself for thinking that he, an old and deformed intellectual, could
marry one so young and have a normal family life. Hester’s promise to keep his identity secret sets up one of
the major conflicts of the novel: Chillingworth’s revenge upon the man who has disgraced him. This revenge
is possible only because Hester agrees to keep the secret. As the chapter concludes, Hester mentally compares
his expression to that of the devil while Chillingworth focuses on what is to become his life’s
objective—revenge.
Chapter 5 Summary and Analysis
Summary
After her ordeal upon the scaffold, Hester Prynne, free to leave the colony, chooses to remain and takes up
Chapter 3 Summary and Analysis
11
residence in an abandoned cottage on the outskirts of the town. To support herself and her child, Hester
becomes a seamstress, famous for her needlework, though she is not allowed to sew wedding garments.
Wearing the scarlet letter has several effects upon her. Even as Hester does charity work, she has to endure
insults from the poor and the sick she is helping. She finds herself often at the center of sermons and public
lectures and jeers. Sensing different reactions from certain men and women, she imagines the letter has given
her the power to see the hidden sins of others.
Discussion and Analysis
This chapter is the first of several throughout the book in which Hawthorne focuses on a single character or
relationship without using dialogue or advancing the plot very much. Here the first three years of Hester’s
predicament are summarized.
The narrator suggests that Hester remains in Salem for three reasons: she feels compelled to stay in the place
where a great event marked her life; she is closer to the man who fathered her child; and lastly, she feels that
“here . . . had been the scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly punishment.”
While Hester’s skill at the needle fills a need within the community and allows her to perform charity work
as penance, she is continually isolated and punished by the community, a situation she accepts quietly. Hester
stops short of praying for her tormentors, afraid that her prayers might turn into curses.
Chapter 6 Summary and Analysis
New Character
Pearl: Hester’s perplexing child
Summary
The narrator devotes this chapter to the first three years of Pearl’s life, so named because she cost her mother
“a great price” (a Biblical reference). She is a child with no apparent physical defect but one who has moods
of defiance and gloom mixed with great exuberance. In public, Pearl acts as if she were a child of the devil,
defiantly hurling stones at the other Puritan children. Privately, Hester at first thought Pearl might be a fairy
child because of her wild swings of mood. Hester later saw in Pearl’s eyes the image of an evil spirit.
Pearl has been fascinated by the scarlet letter upon her mother’s bosom. One afternoon she pelts the spot with
wildflowers while Hester endures the emotional pain. In a discussion of her origin, Pearl declares she has no
heavenly father.
Discussion and Analysis
Pearl seems to be the living embodiment of the scarlet letter. She is beautiful, just as the embroidered letter is,
yet she brings her mother much pain. Within her personality are the mixed emotions that are contained within
the letter—defiance, gloom, shame, and anger. She is as uncontrollable as the situation that the letter
represents.
The devil is a continuing presence in the story, showing himself as The Black Man in the Forest, in the
fiendish look of Chillingworth during the meeting in prison, and now in the form of Pearl, the devil-child.
Pearl senses the pain the scarlet letter causes her mother and torments her about it with words and deeds.
Note that these conclusions about Pearl’s being an imp or demon-child are made through the eyes of the
Puritans, who are biased towards her, and through the eyes of Hester, the adulterous mother who feels the
guilt of bringing Pearl into the world and is reluctant to discipline the child. Pearl functions in the story on
Chapter 5 Summary and Analysis
12
three levels: as a real child, as a continuing symbol of Hester and Dimmesdale’s adultery, and as an
allegorical figure sent to torment the sinners and direct their actions.
Chapter 7 Summary and Analysis
Summary
Hester has heard that Governor Bellingham is considering removing Pearl from her care. There have been
rumors that Pearl is of demon origin and that she would be better raised by someone more respectable than
Hester. Hester hopes to convince the Governor to allow her to keep the child.
Pearl stands out from the other children because Hester has taken to dressing her in scarlet trimmed in fancy
gold embroidery—the scarlet letter in another form. On their way to see the Governor, they are accosted by
children hurling mud and insults. Pearl drives them off, and the two continue on.
A servant informs them that Governor Bellingham is conferring with one or two ministers and a doctor. While
they wait, Pearl points to polished armor and notes the exaggerated proportions the surface gives to her
mother’s scarlet letter. The Governor and three visitors then approach them from the garden as the chapter
ends.
Discussion and Analysis
Themes and character traits noted in earlier chapters are continued here. Pearl is a demon-child and should be
treated differently. Hester is not a person to be given any moral responsibility. Pearl, dressed in scarlet,
represents the scarlet letter, in form and in spirit, as she finds little ways to pain her mother with references to
the letter. Hester shows strength and determination as she faces the authorities.
An additional focus of the chapter is the lush furnishings of Governor Bellingham’s mansion. In contrast to
the sparse lifestyle of the Puritans, the authorities lived in surroundings which imitated as much as possible
the great houses of England. Spacious halls, sparkling stucco exteriors, and many windows gave a cheeriness
that ordinary Puritans would have avoided.
Chapter 8 Summary and Analysis
New Character
Mistress Hibbins: sister of the Governor, reputed to be a witch
Summary
Governor Bellingham is the first of the group to come upon Pearl and expresses surprise at her brightly
colored outfit. Reverend Wilson is next to react and asks if she is a Christian child. Wilson then recognizes
Hester Prynne and tells Bellingham that this is the woman and child of whom they were just speaking.
The Governor explains that for the sake of Pearl’s soul, the authorities are considering removing her from
Hester’s care and raising her more strictly. When Hester replies that she can better teach morality to the child
because of what she has learned from the scarlet letter, they decide to question the child to see if she has been
reared properly.
Pearl refuses to cooperate at first with the questioning, but finally answers Wilson’s question, “who made
thee?” Though she has been taught the correct answers to all these questions of the catechism (religious
instruction), Pearl replies that she had not been made but had been plucked by her mother off the bush that
grew by the prison door. When the Governor says that the decision to taken Pearl away from Hester is
obvious, Hester replies that Pearl is both her happiness and her torture and that she cannot lose her. She turns
Chapter 6 Summary and Analysis
13
to Dimmesdale and demands that he intervene with the authorities. He does so, arguing that Pearl’s presence
also serves to save the mother’s soul which might otherwise be lost to Satan.
Chillingworth, whom Hester noted to have grown uglier in the intervening three years, comments on
Dimmesdale’s earnest plea and joins in asking that Pearl remain with Hester. It is decided that Pearl will be
taught directly by one of the ministers and that she will be supervised at school and at church meetings.
While the conversation goes on, Dimmesdale steps back a bit. Pearl, observed only by her mother,
spontaneously goes to him and puts her cheek against his hand. As Pearl runs off, Wilson speculates that she
may well be a witch. Chillingworth wonders whether analyzing the child’s nature could lead to the identity of
the father, but he is warned by Reverend Dimmesdale to avoid such “profane philosophy” and either to pray
about it or to let Providence take its course.
The narrator tells us that one version of the story reports that Hester, as she is leaving, is invited by Mistress
Hibbins to join other witches in the forest that night, an invitation that Hester says she might have accepted if
the authorities had not allowed her to keep Pearl.
Discussion and Analysis
The opening paragraphs of this chapter confirm that the ruling authorities had a taste for the good things in
life, while their concern for Pearl’s salvation shows that they considered such a decision to be very important.
When Pearl behaves poorly and Hester realizes she in danger of losing her, Hester turns to Dimmesdale.
When it is clear to Dimmesdale that Hester will do anything to keep Pearl, including revealing the father’s
identity, he responds with an earnest and successful plea to the Governor.
Pearl’s response that she had been plucked from the bush that grew by the prison door is true in one sense.
She is the offspring of a radical thinker just as the blooms by the prison could be symbolically said to be the
offspring of Anne Hutchinson, alluded to in Chapter 1. Hutchinson’s doctrine of faith over obedience to the
moral law caused her to be driven from the colony. Hawthorne uses this opportunity to tie Hester to other
women who philosophically opposed the strict controls of Puritan society.
The interlude between Pearl and Dimmesdale illustrates Hawthorne’s idea that people who have connections
between them will have sympathetic responses to each other. Here, Pearl intuitively responds to her father.
Earlier, Hester felt she could recognize others who had sinned, while Chillingworth foretold that he would be
able to recognize the man who wronged him.
A stylistic device within the novel is the writer’s use of several versions of the same episode. Did Mistress
Hibbins actually invite Hester to join with the devil in the forest? Did the scarlet letter itself cast a gleam in
the dark passageway of the prison? This presenting of alternate versions gives an air of credibility to the
narrator as he attempts to present us with as much “truth” as possible. This writing device also allows
Hawthorne to suggest supernatural explanations for events in his novel without losing readers who might
reject a story totally based in the supernatural.
Chapter 9 Summary and Analysis
Summary
Although not religious by nature, Roger Chillingworth chooses the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale as his spiritual
advisor, a choice designed to pique the reader’s curiosity. Dimmesdale’s humility and his many fasts and
vigils have impressed the townspeople with his holiness, but they fear that his deteriorating physical condition
has brought him close to death. The elders persuade him to seek the advice of the learned doctor. Though
Dimmesdale says he prefers death to Chillingworth’s medicines, he and the doctor spend long hours together
Chapter 8 Summary and Analysis
14
talking about many subjects. To allow him to “help” the minister even more, Chillingworth arranges that the
two of them should lodge in separate apartments at the home of a widow.
The narrator tells us that people of the town have differing opinions of the arrangement. Many see it as the
answer to their prayers that the minister might be helped. Others see the new closeness as mysterious; rumors
surface of Chillingworth’s involvement with a conjurer in England and of his taking part in magic rituals
while a captive of the Indians. Most agree that his Chillingworth’s expression has grown uglier and more evil
since he moved in with the minister.
Discussion and Analysis
The word “leech” refers here to a doctor because doctors used leeches to draw out “bad” blood from their
patients. The appropriate double meaning of this word is apparent when we realize that Chillingworth has
attached himself to the young minister and is slowly drawing out information from his troubled soul.
Hawthorne’s technique of offering different opinions of an event or character leads the reader to view
Chillingworth as someone demonic and to see the main characters as taking part in a cosmic interplay of good
and evil.
Chapter 10 Summary and Analysis
Summary
Roger Chillingworth, described as a kindly man earlier in his life, is now described as a man possessed by a
terrible fascination with Dimmesdale’s secrets. During a conversation with the minister about strange plants
he had found growing over a grave, Chillingworth remarks that perhaps they grew from a heart buried with
some hideous secret—thus suggesting that he knows Dimmesdale himself hides a poisonous secret.
Dimmesdale answers that there are many people with such secrets that they dare not reveal. Their
conversation is interrupted by Pearl’s laughter outside their open window. The doctor observes the girl
sticking burrs from plants in the graveyard onto her mother’s scarlet letter, an act which Hester endures
quietly. Chillingworth wonders about the child’s personality, and Dimmesdale offers that her personality is
the result of a “broken law.” Pearl throws a burr at Dimmesdale through the open window and runs away
shouting that the Black Man has hold of the minister.
The conversation returns to the idea of hidden guilt bringing more pain than publicly acknowledged guilt.
Chillingworth raises the idea of physical illness being caused by a spiritual disorder and asks Dimmesdale
what he is withholding. The minister refuses further discussion and rushes from the room.
Later, after the two have re-established their superficial friendship, Chillingworth comes upon the minister
asleep in a chair. He quickly uncovers Dimmesdale’s chest and is greatly surprised and delighted at what he
finds there.
Discussion and Analysis
Chillingworth is using every opportunity to force the minister into an action or statement which will reveal
him as Hester’s lover. Using Pearl’s comments and Hester’s presence outside their window, he focuses the
discussion on the minister’s emotional trouble, saying it may well be causing the physical deterioration in
Dimmesdale that has everyone concerned. This discussion of psychosomatic illness, a concept not accepted
until many years later, is an excellent illustration of Hawthorne’s ability to explore and present human
psychology in readable form. The novel itself is a psychological and allegorical attempt to show the effects of
sin upon personality.
The minister’s rush from the room convinces Chillingworth that Dimmesdale has a rash, passionate side to
his personality, showing him capable of committing adultery. Dimmesdale’s habit of clutching his breast
Chapter 9 Summary and Analysis
15
when he is distressed prompts the doctor to examine the area. We are not told what Chillingworth finds there,
but the mark or condition seems to confirm that the doctor has found the man who has wronged him. Most
readers assume that a scarlet letter “A” has erupted over the minister’s heart.
Chapter 11 Summary and Analysis
Summary
Certain that he had found out the identity of Hester’s lover, Chillingworth now decides that public exposure
of Dimmesdale is not as good a revenge as continued emotional torture. His comments are causing much pain
to Dimmesdale, but the minister, focused as he is on his own sin, does not suspect Chillingworth’s intentions.
The minister’s sense of his own sin and the pain it continually causes has transformed him into a powerful
and much revered preacher. While he painfully tells himself of his unworthiness and punishes himself with
vigils and fasts, the congregation thinks him to be the model of holiness. Many times Dimmesdale resolves
publicly to confess his sin but is only able to state from the pulpit how utterly worthless and vile a liar he is,
confessions which only make him seem holier and humbler than the ordinary person.
Privately, Dimmesdale continues to punish himself with whippings and long periods of watching and fasting.
On one such night vigil, a new idea, one which may bring him a moment’s peace, occurs to him.
Discussion and Analysis
Chillingworth is now certain that Dimmesdale is the man he seeks and realizes that he can derive more
pleasure from continually torturing the minister with well-directed comments, a more evil form of revenge.
The minister’s sincere humility and his attempts to confess his guilt ironically win him wide admiration as a
holy man, admiration that hurts him even more because he considers himself so undeserving. He punishes
himself physically and emotionally until suffering becomes his only “real existence on this earth.”
Chapter 12 Summary and Analysis
Summary
On this May night the minister carries out the plan which occurred to him in Chapter 11. He will stand on the
scaffold, the place of public humiliation on which Hester herself stood some seven years before. The dark of
the night hides him, and he believes the town to be asleep. As he dwells on his sin and on the pain that comes
from whatever is on his chest, he shrieks aloud. The only people who seem disturbed by his outburst are
Bellingham and Mistress Hibbins, but their lights are soon extinguished.
In the relative calm that returns, Dimmesdale observes a person carrying a lantern on the street by the
scaffold. Recognizing The Reverend Mr. Wilson, he boldly calls out to him but is not heard. A new fear
arises: he will be unable to move his stiff body from the spot and will be discovered by the townspeople in the
morning. He laughs aloud at the thought and is surprised to hear childish laughter answer his.
Hester explains that she and Pearl and others have been keeping a deathbed watch with Governor Winthrop
and that she is going home to sew his shroud. Dimmesdale invites them to join him on the scaffold, and, as
they join hands, he feels a vital warmth, a rush of new life. To Pearl’s insistence that he stand with them at
noon of the following day, the minister replies that only on judgment day will they stand together. As he is
speaking, the sky is lit up by a giant meteor streaking across the sky. Its light reveals the minister standing
with his hand over his heart, Hester with her scarlet letter, and Pearl, the embodiment of the scarlet letter, as
the link between them.
Chapter 10 Summary and Analysis
16
The narrator tells of ancient interpretations of such celestial events as having been divinely inspired.
Dimmesdale imagines the meteor to have taken the shape of an immense letter “A,” another symbol of his
guilt.
The light of the meteor reveals another figure in the scene. Roger Chillingworth, returning from attending to
the dying governor, has observed the three upon the scaffold and now offers to escort the minister home and
out of the damp night air, pretending to believe the minister’s odd vigil to be only a symptom of his illness.
Dimmesdale’s sermon the next day is deemed the most powerful he has ever delivered. Afterwards, the
sexton, a church official, returns Dimmesdale’s glove, said to have been found on the scaffold, no doubt put
there by the devil to discredit the minister. He speaks also of a meteor in the shape of the letter “A” observed
last night and says that most have interpreted it as standing for “Angel” since the governor died that very
night.
Discussion and Analysis
After several chapters of background and generalities about the major characters, the action of the plot
advances quickly. Dimmesdale’s urge to stand on the scaffold begins a series of strange occurrences. The
coincidences of the night—the death of the governor, the passing of the main characters by the scaffold, the
outbursts which bring Hester and Pearl to the scaffold, and the bright momentary light of the meteor which
has revealed the people on the scaffold to Chillingworth and the doctor to them, combine to push Dimmesdale
closer to a possible public confession. The mention of the pain on his breast with other manifestations of the
scarlet letter “A” strongly suggests that he carries such a letter carved or burned into his flesh, either
self-inflicted or caused by divine action or emotional stress. Hawthorne does a good job here of reproducing
Dimmesdale’s psychotic thoughts and actions in an understandable way.
This scaffold scene is the second of three in the novel. Dimmesdale, although standing there under the cover
of night, is now found upon the place of punishment embracing Hester and Pearl while Chillingworth comes
closer. The momentary flash of light can be interpreted as bringing Dimmesdale a step closer to full public
disclosure.
Dimmesdale’s interpreting the meteor’s shape as a symbol of adultery is presented as a reflection of his
confused emotional state. That the townspeople interpret it as a religious symbol may be an attempt to link
them with the more primitive peoples the narrator speaks of earlier in the chapter.
Chapter 13 Summary and Analysis
Summary
Seven years have passed since Pearl’s birth. Hester is shocked at the poor physical and psychological state of
Dimmesdale and resolves to do something to help his condition. Hester herself has been accepted by the
community and has outwardly accepted the role she has been forced to assume. She has submitted
uncomplainingly to menial tasks, to poor living conditions, and to public insults. Her charity and unfailing
tenderness have earned her respect, and now most townspeople interpret the “A” upon her breast as standing
for “Able.”
Inwardly, though, Hester is not the model citizen she is thought to be. The letter seems to have stolen her
youth and beauty while forcing her to develop an inner strength few others could understand. She speculates
on the status of women in society and what changes must occur if they are ever to achieve equality. She
accepts the consequences of her actions, but she will not accept the guilt that the scarlet letter was intended to
have imbued her with.
Chapter 12 Summary and Analysis
17
Assessing Dimmesdale’s deteriorating state and his continuing torture by Chillingworth, Hester resolves to
confront her former husband. Soon she and Pearl meet Chillingworth on an isolated part of the seashore.
Discussion and Analysis
The changes in Hester over the seven years since she first stood on the scaffold are remarkable. She has
changed the attitudes of the people around her with her public demeanor while developing internal standards
that have little to do with the Puritan community. Isolation from the community has allowed her to speculate
on ideas others would not consider. The narrator presents her as a more modern woman, one of the age where
old traditions and narrow patterns of thinking are falling away.
Hester’s speculation allows the narrator to present an analysis of the place of women in American society
both at the time the story takes place and at the time the story is being written, 1850. Through Hester he
presents three steps which must occur before women achieve equality: the whole of society must be torn down
and built anew, men must change their attitudes toward women, and women must change their image of
themselves, perhaps losing their “ethereal essence,” or femininity, as they do so. Haw-thorne’s blueprint for
change shows remarkable perception of sociological currents in both societies.
Hester has also developed a strength of personality Dimmesdale cannot find within himself. She feels that she
has grown and climbed to a higher point. Chillingworth has lowered himself by exacting revenge upon
Dimmesdale. She is prepared to do whatever she can to help Dimmesdale.
Chapter 14 Summary and Analysis
Summary
While Pearl plays in a tidal pool, Hester speaks with Chillingworth, who has been gathering plants for his
medicines. When Chillingworth tells her that the magistrates are considering allowing Hester to remove the
scarlet letter, Hester replies that they do not have the power to remove it. She stares at the changes that seven
years of seeking revenge have caused in Chillingworth. She goes on to speak of Dimmesdale and of her
promise not to reveal her husband’s identity to her lover. When Hester says that the doctor has exacted
enough revenge, Chillingworth argues that he has kept Dimmesdale from the gallows, that he has kept the
man, whose body lacked the spirit to withstand the pressures, alive. Here, as Chillingworth becomes very
animated speaking of the years of revenge, he himself sees more clearly what he has become: a fiend whose
only reason for being is revenge. Hester makes it plain that she will tell Dimmesdale the true identity of the
doctor. She challenges her former husband to pardon Dimmesdale. He replies that he cannot—they are fated to
play out their roles.
Discussion and Analysis
Both characters seem to accept fate, but to different degrees. Chillingworth feels he does not have the power
to forgive Dimmesdale, that the minister owes him even more since the man is responsible in Chillingworth’s
eyes for transforming him from a kindly scholar into a vengeance-seeking fiend. They are destined to continue
as they are. Hester accepts her fate when she says that no one has the power to remove the scarlet letter from
her while rejecting the idea that she is powerless. Dimmesdale’s continued suffering is intolerable, and she
will act to change the situation.
Chapter 15 Summary and Analysis
Summary
As Hester watches Chillingworth walk away gathering herbs, she marvels at his ugliness and involuntarily
admits that she hates him. Memories of their marriage lead her to conclude that the wrong he did her,
marrying a girl so young, was far greater than any wrong she did him.
Chapter 13 Summary and Analysis
18
Pearl has been playing nearby and now creates a letter “A” out of seagrass and places it on her chest. Hester,
calling to her, notes the green letter and asks whether Pearl knows why her mother wears her letter. Pearl
replies that all she knows is that it is for the same reason that the minister places his hand over his heart. She
thinks that the reason might be known to the old doctor. Hester is tempted to take Pearl into her confidence
and tell her the importance of the scarlet letter, but instead tells her child that the letter has no great
importance. Pearl is not satisfied with this answer and pesters her mother until Hester threatens to put her in a
dark closet.
Discussion and Analysis
Hester undergoes several dramatic changes in this chapter. First, she permits herself to express her hatred for
her former husband. In a reversal of her earlier position she now feels that she has suffered the greater wrong
by being coerced into marriage with Chillingworth. Next, Hester sees a thoughtful side to her daughter’s
personality and speculates whether a new relationship with her is possible. Could a thoughtful young woman
grow out of this impish child? Finally, to stop Pearl’s pestering about the origin of the scarlet letter, Hester
responds with a threat that silences the child, something she has had very little success at previously.
Chapter 16 Summary and Analysis
Summary
After several days of attempting to meet with and tell Dimmesdale the truth about her former husband, Hester
learns that he will be returning from a visit to another minister along a path through the forest. She wishes to
speak with him in the openness of nature, but she is also aware of the parallel between the actual wilderness
and the moral wilderness in which she feels she has been wandering.
Pearl has been playing in the patches of the sunshine that shifting clouds have caused. She teases her mother
that the sunshine is avoiding her. Pearl does catch the light, but when Hester approaches and attempts to grasp
it, the sunlight disappears.
Pearl asks for a story about the Black Man and repeats a story she had overheard at a house Hester had visited
the evening before. In this story, among the people who have visited the Black Man in the Forest at night is
Hester, who wears his mark, the scarlet letter. Hester agrees with the story; she has met with the Black Man
and does wear his mark. As they talk, they approach a brook, and Pearl remarks that it sounds very sad.
Hearing footsteps and anticipating Dimmesdale, Hester attempts to send Pearl off to play. The child remarks
that the minister’s hand over his heart may point to the spot where the Black Man put his mark upon the
minister, then skips off to play. Hester watches the minister, listless and haggard, approach the spot where the
path crosses the brook.
Discussion and Analysis
Hawthorne uses the forest as a symbol in several ways. It is the abode of the Black Man, a wilderness where
the devil and the heathen Indians roam. Those who venture out into the forest at night are most assuredly
meeting with the devil. Hester admits to meeting symbolically with the devil and at one point feels she is
wandering in a moral wilderness. A second reference to the forest is as a place where, in contrast to the
strictness of the Puritan settlement, people and events here are open and natural. Later, Hawthorne will
present the forest as a place of potential.
An ongoing motif is Hawthorne’s symbolic use of light and dark in the novel. Here the sunlight favors Pearl
while the sunshine, like happiness, eludes Hester.
Chapter 15 Summary and Analysis
19
Chapter 17 Summary and Analysis
Summary
The meeting of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale is awkward at first. After speaking of unimportant
matters, both confess that they have not found peace. The minister tells of his continued hypocrisy and wishes
for one person before whom he could daily be known for the sinner he is. Hester replies that there is such a
person and he “dwellest with him under the same roof.” Dimmes-dale is furious with Hester for concealing
Chillingworth’s identity, and allowing him to go through the horror of living with Chillingworth. Hester sees
the depth of evil she has permitted and tries to explain why she allowed the deception. However, she
concludes that “a lie is never good, even though death threatens on the other side.”
Dimmesdale condemns and rejects her, yet she pleads to him for forgiveness, telling him that Chillingworth is
her husband.
It is Chillingworth who has committed the vilest sin, according to Dimmesdale. He has sought continual
revenge in a calculated manner; the two lovers, while sinners, did not set out to hurt anyone.
Dimmesdale wonders what course Chillingworth’s revenge will now take and asks Hester for help. “The
judgment of God is on me. . . . It is too mighty for me to struggle with!” She demands that he be strong and
formulates a plan. The minister can leave the Puritan settlement and restart his life in the wilderness or in
Europe. When he replies that he has not the strength to begin anew, Hester says he will not be going alone,
that she has strength enough for both of them.
Discussion and Analysis
The dark wood in which Hester and Dimmesdale meet and their separation of seven years makes them doubt
the reality of the moment. The dramatic interchanges in which forgiveness is asked, withheld, and given and
in which plans are made reveal much about the two characters and their futures. Hester is strong and is able to
both analyze the situation and plan for the future. She demands that Dimmesdale be strong and take control
over his life. He doubts whether he can do anything about his life until Hester tells him that he will not have to
leave alone.
In this chapter the forest is offered as a place of escape. Though mastering the wilderness seems beyond the
minister’s physical and emotional strength, he comes to realize that outside the settlement are places where a
person may start a new life.
Chapter 18 Summary and Analysis
Summary
The narrator explains the source of Hester’s boldness. Ostracized by the community, she has learned to think
for herself, free of the strict boundaries proscribed by the Puritans. In contrast, Arthur Dimmesdale is a
representative of that system, a priest, and therefore bound all the more by it. When Dimmesdale agrees to
leave with Hester, they both feel a resurgence of hope. Hester symbolically tears off the scarlet letter and
tosses it into the bushes. Rather than landing in the brook which could carry it away, the scrap of cloth lands
among the fallen leaves on the edge of the water.
Hester lets down her hair, and as she does so, sunlight bathes the scene. She wants father and daughter to
know each other and so calls to Pearl who is standing in another patch of sunlight. During this interval she has
been playing with the plants and animals about her. The narrator suggests that one version of the tale implies
that a savage wolf had come to Pearl to be petted. Because she sees the minister still with her mother, Pearl
comes back slowly.
Chapter 17 Summary and Analysis
20
Discussion and Analysis
This chapter contrasts the two characters as they plan their future actions. The great forces opposing the
minister’s leaving are noted; and though he agrees to go along with Hester’s plan, we can see that it will be
extremely difficult for him to do so.
As they feel an initial release from their burdens, the sunlight which bathes them is not, the narrator tells us, a
symbolic blessing from Providence, but Nature’s sympathetic reaction to the joining of the hearts of two
lovers. Pearl is standing in a separate patch of sunlight, one which comes down upon her “through an arch of
boughs,” suggesting a religious significance to her light in contrast to theirs. Careful reading will permit a
reader to determine when Hawthorne is suggesting the light is of a divine, demonic, magical, or natural origin.
The narrator also calls our attention to the fact that the scarlet letter, tossed aside by Hester, falls short of
being carried away by the little brook, a suggestion that Hester will not be rid of the stigma so easily.
The narrator also offers differing versions of Pearl at play. The dramatic realism of the meeting he has just
related is offset by the fanciful image of a wolf allowing Pearl to pet him, reminding us that the novel is a
retelling of a supposed historical event intended to be read at multiple levels.
Pearl’s reluctance to hurry back to the reunited lovers suggests that she might be a cause of trouble to the
plans Hester and the minister have made.
Chapter 19 Summary and Analysis
Summary
As Hester and Dimmesdale await Pearl’s return, the minister confesses his ongoing dread of the child, the
living testimony of his sin, while Hester remarks on her beauty and her fitful moods. Pearl responds to her
mother’s call but remains in a patch of sunlight on the opposite side of the brook, refusing to come closer.
When Dimmesdale reaches his hand up to his heart, Pearl points to the spot on her mother’s breast where the
scarlet letter should be. In response to Hester’s promptings to join them, Pearl goes into a wild tantrum,
pointing to Hester’s bodice. To pacify her, Hester points to the scarlet letter lying by the side of the stream
and asks Pearl to bring it to her. Pearl insists that her mother pick it up. Thinking she will soon be rid of the
stigma permanently, Hester does so, but placing it once more in its accustomed place makes her feel a sense
of inevitable doom. Pearl spontaneously kisses her mother, then the scarlet letter itself, an act which pains
Hester greatly.
When Pearl asks about the minister, standing a distance from them, Hester replies that he loves them and
wants to meet her. Pearl wants to know if the love is great enough to have the minister walk back, hand in
hand, with them to the village. Hester has to drag an uncooperative Pearl back to the minister. Pearl washes
off his unwelcomed kiss and remains apart while the two complete the details of their escape.
Discussion and Analysis
The foreshadowing noted at the end of Chapter 18 is fulfilled as Pearl refuses to accept her mother without the
familiar scarlet letter. She insists her mother take up the symbol herself and refuses to accept the minister’s
kiss. Here, in an allegorical sense, Pearl is their living conscience, reminding the two of their situation, their
responsibilities, and the impossibility of escaping their guilt.
Dimmesdale’s aversion to the child has several explanations. He does not have a natural affinity for children,
and Pearl’s personality marks her as a difficult child. Her very existence is a constant reminder to him of his
sin, while her features hold possible clues to his identity as her father.
Chapter 18 Summary and Analysis
21
Pearl’s refusal to join Hester and Dimmesdale can be interpreted on multiple levels. She is a young child who
has been excluded from their talk. As a child she is upset with any changes in her mother, and the removal of
the scarlet letter is frightening to her. If she is the symbolic embodiment of the scarlet letter, neither she nor it
can be tossed away. On the allegorical level, Pearl functions here as an agent of the divine, preventing Hester
from avoiding the consequences of her actions.
Chapter 20 Summary and Analysis
Summary
As he leaves Hester and Pearl behind on the forest path, Dimmesdale reviews the plan he and Hester have
devised for escape. Hester is to secure passage for the three of them on a ship now in port and bound for
England. When Hester tells him that it will probably be four days until their departure, the minister is glad.
Three days from now he will preach the Election Day sermon and has decided that it is the ideal time to
confess his guilt and end his career as a preacher.
The dramatic changes in his life now rejuvenate the minister, and he experiences strange transformations and
impulses. He wants to tell people about the new Dimmesdale, to whisper sacrilegious ideas to a church
official and an old lady, and to give impure suggestions to a young maiden obviously enamored of him. These
temptations lead the minister to conclude that the plan devised in the forest was, in fact, a pact with the devil,
who even now is taking over his soul. Mistress Hibbins appears at this time. By congratulating him on his
meeting with the devil in the forest, she confirms his suspicions.
Dimmesdale returns to his study and resumes work on the Election Day sermon. He refuses Chillingworth’s
offer of medicines to see him through the election day and returns to his task with energy. He is still writing as
the morning light finds him.
Discussion and Analysis
Agreeing to Hester’s plan has dissolved the stalemate of public hypocrisy and private suffering that
Dimmesdale has lived with for seven years, and his mind is now freed to consider possibilities. He feels a new
power in his step and in his ability to influence people around him by creating scandal in their minds. These
great temptations and a conversation with a reputed witch cause him to return to more familiar thoughts, that
he should not do the work of the devil and that he is a powerless pawn with a destiny to be played out on the
present stage. Being drawn in one direction by Hester has caused him to pull back and to act with a greater
determination as he feels fate is directing him to.
Chapter 21 Summary and Analysis
Summary
The settlement is crowded with visitors and townspeople interested in seeing the new governor take office.
Hester, with Pearl by her side, views the scene with mixed emotions. She is looking, for what might be the
last time, at the society which has been her life and her torture for seven long years. She is anticipating the
freedom which will be hers in a few hours. Pearl, dressed in a bright dress, reflects in her actions the mixed
emotions which her mother is hiding beneath a calm exterior. She demands an explanation for the gathering
and is told all are here for the holiday procession of soldiers and officials. To questions about the minister,
Hester replies that they must not greet him publicly today.
The narrator describes the scenes and events of this holiday and the attitudes behind them. Many remember
the wilder celebrations of England, and, while there are no skits or singing or dancing, the Puritans have
lightened up their usual somber lifestyle with a procession and with some sporting competitions: in this case,
wrestling and fighting with quarterstaffs. A swordfight is broken up by the town beadle, much to the
Chapter 19 Summary and Analysis
22
disappointment of the crowd. In addition to Indians, rough-looking sailors can be seen, drinking and smoking
in contradiction to the stern Puritan laws. Roger Chillingworth is seen talking earnestly with a ship’s captain,
who later recognizes Hester among the crowd and approaches her. The captain tells Hester that making ready
one more berth for her party will be no problem. Chillingworth is going with them. Hester then glimpses the
old doctor smiling at her from across the market-place and realizes her plan to leave is coming undone.
Discussion and Analysis
The narrator here attempts to give the reader an understanding of the varied attitudes among the Puritans.
Normally somber, they did brighten up for state occasions, intertwined as these were with religious office. A
few of the quieter English customs, processions and sporting events were transplanted to this early colony.
The Puritans interacted with those about them—Indians, traders, and sailors—tolerating their differences. The
narrator comments sardonically that they have lightened up to a point equal to that of people who are greatly
troubled.
Hester’s helping the poor and the troubled has acquainted her with the sea captain, and so there is no scandal
in her talking with him. News that Chillingworth is going to be on the same ship is the beginning of the
unraveling of her plan to escape.
Chapter 22 Summary and Analysis
Summary
March music is heard, and even Pearl is momentarily transfixed by the sight and sound of the musicians, the
military men, the civil authorities, and lastly, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale as he is escorted to the
meeting-house. He walks with unusual energy, and as Hester looks upon him, she senses that he is beyond her
reach. In contrast to the closeness they shared in the forest, he seems a player in a drama and she, a mere
spectator. Even Pearl is unsure that she recognizes the man.
Mistress Hibbins begins a conversation with Hester about the transformation in the minister. Over Hester’s
protests, the woman goes on to speak of the minister’s dark secrets and his possible revelation of them in the
open air. Dimmesdale’s sermon begins, and Hester, unable to get into the meeting-house, takes a spot in the
crowd near the scaffold.
The powerful sounds of Dimmesdale’s voice delivering his sermon can be heard outside in the market-place.
While Hester and others listen, not quite able to make out the words, Pearl runs about, first investigating an
Indian, then, a group of sailors. One, the ship captain, gives her a gold chain and asks her to carry a message
to her mother: the doctor will bring the gentleman aboard, and she need worry only about herself and her
child.
While she is digesting this painful news, Hester and her scarlet letter become the center of the attention among
strangers who have heard of, but not seen, the red symbol. Their attention soon attracts others, and Hester
finds herself at the center of a ring of strangers, seamen, Indians, and townspeople.
Discussion and Analysis
The procession allows the narrator to compare and contrast the groups that parade by with both their
counterparts in Europe at that time and with those of Hawthorne’s age, the 1850s. The military men in armor
and plumes carried themselves with a haughtiness that showed they considered the call to arms a high calling.
The magistrates who followed showed a dignity and seriousness of purpose, rather than any other talent, that
suited them for governing the colony. Last and most important was the religious leader, one whose profession
enjoyed “the almost worshipful respect of the community.”
Chapter 21 Summary and Analysis
23
Any lingering hope that the lovers can rise above their problems is dashed by the distant look about
Dimmesdale as he proceeds to the meeting-house. Hester recognizes the great gulf between them, and even
Pearl is not sure that this is the same man she met in the forest. The conversation with the reputed witch who
speaks of the forest meeting of Hester and the minister shows more public unraveling of their secrets.
Hester endures many painful barbs in this chapter: Dimmesdale’s aloofness as he passes, Mistress Hibbins’
prying questions and her prophecies, the captain’s message about Chillingworth’s intentions, and the hurtful
stares of the people as she stands by the scaffold. This last scene, where people begin staring at Hester’s letter
for little reason, allows us to see that Hester has not progressed very far in seven years. Only the face of the
sympathetic young mother, now dead, is missing from the opening scene of the novel, when the Puritan
women stared and commented on Hester’s disgrace. Unaware that the same stigma marked both Hester and
Dimmesdale, an observer might have noted an ironic contrast between the minister, surrounded by attentive
and adorous listeners in the meeting-house, and the adulterous woman, surrounded by a more hostile crowd in
the market-place.
Chapter 23 Summary and Analysis
Summary
Dimmesdale has finished his sermon, and as people exit the meeting-house, they proclaim the wisdom in his
inspired words. He has spoken of the special relationship between God and the New England communities
and prophesied a great future for the people. Now the march music begins anew, and all are to proceed to the
town-hall for a solemn banquet.
Even as he is honored as being at the high point of his career, Dimmesdale looks exhausted, and people fear
he will fall at any moment. He rejects the offered arm of Reverend Wilson and continues on until he
encounters Hester and Pearl standing by the scaffold. Governor Bellingham steps forward to offer assistance
but is stopped by a look from the minister. The rest of the procession continues on, but Dimmesdale calls to
Hester and Pearl.
As Pearl clasps his knees and Hester comes towards him “as if impelled by inevitable fate,” Chillingworth
protests and catches him by the arm. Dimmesdale waves him off and again calls to Hester, who helps him up
the steps to the scaffold. Chillingworth follows. “Hadst thou sought the whole earth over,” said he, looking
darkly at the clergyman, “there was no one place so secret—no high place or lowly place, where thou couldst
have escaped me—save on this very scaffold!”
The noonday sun shines down upon the Reverend Dimmesdale as he announces to the entire community that
one sinner in their midst has remained hidden for seven long years. With that, he tears open his robe to reveal
something on his breast. He sinks to the scaffold and is supported by Hester, his head against her bosom. He
forgives Chillingworth and asks Pearl for a kiss. The girl responds with a kiss and tears, and we are told that a
spell has been broken. In the future Pearl will become a secure young woman, no longer a source of anguish
to her mother.
Hester asks whether they shall meet again. The minister, in his dying words, tells her that the law they broke
makes it a vain hope that they should have an everlasting and perfect union. Dimmes-dale does thank God for
his mercy—for the burning torture upon his breast, the presence of Chillingworth to give him further pain, and
the opportunity “to die this death of triumphant ignominy before the people,” all of which have helped to
save his soul.
Discussion and Analysis
The change in Reverend Dimmesdale after delivering his triumphal sermon is dramatic. He totters forward as
Chapter 22 Summary and Analysis
24
a man with hardly any life in him. If his great objective was to confess upon the scaffold, it would seem he
would be highly energized as he approached the spot, yet it is only after seeing Hester and Pearl standing near
the scaffold that the minister pauses. While it is likely that Dimmesdale fully intended to confess his hidden
sin at this point, Hawthorne’s wording does not make this very clear. That Dimmesdale rejects assistance
from Wilson, a representative of the church and from Bellingham, a representative of the state, can be taken as
symbolic of his determination to do what he has to do on his own.
This, the final of three scaffold scenes in the novel, brings all four major characters to the place of punishment
and atonement. Pearl, whose very existence is the result of a broken Commandment, is able to kiss her father
and, no longer needed as the allegorical tormentor of Hester, become a normal person. Hester, publicly
punished for seven years and yet not inwardly remorseful, returns to the place of her initial humiliation.
Dimmesdale, adulterer and hypocrite, finally stands, in the light of day, where he should have shared the
public scorn seven years ago. Chillingworth, whose sin has been called the blackest of the several presented
by the story, is revealed to the community as a vengeful creature who by intention set out to torment another
human being.
Of the four major players, Dimmesdale seems to be the central focus. Pearl’s only sin is being born, and she
is allowed to find happiness. Hester, though she remains a strong character who wins our sympathy for her
ability to endure, has few options in her conflict with Puritan morality. She is an example of the women made
relatively powerless by the way societies have been set up, an idea expanded upon by Hawthorne in Chapter
13. Chillingworth, though the most detestable of the characters, was initially a kindly man who is caught up in
an obsession much as Hester and Dimmesdale were in their act of adultery. They were overcome by a need for
love while Chillingworth is overcome by a need for revenge. Dimmesdale, though, has several additional
conflicts—with himself, that he cannot be truthful; with his followers, who see him not as a hypocrite, but as a
holy man; and with his God, who requires atonement for the transgression Dimmesdale is guilty of. It is his
inability to resolve these conflicts that compound the pain and sins of the others.
Chapter 24 Summary and Analysis
Summary
In the days that follow Dimmesdale’s death many opinions are offered for the letter “A” that was seen on the
minister’s chest. Some say he inflicted it upon himself, others say that Chillingworth caused it to appear
through the use of drugs and magic, and still others speculate that personal remorse and divine judgment
combined to put it upon the minister’s chest. Again, by presenting multiple versions of an incident, the
storyteller allows the reader’s mind to choose the most likely version and thus to think more deeply about the
idea he is presenting.
Others deny that any such mark even existed. They maintain that the minister was not guilty of any misdeed,
and that he simply used his final moments to make yet another impression on his congregation. The narrator
disregards this last version and tells us that the most important moral to be learned from Dimmesdale’s
experience is “Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby
the worst may be inferred!”
Chillingworth, with his life’s purpose gone, withers away and dies within a year. The narrator speculates that
hate and love may be much the same thing, and that in the spiritual world Chillingworth and Dimmesdale, two
who were victims of each other, may find their hatred turned to love. The doctor leaves much property, both
in the colonies and in England, to Pearl, who leaves Salem with her mother soon after Chillingworth’s death.
Years later reports say that Hester Prynne returned to Salem and her cottage and resumed wearing the scarlet
letter. While indications are that Pearl has married into royalty in England, Hester has returned. “Here had
Chapter 23 Summary and Analysis
25
been her sin: here, her sorrow; and here, her penitence.” Hester has become a counselor of troubled people,
especially women, and assures them that at some brighter time in the future relations between men and
women will be on “a surer ground of mutual happiness.” At her death Hester is buried near the grave of
Dimmesdale with one tombstone, bearing a coat of arms carved with a single letter “A,” serving for both.
Discussion and Analysis
This chapter serves three major functions. It speculates on morals to be derived from the story, attempts to
produce a happy ending for at least one of the characters, and ties up loose ends in a fitting sort of way.
Hester’s identity is so interwoven with the place of her sin and with the scarlet letter that she returns to both,
eventually to be buried near, but not with, her lover, fulfilling the minister’s declaration that theirs would
always be an imperfect union. Chillingworth, driven by revenge, an obsession similar to the lovers’ passion,
is consumed by his sin as they were by theirs, but partially redeems himself with his legacy to Pearl. Her
escape to a happy life away from Salem is the best that Hawthorne could do to satisfy his readers’ need for a
balance of happiness and sadness.
Among the sins, hypocrisy is put forth as the one most controllable and the one causing the most damage to
all, for it compounds the effects of other sins. Admitting his guilt with Hester would have precluded the seven
years of personal torment for Hester and Dimmesdale and prevented himself from being consumed with
vengeance. If the narrator says “Be True!” is the moral to be most directly drawn from the life of Reverend
Dimmesdale, it might equally be said of the other two sinners. Chillingworth’s taking on a false identity and
Hester’s concealment of this fact from Dimmesdale would seem to make them equally worthy of blame.
The chapter’s last scene, that of two graves sharing a simple headstone, dramatically focuses our attention on
the symbol which in all of its manifestations remains central to the novel.
The Scarlet Letter: Quizzes
Chapters 1-4 Questions and Answers
Study Questions
1. What is the setting of the story?
2. What legend accounts for the existence of the rose bush by the prison door?
3. What is the mood of the crowd, and why is their attention focused on the door?
4. What reasons are given as to why Hester Prynne was not executed for her crime? What would the Puritan
women have done to her if given the power?
5. What are Hester’s specific actions as she walks from the prison to the scaffold?
6. What memories does Hester review during her three-hour ordeal?
7. Tell where each of the following are located while Hester is on the scaffold: her daughter Pearl, the
Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, and her former husband, Roger Chillingworth.
8. What specifically is Dimmesdale’s plea to Hester?
9. During their interview, what is Chillingworth’s attitude toward Hester and her act of infidelity?
Chapter 24 Summary and Analysis
26
10. What promise does Chillingworth exact from Hester?
Answers
1. The Scarlet Letter is set in the Puritan colony of Salem, Massachusetts during the 1640s. Specifically, the
action begins in the market-place of Salem on a morning in June 1642.
2. The rose bush was said to have grown out of the footsteps of Anne Hutchinson. She was a heretic who
taught that personal faith was superior to the force of moral law. The Puritans imprisoned her, then drove her
from the colony.
3. Most of the crowd are serious and somber, as if they were about to witness an execution. They are waiting
to witness the public humiliation of an adulterer among them.
4. The men governing the colony feel that Hester Prynne is young and fair and therefore more likely than most
to give in to temptation. Moreover, her husband may very well be dead. The majority of women want Hester
to be branded on her forehead or even put to death.
5. Hester shrugs off the beadle’s hand on her shoulder, pauses a moment outside the door of the prison, and
looks around at the townspeople. She resists the urge to cover the scarlet letter with the baby she is carrying,
and walks serenely and gracefully to the scaffold.
6. During the three hours on the scaffold Hester remembers a decaying ancestral home, the parents who loved
her, her marriage to a pale, thin, misshapen scholar, and life in the capitals of Europe with the old scholar.
7. Pearl is in Hester’s arms, Dimmesdale is above Hester on a balcony of the meeting-house, and
Chillingworth is on the edge of the crowd gathered in the market-place.
8. Dimmesdale says that Hester must realize the pressure he is under. If she feels it is the right thing to do, she
should reveal the name of the father. Doing so would be for his own good, even if he were to come down from
a high place, since he probably does not have the courage to do so himself. He is greatly relieved when Hester
refuses to answer.
9. Chillingworth feels the scale is balanced between them; she should not have committed adultery, while he
should not have married so young and vibrant a girl and left her alone. He seeks no revenge on Hester.
10. Hester promises to keep her husband’s identity a secret.
Chapters 5-8 Questions and Answers
Study Questions
1. After her ordeal, where did Hester choose to live? Why?
2. What occupation did Hester take up?
3. Describe Hester’s appearance and mental state during this time period.
4. Give at least three examples of Hester’s treatment by the community.
5. Describe Pearl’s personality and appearance.
Chapters 1-4 Questions and Answers
27
6. What is Pearl’s reaction to the scarlet letter?
7. Why does Hester go the Governor’s house?
8. Describe the luxury of the Governor’s home, especially in contrast to an ordinary Puritan’s lifestyle.
9. How does Pearl behave when questioned by the men?
10. How does Hester succeed in her mission, and how does this relate to her conversation with Mistress
Hibbins?
Answers
1. Free to go anywhere, Hester remains in Salem, taking up residence in an abandoned cottage on the outskirts
of the community. She does so because she feels connected to Salem by her sin and because she feels linked
to the man who was her lover.
2. Hester’s ability to sew, shown by her embroidering of the scarlet letter itself, allows her to support herself.
She sews everything from funeral shrouds to fancy apparel for the upper class.
3. On the outside Hester exhibits the somber manner the Puritans demand of her. She wears drab and coarse
clothing and interacts with the community only in her work and in her charitable acts. Her passionate nature is
hidden and redirected into her embroidery. Inwardly, she feels isolated and lonely but accepts this as her lot.
4. Everyone, rich and poor, makes comments to Hester about her sin. Clergymen preach sermons about her
behavior. Children, imitating their parents’ behavior, taunt her in the streets. Strangers, unaware of her
situation, stare in puzzlement at her.
5. Pearl is described as wild, defiant, moody, exuberant, undisciplined, perceptive, and perverse. Hester
dresses her in colorful outfits, beautifully embroidered, but is unable to control the actions of her young
daughter who remains isolated from other children.
6. Even in her crib Pearl seemed fascinated with the scarlet letter. She grabbed on to it once and smiled,
causing her mother considerable anguish. Pearl constantly smiles knowingly at the letter, renewing Hester’s
anguish each time she observes her child’s sly smile. Once Pearl smilingly pelted the scarlet letter with
flowers, an action her mother silently endured.
7. Hester has heard rumors that she is considered an unfit mother for so undisciplined a child. Since Pearl is
the source of her joy as well as her torment, Hester is determined to keep her.
8. The Governor’s mansion is described as large and airy with much sunshine coming through many
windows. The outside, made of stucco mixed with glass, sparkles in the sunlight. The mansion is furnished
with curtains and wall decorations, few of which would please an ordinary Puritan who lived a simple and
unadorned life.
9. Pearl first jumps up on the window ledge, then puts her finger in her mouth, refusing to speak. She gives a
seemingly nonsensical answer to a question from the catechism, though she knew the expected response from
Hester’s teaching.
10. Hester demands that Dimmesdale intercede for her. She implies that she will do anything to keep Pearl,
including revealing that Dimmesdale is the father of the child. Hester, in reply to Hibbins’ request that she
join the Black Man in the Forest that night, replies that she would have done so if she had not won the right to
Chapters 5-8 Questions and Answers
28
Pearl.
Chapters 9-12 Questions and Answers
Study Questions
1. What are the townspeople’s reactions to Chillingworth’s lodging in the same house as Dimmesdale?
2. What changes have taken place in Chillingworth over the years?
3. What actions does Dimmesdale take to punish himself?
4. Why is Chillingworth called a “leech,” and why, at another point, does the narrator compare him to a
miner?
5. What is the significance of Chillingworth’s examining Dimmesdale’s chest?
6. What is the reaction of Dimmesdale’s parishioners to his sermons?
7. For what reasons are the major characters at the scaffold during the night?
8. Why does Dimmesdale cry out while on the scaffold?
9. Where is each major character located when the meteor is seen?
10. What are the various interpretations the characters attribute to the shape of the meteor?
Answers
1. Many are happy that a doctor will be close at hand to tend to their beloved minister. It is seen as the answer
to their prayers. Others begin to notice changes in Chillingworth’s appearance and personality, and rumors
circulate that he might be in league with the devil. If there is any conflict between Chillingworth and
Dimmesdale, they are sure the goodness in Dimmesdale will win out.
2. There was something ugly and evil in his face. It was widely held that he was the devil or the devil’s agent
come to persecute Dimmesdale.
3. Over the years Dimmesdale has taken to whipping his shoulders with a scourge, fasting until weak with
hunger, and staying awake in night-long vigils.
4. Doctors used leeches to draw out bad blood, and the ironic use here is appropriate. Chillingworth is also
presented as someone who was entering into the interior of a heart and digging, like a miner, to take out
something precious.
5. Dimmesdale often clutches his chest and to this point has not allowed Chillingworth, his doctor, to examine
him. Since Chillingworth suspects the minister has committed the same sin as Hester, it follows that he might
be pained symbolically and literally in the same spot as she.
6. Ironically, the more earnestly Dimmesdale tells them that he is a sinner, the more powerful his sermons are
to those who see him as the model of virtue. If this saintly man has sinned, they must be very unworthy of
God’s blessing.
Chapters 9-12 Questions and Answers
29
7. Dimmesdale feels he might have more peace within himself if he stands at the place of atonement even
though it is under the cover of night. The others are passing by after leaving the deathbed of Governor
Winthrop: Hester as a nurse and shroud maker, Pearl as her companion, and Chilling-worth as his doctor.
8. Dimmesdale shrieks out of horror at the thought that his guilt is exposed to the view of the universe. He
calls to Wilson out of a fatalistic impulse that tells him he will soon be exposed because he feels he cannot
move.
9. Dimmesdale, Hester, and Pearl are on the scaffold while Chillingworth is approaching it.
10. Dimmesdale interprets the shape to indicate that Heaven has taken notice of his guilt. The townspeople
interpret the “A” to stand for “Angel” for the taking into heaven of Governor Winthrop.
Chapters 13-15 Questions and Answers
Study Questions
1. What are the effects of the letter on Hester Prynne over this seven year interval?
2. What crime has Hester committed which, if known to the Puritans, would have resulted in her death?
3. What value does Hester place upon her life?
4. What does Hester see as necessary before women would be treated equally in society?
5. What is the meaning of the line, “the scarlet letter had not done its office”?
6. Why does Hester feel responsible for Dimmesdale’s physical condition?
7. What favors does Chillingworth feel he has done for Dimmesdale?
8. Why is Chillingworth even more vengeful towards Dimmes-dale?
9. When is Hester untrue to the scarlet letter?
10. What is the current relationship between Hester and Pearl?
Answers
1. Her quiet acceptance of her status and her charity work have won her respect. The scarlet letter is now said
to stand for “Able” and is even said by some to have a supernatural power to protect the wearer, but the letter
and Pearl’s reaction to it are a source of continual pain. On the surface Hester is uncomplaining and somber,
but her passions have been redirected into thoughts about the individual’s role in society.
2. Hester’s free speculation about life and her abandonment of Puritan values, if known, would have been
held a far deadlier crime than adultery.
3. Hester sees little hope for improvement in her condition and, at times, considers killing both Pearl and
herself and taking her chances in the afterlife.
4. Hester believes that the whole of society must be torn down and the rules of conduct as proscribed by the
Puritan leaders must be done away with. Secondly, men must change their attitudes towards women and their
Chapters 13-15 Questions and Answers
30
capabilities. Finally, women must change their images of themselves and take the means of power equally
with men.
5. “Office” means the job for which it was intended. The letter was intended to make Hester remorseful of
her sin and eager to keep in line with Puritan values. In fact, it has done the opposite, even bringing her to the
point of considering murder and suicide.
6. Hester feels her promise not to reveal Chillingworth’s identity is allowing the doctor to torment the
minister, causing his physical deterioration.
7. Chillingworth feels he has kept the minister from being imprisoned or even executed by keeping his part in
the adultery secret. In fact, it has been the doctor’s continued care that has kept Dimmesdale alive.
8. The doctor, now aware of the fiendish person he has become in his pursuit of revenge, feels Dimmesdale
has done this to him and is therefore even more deserving of punishment. He takes no responsibility for his
actions.
9. Although Hester has not been open with Pearl about the letter, this is the first time she has ever lied to
Pearl. Pearl knows Hester is lying. She cannot bring herself to tell the child about her illegitimacy and says
she wears the letter only for its value as a decoration.
10. Pearl is beginning to show traits of affection for her mother, and Hester considers confiding in her.
Another change is refelected in Hester’s stern warning to Pearl to be quiet as she continues asking about the
letter. Before this time she could not find it within herself to be harsh with the child.
Chapters 16-19 Questions and Answers
Study Questions
1. Why does Hester prefer to meet with Dimmesdale in the forest rather than in the settlement?
2. What significance can be attributed to the play of sunlight on Pearl and Hester?
3. What story does Pearl hear of her mother’s involvement with the Black Man of the Forest?
4. What are Dimmesdale’s reactions when Hester tells him Chillingworth’s true identity?
5. What effect does Hester have upon Dimmesdale?
6. How does Pearl fit into the forest setting?
7. Why does Pearl refuse to retrieve the scarlet letter herself?
8. Why does Pearl insist that the scarlet letter be replaced?
9. What is the effect on Hester when she replaces the letter on her bosom?
10. What is the significance of Pearl’s reaction to the minister?
Answers
1. Hester prefers the openness of the forest for their important talk. She also fears the interference of
Chapters 16-19 Questions and Answers
31
Chillingworth if the two meet anywhere in the settlement.
2. Here, sunlight seems to symbolize happiness and acceptance of the individual by nature. Pearl delights in
the light while it eludes Hester when she reaches for it.
3. Pearl has overheard rumors that her mother meets regularly with the devil in the forest. Hester denies this
and admits to meeting with the devil once and receiving the scarlet letter from him. Hester is referring here to
her instance of adultery but an argument can be made that her independent thinking is her ongoing sin, thus
representing her ongoing meetings with the devil.
4. Dimmesdale is astonished to learn that Chillingworth is Hester’s former husband. He gives her an evil look
and refuses at first to forgive her. Hester holds him fiercely and insists that he forgive her.
5. Unable to think or act clearly, Dimmesdale says, “Be thou strong for me!” It is Hester who excites him
with the possibilitiy of escape.
6. Pearl moves naturally and happily in the forest. The sunlight delights her, the berries feed her, the flowers
adorn her, and the forest animals accept her as a natural part of the scene.
7. Pearl wants her mother to retrieve the scarlet letter herself and put it back on.
8. The narrator suggests that Pearl may be reluctant to return from the natural world and directly states that
she feels excluded from her mother’s affection by the presence of Dimmesdale. Dimmesdale says that Pearl
could be having a natural reaction to seeing a change in her mother’s appearance or could very well be a
devilish spirit.
9. Hester, forced to put the letter back on, has a sense of “inevitable doom.” She puts up her hair back under
her cap and again becomes the somber person she had been for seven years.
10. Pearl focuses on the need for Dimmesdale to openly acknowledge his lover and illegitimate daughter.
Pearl’s washing off of his kiss sets us up for her eventual acceptance of his kiss in the climatic scene of the
novel.
Chapters 20-22 Questions and Answers
Study Questions
1. What is Hester’s plan for Dimmesdale, Pearl, and herself?
2. What is Dimmesdale tempted to do as he returns to his room? Why?
3. What decision does he make as he reaches his lodging?
4. What does the Puritan celebration tell about their values?
5. How has Chillingworth interfered with Hester’s plan?
6. What does the procession show about Puritan values?
7. What is the minister’s mental state as he walks to the meeting-house? What effect does he have upon
Hester?
Chapters 20-22 Questions and Answers
32
8. Where is Hester standing during Dimmesdale’s sermon?
9. Why does Hester become the center of the crowd’s attention? What irony does the narrator see in the
scene?
10. What is Pearl doing during the sermon?
Answers
1. Hester will arrange passage to England for the three of them with a ship’s captain who is leaving in four
days.
2. As the minister encounters people on his way he is tempted to suggest obscene religious practices to a
deacon, heretical comments about doctrines to a pious woman, and impure ideas to a young maiden. His
weakened mind is not accustomed to thinking outside the basic Puritan guidelines.
3. Since he is scheduled to deliver an important sermon one day before the escape to England, Dimmesdale is
moved to write a new and more powerful sermon. The encounter with Hibbins causes him to pull back from
the wild thoughts he has been experiencing and to reconsider Hester’s plan for them.
4. The Puritans take the transfer of political power very seriously, intertwined as it is with religious power.
Remnants of English attitudes remain with them, but celebration are restricted to only modest changes from
their somber routines. The narrator comments that even as they celebrated, the Puritans looked like people
undergoing great troubles.
5. Somehow Chillingworth has found out about the plan and has booked passage to England on the same ship.
6. The solemnity accorded the procession is the same the Puritans gave to most activities. The order in which
the groups marched showed their relative importance to the community: the military first, the civil authorities
next, and the religious, last and most important.
7. The minister is walking with new-found energy, seemingly oblivious to the crowd and the moment. Hester
is dismayed at the remoteness of his look and fears her plan has little hope of being fulfilled.
8. By coincidence, Hester, unable to get into the packed meeting-house, stands next to the scaffold.
9. Newcomers to the village had heard of but had not seen the woman with the scarlet letter. Now aware of
her, they cause others to stare at Hester. While she and her letter are the center of one crowd, Dimmesdale,
with the burden on his chest, ironically is the center of another group.
10. Pearl, in typical fashion, is skipping about, investigating Indians and sailors. One, the sea captain, gives
her a gold chain and a message about Chillingworth for her mother.
Chapters 22-24 Questions and Answers
Questions
1. What is the topic and mood of Dimmesdale’s sermon?
2. Describe the minister’s condition after the speech, and tell which people offer him assistance.
3. Where are the four major characters during the final scaffold scene?
Chapters 22-24 Questions and Answers
33
4. What changes occur in Pearl? What does she accept from Dimmesdale?
5. What moral does the narrator say is central to the story?
6. What are the various versions of what was seen on Dimmesdale’s chest?
7. What is the effect of Dimmesdale’s confession on Chillingworth?
8. What is the effect of Chillingworth’s legacy to Pearl?
9. Describe the circumstances of Hester’s return to Salem.
10. Are the two lovers ever united?
Answers
1. Dimmesdale’s sermon is a passionate and surprisingly positive one about the relationship of God to the
Puritan community and about the “high and glorious destiny for the newly gathered people of the Lord.”
2. Dimmesdale seems near death. He rejects the assistance of Reverend Wilson and of Governor Bellingham,
but accepts the help of Hester as he mounts the scaffold.
3. All four, Hester, Pearl, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth, are now on the scaffold.
4. Dimmesdale’s kiss acknowledges Pearl as his child, and breaks the spell which seems to have held Pearl
captive. She cries and, we are told, will be a normal person from this moment onward.
5. “Be true! Be true! Be true!” The inability of Dimmesdale to be honest is pointed to as the central cause of
the ongoing distress.
6. The narrator again is ambiguous. A red letter “A” was seen and was said to be either cut or burnt in by
Dimmesdale, made to appear by his guilt feelings and heaven’s judgment, put there by Chillingworth’s
medicines or magic, or was never there at all.
7. Frustrated by Dimmesdale’s confession and death, Chillingworth withers away and dies within a year.
8. The great amount of land left to Pearl allows her and Hester to leave Boston.
9. Several years later Hester returns to Boston. She takes up her residence in the cottage and resumes her drab
dress accented by the scarlet letter.
10. Dimmesdale’s last words presumed that their sin meant they would never have a perfect union. In death
they are buried near, but not beside, each other. Whether Hester and Dimmesdale are united in heaven is left
unsaid.
The Scarlet Letter: Essential Passages
Essential Passages by Character: Hester Prynne
Essential Passage 1: Chapter 2
The Scarlet Letter: Essential Passages
34
When the young woman—the mother of this child—stood fully revealed before the crowd, it
seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the infant closely to her bosom; not so much by an
impulse of motherly affection, as that she might thereby conceal a certain token, which was
wrought or fastened into her dress. In a moment, however, wisely judging that one token of
her shame would but poorly serve to hide another, she took the baby on her arm, and, with a
burning blush, and yet a haughty smile, and a glance that would not be abashed, looked
around at her townspeople and neighbours. 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. It was so artistically done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of
fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore;
and which was of a splendour in accordance with the taste of the age, but greatly beyond what
was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony.
Summary
Hester Prynne, an English colonist of seventeenth-century Boston, has been found guilty of adultery,
evidenced by the birth of her child, Pearl. Rather than have her submit to the severe consequences required by
Puritan law (i.e., death), the authorities have given her a measure of mercy, due to the unknown fate of her
husband, and have required that she simply wear the letter “A” upon her breast for the rest of her life. Having
served at least three months in prison, Hester is now brought before the entire community, along with her
baby, to stand upon the scaffold for several hours, subject to the shame and taunts of the community. At first,
Hester displays shame for the scarlet letter and tries to shield it from view by drawing Pearl closely to her.
Realizing that Pearl herself could be considered a living “scarlet letter” and evidence of her sin, Hester
lowers her child and almost proudly displays the letter. Having embroidered the letter herself, she has made
the most of it, sewing with a richness that was characteristic of Elizabethan fashion but definitely contrary to
the Puritan practice of simplicity of dress.
Essential Passage 2: Chapter 5
It might be, too,—doubtless it was so, although she hid the secret from herself, and grew pale
whenever it struggled out of her heart, like a serpent from its hole,—it might be that another
feeling kept her within the scene and pathway that had been so fatal. There dwelt, there trode
the feet of one with whom she deemed herself connected in a union, that, unrecognised on
earth, would bring them together before the bar of final judgment, and make that their
marriage-altar, for a joint futurity of endless retribution. Over and over again, the tempter of
souls had thrust this idea upon Hester's contemplation, and laughed at the passionate and
desperate joy with which she seized, and then strove to cast it from her. She barely looked the
idea in the face, and hastened to bar it in its dungeon. What she compelled herself to
believe,—what, finally, she reasoned upon, as her motive for continuing a resident of New
England,—was half a truth, and half a self-delusion. Here, she said to herself, had been the
scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly punishment; and so, perchance,
the torture of her daily shame would at length purge her soul, and work out another purity
than that which she had lost; more saint-like, because the result of martyrdom.
Summary
After her release from prison and punishment on the scaffold, Hester takes up residence in a run-down cottage
outside of town. There she makes a living as a seamstress and becomes quite well-known for her needlework.
Although she is free to leave Boston, she has decided to stay, despite having to continue the wearing of the
scarlet letter as well as facing rejection and rumors. The narrator speculates on the possible reasons why she
has not relocated. First, the father of her child, Arthur Dimmesdale, remains in Boston. Although he has not
confessed that he is the father of Pearl, Dimmesdale is still the object of love for Hester. She knows that it is
impossible that they will be married in this world, but she believes—or hopes—that they might possibly be
Essential Passages by Character: Hester Prynne
35
allowed to be joined in Heaven, forgiven at last for their sin. Yet to herself, Hester says that she remains for
one simple reason: because Boston was the scene of her crime, it will be the scene of her punishment. She
hopes that the shame that she must endure daily from the Puritans will somehow cleanse her soul.
Essential Passage 3: Chapter 13
Indeed, the same dark question often rose into her mind, with reference to the whole race of
womanhood. Was existence worth accepting, even to the happiest among them? As concerned
her own individual existence, she had long ago decided in the negative, and dismissed the
point as settled. A tendency to speculation, though it may keep women quiet, as it does man,
yet makes her sad. She discerns, it may be, such a hopeless task before her. As a first step, the
whole system of society is to be torn down, and built up anew. Then, the very nature of the
opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit, which has become like nature, is to be essentially
modified, before woman can be allowed to assume what seems a fair and suitable position.
Finally, all other difficulties being obviated, woman cannot take advantage of these
preliminary reforms, until she herself shall have undergone a still mightier change; in which,
perhaps, the ethereal essence, wherein she has her truest life, will be found to have
evaporated. A woman never overcomes these problems by any exercise of thought. They are
not to be solved, or only in one way. If her heart chance to come uppermost, they vanish.
Thus, Hester Prynne, whose heart had lost its regular and healthy throb, wandered without a
clew in the dark labyrinth of mind; now turned aside by an insurmountable precipice; now
starting back from a deep chasm. There was wild and ghastly scenery all around her, and a
home and comfort nowhere. At times, a fearful doubt strove to possess her soul, whether it
were not better to send Pearl at once to Heaven, and go herself to such futurity as Eternal
Justice should provide.
The scarlet letter had not done its office.
Summary
Hester contemplates whether or not Pearl, who has become an almost uncontrollable child, should have been
allowed to be born. From this thought, she is led to question her own existence, and what is more, the
existence of women as a whole. Was it worthwhile for a woman to exist? Can she have a good life? Hester has
decided that she cannot. The problem lies in two areas. First, women are second-class citizens, thus
necessitating the restructuring of society as a whole. Women must be seen as the equal of men. Until that
time, it is little difference how a woman sees herself. Secondly, a woman is by nature more spiritually
introspective than a man, which often leads her to an emotional chasm. It is this point that Hester has now
reached. She has nowhere to go to escape, for she must take Pearl, the living reminder of her sin and her
womanhood, with her. Perhaps it is better, Hester thinks, that Pearl should die, and then Hester herself can end
her own life. As the narrator points out, the scarlet letter, which was intended to heal her soul and bring her
back to a righteous life, has done the opposite.
Analysis of Essential Passages
Hester Prynne is viewed primarily as a woman faced with the consequences of her sin of adultery. Yet it is not
the sin itself that Hawthorne focuses on, but the consequences of that sin within the context of the society in
which Hester finds herself. Her partner in adultery, Arthur Dimmesdale, faces daily his own sins, both
adultery and hypocrisy, but Hester has moved beyond that to face life on her own.
Initially, Hester does not know what to do with the shame that is handed to her. Although she tries to hide the
scarlet letter as she emerges from the jail to stand on the scaffold, she knows this is fruitless and thus
continues with the pledge that she made to herself while in prison—to wear her shame proudly. The elaborate
design of the scarlet letter is symbolic of Hester’s determination to refuse to hide from what she has done.
Essential Passages by Character: Hester Prynne
36
Dimmesdale’s scarlet letter remains hidden until the end, at the time of his confession, but Hester’s is before
her and before the community.
It is also for this reason that Hester remains in Boston. Although escape could be easily accomplished,
allowing her to return to a life of honor and societal acceptance, she chooses to stay at the place of her sin, to
accept the consequences. However, it is not necessarily out of pride in her sin that she remains. She accepts
that what she did—having a relationship with a man not her husband—was wrong, but she knows that she
cannot go back to change what happened: now that she has Pearl, all the world can see the result of her sin.
Knowing that no true marriage is available to her, she still has some feelings for Dimmesdale, despite the
impossible nature of their situation.
Hester’s thoughts eventually turn to the realization that her place as a woman in that society was
predetermined. She cannot change herself without changing society. While Dimmesdale has effectively
hidden his sin, a benefit of being a man, Hester as a woman cannot do that. She alone bears the disgrace and
has no intention of forcing Dimmesdale’s confession out of him.
Later, as she and Dimmesdale make plans for escape, she still realizes, as she sees him marching in the
Election Day procession, that nothing will change. She resents Dimmesdale for being a man and thus having
the ability to be other than what he really is. Although the three ultimately do not escape together, Hester has
some measure of redemption, through the deaths of both Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, as well as the escape
of herself and Pearl to Europe where Pearl grows up to be in the highest levels of society. It is through this
knowledge that she eventually returns to Boston, resumes the wearing of the scarlet letter, and is content to
live the life that she has created for herself.
Essential Passages by Theme: Moral Cowardice
Essential Passage 1: Chapter 4
“Thou knowest,” said Hester,—for, depressed as she was, she could not endure this last quiet
stab at the token of her shame,—“thou knowest that I was frank with thee. I felt no love, nor
feigned any.”
“True,” replied he. “It was my folly! I have said it. But, up to that epoch of my life, I had
lived in vain. The world had been so cheerless! My heart was a habitation large enough for
many guests, but lonely and chill, and without a household fire. I longed to kindle one! It
seemed not so wild a dream,—old as I was, and sombre as I was, and misshapen as I was,—that
the simple bliss, which is scattered far and wide, for all mankind to gather up, might yet be
mine. And so, Hester, I drew thee into my heart, into its innermost chamber, and sought to
warm thee by the warmth which thy presence made there!”
“I have greatly wronged thee,” murmured Hester.
“We have wronged each other,” answered he. “Mine was the first wrong, when I betrayed
thy budding youth into a false and unnatural relation with my decay. Therefore, as a man who
has not thought and philosophised in vain, I seek no vengeance, plot no evil against thee.
Between thee and me, the scale hangs fairly balanced."
Summary
Hester, remaining in the prison cell following her stint on the scaffold, is so upset that a physician is sent
for. Having learned some medicine in Europe and even more during his stay with the Indians, Chillingworth
Essential Passages by Theme: Moral Cowardice
37
answers the call. (He has been posing as a doctor.) This gives him the opportunity to confront his wife. After
explaining his absence as being the result of a hostage situation, he absolves himself of guilt for leaving
Hester alone to come to the New World by herself. Chillingworth then confesses his own errors. As a scholar
in England, he had lived alone with his studies until middle age. Seeking to ease his loneliness with a wife, he
chose the very young Hester and persuaded her to marry him. Knowing him to be a scholar, and evidently
ready to leave the poverty of her home, Hester married him, despite the age difference and the separation of
their social classes. Hester is now honest with him, that she never loved him, nor professed to. He agrees that
she did not, but he wanted to love her as a true husband loves his wife. Hester confesses on her own part that
she has done Chillingworth wrong, not just in committing adultery, but in marrying him without loving him.
Chillingworth in turn admits his own error in marrying her. It was unnatural, he says, and seeks no revenge on
her. His revenge, he reveals, is against the man who is the father of her child.
Essential Passage 2: Chapter 4
“Thy acts are like mercy,” said Hester, bewildered and appalled. “But thy words interpret
thee as a terror!”
“One thing, thou that wast my wife, I would enjoin upon thee,” continued the scholar. “Thou
hast kept the secret of thy paramour. Keep, likewise, mine! There are none in this land that
know me. Breathe not, to any human soul, that thou didst ever call me husband! Here, on this
wild outskirt of the earth, I shall pitch my tent; for, elsewhere a wanderer, and isolated from
human interests, I find here a woman, a man, a child, amongst whom and myself there exist
the closest ligaments. No matter whether of love or hate; no matter whether of right or wrong!
Thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me. My home is where thou art, and where he is.
But betray me not!”
Summary
Confronting Hester in her prison cell, under the guise of a physician, Chillingworth sets his plan of action. He
has no desire to wreak his revenge on her, but he will do so on the man who cuckolded him. Hester has
refused to reveal the identity of the father of her child; therefore, Chillingworth demands that she also keep his
identity a secret. He does not hide his reason: he plans on bringing forth the wrongdoer to the light of the
Puritan society, that he may be held accountable for his sins, as Hester has been for hers. Hester, Dimmesdale,
Chillingworth, and the child Pearl have become on odd little family on the edge of the physical and moral
wilderness. Chillingworth plans on keeping them all together, until moral justice can be done. Legally, he still
controls both Hester and the child, regardless of her parentage. If she presses him and reveals his identity to
anyone, Chillingworth has no qualms about exacting justice.
Essential Passage 3: Chapter 12
It was an obscure night of early May. An unwearied pall of cloud muffled the whole expanse
of sky from zenith to horizon. If the same multitude which had stood as eyewitnesses while
Hester Prynne sustained her punishment could now have been summoned forth, they would
have discerned no face above the platform, nor hardly the outline of a human shape, in the
dark grey of the midnight. But the town was all asleep. There was no peril of discovery. The
minister might stand there, if it so pleased him, until morning should redden in the east,
without other risk than that the dank and chill night-air would creep into his frame, and stiffen
his joints with rheumatism, and clog his throat with catarrh and cough; thereby defrauding the
expectant audience of to-morrow's prayer and sermon. No eye could see him, save that
ever-wakeful one which had seen him in his closet, wielding the bloody scourge. Why, then,
had he come hither? Was it but the mockery of penitence? A mockery, indeed, but in which
his soul trifled with itself! A mockery at which angels blushed and wept, while fiends
Essential Passages by Theme: Moral Cowardice
38
rejoiced, with jeering laughter! He had been driven hither by the impulse of that Remorse
which dogged him everywhere, and whose own sister and closely linked companion was that
Cowardice which invariably drew him back, with her tremulous gripe, just when the other
impulse had hurried him to the verge of a disclosure. Poor, miserable man! what right had
infirmity like his to burden itself with crime? Crime is for the iron-nerved, who have their
choice either to endure it, or, if it press too hard, to exert their fierce and savage strength for a
good purpose, and fling it off at once! This feeble and most sensitive of spirits could do
neither, yet continually did one thing or another, which intertwined, in the same inextricable
knot, the agony of heaven-defying guilt and vain repentance.
Summary
Arthur Dimmesdale, the beloved young pastor of Boston, has not been able to get up the courage to confess
himself to be the father of Pearl, Hester Prynne’s illegitimate daughter. Having preached on the occasion of
Hester's release from prison and her punishment on the scaffold, he had almost begged her to identify him, not
having the strength of will to do so himself. Yet Hester refused. The responsibility for confession rests with
the sinner. Dimmesdale, anxious for his reputation among the Puritans of Boston, is physically tearing himself
apart with guilt. He thinks that perhaps by standing where Hester stood on the scaffold, he can get some kind
of relief. In the dead of night he comes to stand guilty, though no one sees. He calls out to some passersby,
hoping that they will see him there, thus giving him an opportunity to speak. But he remains invisible.
Analysis of Essential Passages
Hawthorne wished to portray the Puritans as rigid and unforgiving, yet also hypocritical in their
self-righteousness. In doing so, he shows that this hypocrisy is engendered through moral cowardice, the fear
of confessing one’s sins in the presence of other sinners. This hypocrisy comes as the main characters hide
their true selves, not just from each other but also from themselves.
For Hester, the moral cowardice lies mostly in her marriage to Chillingworth, despite the fact that she was not
in love with him. Through her revelations in her conversation with Chillingworth in the jail cell, she is
presented as a completely different person in America than she was in England. The noticeable strength of
will, despite her succumbing to temptation with Dimmesdale, is absent in her marriage to Chillingworth.
Although she frequently thinks of the trials of the life she is forced to live, she has accepted the consequences.
In her later plans to run away with Dimmesdale, escaping the life of the scarlet letter, she reveals that indeed
“the scarlet letter has not done its office.” She is falling into the same trap she encountered that led to Pearl’s
conception. Her moral cowardice thus lies in the unwillingness to stand up to temptation and take the multiple
opportunities that have been given her by the town’s elders to take off the scarlet letter, having shown herself
“rehabilitated” in their eyes.
In Chillingworth’s case, his cowardice was in his fulfillment of marriage as a self-absorbed act. He had little
thought for Hester, nor did he especially care if she was happy. In Boston, he sees that she is already being
punished, so there is no pleasure in his doing so. He reserves that “happiness” in tormenting Dimmesdale.
His revenge, taken through psychological manipulations and abuse, reveal his weakness in resisting the
temptation of hate.
The most obvious display of moral cowardice, however, is in Arthur Dimmesdale. His weakness is
self-evident, having most likely been passive in the affair that he had with Hester. As the stronger character,
she likely was able to lead him past the point of no return. His refusal not only to confess his complicity but
also to be the one to stand up and present himself for what he is, shows the weakest kind of character possible.
Hiding behind the false reputation that he has worked for in the community, Dimmesdale is perfectly content
to let Hester alone face the consequences. Although he will occasionally stand up for her, as in the instance
when the magistrates were contemplating removing Pearl from her parentage, all in all he has allowed Hester
to be the stronger person, even to the point of planning their escape.
Essential Passages by Theme: Moral Cowardice
39
In the final chapter, Hawthorne presents the moral that he is trying to relate in the novel: “Be true! Be true!
Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred.”
Avoid hypocrisy, throw off moral cowardice, and be transparent. Perfection is not granted to man, so do not
fear that which shows you as imperfect as the next person.
The Scarlet Letter: Characters
Governor Bellingham
Governor Bellingham represents an actual person, Richard Bellingham, who came to America in 1634 and
was elected as governor of the English colony in 1641, 1654, and 1655. When not acting as governor, he still
held positions of power as magistrate or deputy governor. In the novel his character demonstrates that in the
colony, as the narrator states in chapter two, "religion and law were almost identical." Bellingham is described
as a "stern magistrate," who, in chapter eight, is convinced that Pearl should be taken from her mother in order
to receive a proper moral upbringing, until Dimmesdale persuades him that the union of Pearl and Hester is a
part of God's design.
Roger Chillingworth
Roger Chillingworth is the alias of Hester's husband. The two were married in England and moved together to
Amsterdam before Hester preceded Chillingworth to America. Chillingworth is a man devoted to knowledge.
His outward physical deformity (a hunchback) is symbolic of his devotion to deep, as opposed to superficial,
knowledge. His lifelong study of apothecary and the healing arts, first in Europe and later among the Indians
of America, is a sincere benevolent exercise until he discovers his wife's infidelity, whereupon he turns his
skills toward the evil of revenge.
Chillingworth is introduced near the very start of the narrative, where he discovers Hester upon the scaffold
with Pearl, the scarlet letter upon her chest, and displayed for public shame. After surviving a shipwreck on
his voyage to America, he lived for some time among the Indians and slowly made his way to Boston and
Hester. Upon discovering Hester's "ignominious" situation, Chillingworth declines to announce his identity
and instead chooses to reside in Boston to find and avenge himself on Hester's lover. When Dimmesdale
becomes ill with the effects of his sin, Chillingworth comes to live with him under the same roof. Reneging on
an earlier promise, Hester eventually discloses Chillingworth's identity to Dimmesdale. Soon after
Dimmesdale publicly confesses his sin and, as Chillingworth puts it, "Hadst thou sought the whole earth over .
. . there was no one place so secret,—no high place nor lowly place, where thou couldst have escaped
me,—save on this very scaffold!" Thus, his vengeful victory taken from him, Chillingworth soon dies, though
not before leaving all of his substantial wealth to Pearl.
Arthur Dimmesdale
Arthur Dimmesdale is the young, charismatic minister with whom Hester commits adultery. Unlike Hester,
who bears the child Pearl by their affair, Dimmesdale shows no outward evidence of his sin, and, as Hester
does not expose him, he lives with the great anguish of his secret guilt until he confesses publicly and soon
after dies near the end of the novel.
Dimmesdale is presented as a figure of frailty and weakness in contrast to Hester's strength (both moral and
physical), pride, and determination. He consistently refuses to confess his sin (until the end), even though he
repeatedly states that it were better, less spiritually painful, if his great failing were known. Thus Dimmesdale
struggles through the years and the narrative, enduring and faltering beneath his growing pain (with both the
help and harm of Roger Chillingworth), until, after his failed plan to escape to Europe with Hester and Pearl,
he confesses and dies.
The Scarlet Letter: Characters
40
The Goodwives
The Goodwives are several women who discuss Hester's situation in chapter two. They generally believe the
magistrates have been too easy on Hester and suggest branding or execution as appropriate punishments. One
exception is a "young wife" who in this, and a later scene, feels pity for Hester.
Mistress Hibbins
Mistress Hibbins, who makes several provoking, if short, appearances in the novel, represents the actual
historical figure Ann Hibbins, who was executed for witchcraft in 1656. Mistress Hibbins tempts both Hester
and Dimmesdale to enter in the league of the "Black Man," who, as a representative of the devil, haunts the
wild forest. While she is very nearly a comic figure in the narrative, the fact of her historical reality and fate
remind us of the grim power of Puritan regulation and paranoia.
Pearl
Pearl is the daughter of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale. Necessarily marginal to Puritan society and
scorned by other children, she grows up as an intimate of nature and the forest. Symbolically recreating the
scarlet letter, Hester, in opposition to her own drab wardrobe, dresses Pearl in brilliant, decorative clothing
such "that there was an absolute circle of radiance about her."
Like most characters in The Scarlet Letter, Pearl is complex and contradictory. On the one hand, as the
narrator describes, she "could not be made amenable to rules." At one moment in the novel, her disregard of
authority takes the form of a violent game where she pretends to destroy the children of the Puritan elders:
"the ugliest weeds of the garden [she imagined were the elders'] children, whom Pearl smote down and
uprooted, most unmercifully." On the other hand, at a climactic point in the narrative, where Hester discards
the scarlet letter on the floor of the forest, it is Pearl who dramatically insists that she resume the potent
symbol. The form of her insistence is particularly important, for, against her mother's request, she does not
bring the letter to Hester, but obstinately has Hester fetch the letter herself. This moment demonstrates one of
the central conflicted themes of the novel about the authoritarian imposition of law and the willing subjection
to it, or even embodiment of it. In this scene Pearl becomes the figure of authority to whom Hester willingly,
if symbolically, obeys. Pearl eventually leaves with Hester for Europe (though Hester returns), where, it is
implied, Pearl stays and, with the aid of Chillingworth's inheritance, is married to nobility.
Hester Prynne
Hester Prynne is the central and most important character in The Scarlet Letter. Hester was married to Roger
Chillingworth while living in England and, later, Amsterdam—a city to which many English Puritans moved
for religious freedom. Hester preceded her husband to New England, as he had business matters to settle in
Amsterdam, and after approximately two years in America she committed adultery with the Reverend Arthur
Dimmesdale.
The novel begins as Hester nears the end of her prison term for adultery. While adultery was considered a
grave threat to the Puritan community, such that death was considered a just punishment, the Puritan
authorities weighed the long absence and possible death of her husband in their sentence. Thus, they settled on
the punishment of permanent public humiliation and moral example: Hester was to forever wear the scarlet
letter A on the bodice of her clothing.
While seemingly free to leave the community and even America at her will, Hester chooses to stay. As the
narrator puts it, "Here, she said to herself, had been the scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her
earthly punishment; and so, perchance, the torture of her daily shame would at length purge her soul."
According to this reasoning, Hester assumes her residence in a small abandoned cottage on the outskirts of the
community.
The Scarlet Letter: Characters
41
While the novel is, in large part, a record of the torment Hester suffers under the burden of her symbol of
shame, eventually, after the implied marriage of her daughter Pearl and the death of Chillingworth and
Dimmesdale, Hester becomes an accepted and even a highly valued member of the community. Instead of
being a symbol of scorn, Hester, and the letter A, according to the narrator, "became a type of something to be
sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence too." The people of the community even come
to Hester for comfort and counsel in times of trouble and sorrow because they trust her to offer unselfish
advice toward the resolution of upsetting conflict. Thus, in the end, Hester becomes an important figure in
preserving the peace and stability of the community.
The Shipmaster
The Shipmaster is the captain of the ship on which Hester, Dimmesdale, and Pearl hope to leave America for
Europe. During the Election Day sermon in chapter twelve, he is smitten by Pearl's charm. He even tries to
kiss her, and, when this fails, he gives her a long gold chain.
John Wilson
Another historical figure, John Wilson was a minister who came to America in 1630. He was a strong figure
of Puritan authority and intolerance. In chapter three, where Hester is on the scaffold, he prods Dimmesdale to
interrogate Hester about the identity of her lover. In chapter eight he questions Pearl about her religious
knowledge.
The Scarlet Letter: Themes
Individual vs. Society
The Scarlet Letter is a novel that describes the psychological anguish of two principle characters, Hester
Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale. They are both suffering under, while attempting to come to terms with, their
mutual sin of adultery in a strict Puritan society. As critics immediately recognized upon publication of the
novel in 1850, one of its principal themes involved conflict between the individual and society.
Hawthorne represents the stern and threatening force of Puritan society in the first sentence of the first
chapter, where he describes a "throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments and gray," who stand before
the prison door "which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes," and behind which was
Hester. Hawthorne symbolizes the force of the Puritan's civil and religious authority in this "prison-door,"
which is indeed the very name of the chapter. Yet outside the door, symbolizing Hester, the scarlet letter, and
finally the individual who dissents from society, is a "wild rose-bush." This rosebush that stands just outside
the prison door, Hawthorne famously suggests, "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."
The action of the novel (what there is of action in this notoriously unmoving narrative) maintains the conflict
of the individual with society, even to the end, where Hawthorne offers a perplexing conclusion. Beginning
with the above symbolic scene, Hawthorne repeatedly attaches our sympathies with the individual against
social authority, setting us up for a narrative resolution where the individual breaks free from imposed
constraints. Yet Hester, after she leaves America for a time, returns to the place of her punishment and
willingly resumes the imposed symbol of her guilt and shame. Thus we are left with this principal thematic
conflict to resolve on our own.
Change and Transformation
Closely related to the conflict of the individual and society is the theme of stability, change, and
transformation. One of the important places where this theme is introduced is actually outside the proper
narrative, in Hawthorne's introduction, "The Custom-House."
The Scarlet Letter: Themes
42
In "The Custom-House" Hawthorne informs us about his actual job as the commissioner of the custom house
in Salem, Massachusetts. Given the job as a political appointment, Hawthorne was responsible for the
inspection and regulation of merchant ships that landed in Salem. In his endless partiality to symbols,
Hawthorne describes "an enormous specimen of the American eagle, with outspread wings" that "hovers"
before the Custom-House entrance and appears "by the fierceness of her beak and eye and the general
truculency of her attitude to . . . warn all citizens" of disrupting the Custom-House affairs. Here is a symbol of
stable authority necessarily connected to Hawthorne himself, insofar as he is chief official of the
Custom-House. Yet this firm symbol of civil authority is immediately compromised by the context of decay in
which it is placed. Hawthorne notes that the wharves of Salem have been left "to crumble to ruin" and that the
port "exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial life." Even the pavement around the Custom-House "has
grass enough growing in its chinks to show that it has not, of late days, been worn by any multitudinous resort
of business."
But these signs of creeping transformation are replaced by Hawthorne's obviously uncomfortable
representation of sudden, even violent change, which in fact struck him personally. Due to the political nature
of Hawthorne's appointment, when Zachary Taylor won the Presidential election of 1848, Hawthorne was
promptly removed from office. Viewing himself as politically harmless, Hawthorne had felt his "prospect of
retaining office to be better than [that of his] Democratic brethren. But who can see an inch into futurity,
beyond his nose? My own head was the first that fell!" With his guillotine metaphor, Hawthorne evokes the
great violent revolutions then sweeping Europe. Critics now agree that he greatly feared the possibility of such
dramatic change in America.
Ambiguity
Critical consensus has come to regard the issue of ambiguity and knowledge rather than ones of deception and
truth, as a central, if not the central, theme in the novel. Truth and deception imply a firm moral order, the
very possibility of which the novel repeatedly draws into question. Ambiguity, which implies the incapacity to
know anything for certain, is much closer to what the novel describes. One of the most profound expressions
of ambiguity surrounds Arthur Dimmesdale, for it is the truth of sin that he keeps hidden which makes him
the very pillar of moral purity in the community. In fact, exactly because he confesses his impurity he
becomes a more powerful figure of virtue: "He had told his bearers that he was altogether vile, a viler
companion of the vilest, the warts of sinners, a thing of unimaginable iniquity. . . . They heard it all, and did
but reverence him the more." The "truth" about the minister, sinner or sinless, is forever suspended. Thus,
even after the narrator records Dimmesdale's public confession of his affair with Hester, the very notion that
he was Hester's lover remains inconclusive. Some people maintain that they saw a stigmata of the scarlet letter
on Dimmesdale's chest, others present say they saw nothing at all. Some even claim that he did not confess
"the slightest connection, on his part, with the guilt for which Hester Prynne had so long worn the scarlet
letter." As the narrator says, "The reader may choose among these theories."
Another moment where the lure of truth is presented yet left undisclosed occurs in chapter nineteen, where the
narrator tells us that Pearl "had been offered to the world. . . . As the living hieroglyphic, in which was
revealed the secret [Hester and Dimmesdale] so darkly sought to hide,—all written in this symbol,—all plainly
manifest,—had there been a prophet or magician skilled to read the character of flame." Truth is plain, but its
language is hard to interpret.
Guilt and Innocence
Sin
The Scarlet Letter is without question a novel about sin and guilt, though, as we should expect of Hawthorne,
it is not a simple matter to determine who, or what, is the subject of these themes. Are Hester and Dimmesdale
the principle sinners, or does their suffering, if not their love, absolve them? If we assume that the novel is an
allegory, involving significant episodes and issues from American history, particularly the Salem witch trials,
then is it America itself that is guilty of great sin? If this is the case (and many critics feel that it is), then we
The Scarlet Letter: Themes
43
should reverse the most obvious terms of guilt and sin that the novel presents and read the representatives of
authority as the principal figures of guilt. Following this line of interpretation, we can see Hawthorne
attempting to individualize national sin in the actual historical characters of Governor Bellingham and John
Wilson. We can even take this reading one step further and see Hawthorne attempting to absolve himself and
his own family lineage when we recall that one of his own forefathers, John Hathorne, was a particularly cruel
prosecutor during the witch hysteria. Whether absolution is rendered is a matter for the reader to decide.
Identity
Perhaps the most obvious theme in The Scarlet Letter is exemplified by the red letter A Hester is forced to
wear on her chest. Whatever identity she had before the story began (and Hawthorne is careful to give us very
little information in the beginning) is meaningless because she wears the scarlet letter. Society places her,
identifying her as an adulteress and nothing more. She has no function in society except as an example for
others’ behavior, regardless of her skills and caring nature, which become evident later in the novel.
Dimmesdale struggles with his identity as well, as he lives with a constant lie. Hester wears the A because he
wouldn’t admit to his involvement with her, placing his position in the community above everything.
Gradually his standing means less and less to him, and the community mistakes his misery for piety. He is
literally living a lie by the end of the novel, unable to live up to his own standards nor those set by the
community. He allows society to construct an identity around him, and it can only hold him up for so long.
Hester, on the other hand, begins to find the letter liberating in a way; through her actions, her community
involvement, and the inevitable changes that her society undergoes, Hester’s A is a badge of honor. When
she’s offered the chance to remove it, she refuses, seeing the letter as an integral part of what she has become
thanks to her own effort. Hester’s identity grows independently of the scarlet letter, and it becomes an
extension of her rather than the other way around.
Civilization
Living in an extremely organized society, the Puritans believe they are civilized. But are they? Hawthorne
seems uncertain, if not skeptical. They have laws based on their religion and punishments based on long-held
ways of doing things. Perhaps the concept of civilization has passed them by, or perhaps their insistence on
the “civilized” nature of their society is not civilized at all.
Puritan civilization is questioned from a number of angles in The Scarlet Letter. Hester doesn’t go away
when she is made to wear the scarlet letter; she lives with it, and eventually flourishes. Dimmesdale is a pillar
of the community, but his spiritual strength and moral foundation are built on lies. As he begins to deteriorate,
all of Boston’s dearly-held conventions do as well—if he had been able to tell the truth and go on, would he
have been an even better minister to those who are as weak as he was?
Pearl questions Puritan civilization through the simple act of asking questions. Things about her world make
no sense to her, so she asks about them to learn, and eventually to criticize when the answers also make no
sense. She is seen as “evil” because she is unwilling to blindly follow; she is acting far more out of confusion
of her own mother’s ostracized position in the community. If Hester had not had to wear the A, would her
world have made more sense to Pearl?
Hawthorne’s own questioning of the nature of Puritan civilization is intended to make us question not only
the Puritans, but ourselves. Is a practice “civilized” simply because it has always been done that way? Is
individuality a sin to be punished? Hawthorne believed it was not, and his novel shows it in increasingly
graphic detail for the time.
The Scarlet Letter: Themes
44
The Scarlet Letter: Style
Narrator
One of the most obvious problems when discussing The Scarlet Letter is determining the identity of the
narrator. This difficulty is clearly intentional. In the second paragraph of "The Custom-House," Hawthorne
claims that he is merely "explaining how a large portion of the following pages came into [his] possession,"
hoping to offer "proofs of the authenticity of a narrative therein contained." Hawthorne proclaims himself
only an editor, "or very little more." Yet later he states that "I have allowed myself . . . nearly or altogether as
much license as if the facts had been entirely of my own invention," and all he is willing to verify is "the
authenticity of the outline " Thus Hawthorne's characteristic use of ambiguity is both a central theme and a
central technique of the novel.
Symbolism
The Scarlet Letter is rich with symbols; in fact, it is largely regarded as the first symbolic novel in America. A
symbol is, like a metaphor, something that stands for, or represents, something else: an object, a person, even
an idea. But the term "symbol" is used to describe a substitution with more power, or profound meaning, for
which the term "metaphor" is inadequate. Of course, the scarlet letter itself is the principal symbol in the
novel, but there are many others. In the first chapter the wild rosebush symbolizes dissent in its reference to
the historical figure Anne Hutchinson, who led a group of religious dissenters in colonial Massachusetts. It
also symbolizes Hester and even anticipates the scarlet letter that she wears. Individuals in the novel can also
be understood as symbols. For instance, Arthur Dimmesdale, with all of his profound pain and suffering, is
symbolic of the high value of truth and the irony of its unattainability.
Setting
Another of Hawthorne's techniques, one that so effectively immerses us in the atmosphere of his story, is his
use of setting. The entire novel takes place in and around the small colonial town of Boston, Massachusetts.
As Hawthorne describes it, the town is situated precariously between the sea and the great "wilderness" of
unsettled America. What lies outside the town is a "black forest," strongly symbolic of moral absence and
evil. Thus the narrator describes a "footpath" that straggled onward into the "mystery of the primeval forest.
This [forest] hemmed it in so narrowly, and stood so black and dense on either side . . . that, to Hester's mind,
it imaged not amiss the moral wilderness in which she had so long been wandering." (©eNotes) Here we see
an almost claustrophobic pressure being evoked, which alludes to not only Hester but also the community of
which she is a part, always facing the possibility of moral failure.
As seen above, Hawthorne uses color adeptly in his description of settings. Besides the black wilderness there
is the gray of the village and its inhabitants, who, as the narrator describes, "seemed never to have known a
youthful era." Even though it was in fact a young settlement, the town jail "was already marked with weather
stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its . . . gloomy front." In fact, it is
precisely the dark and gloomy depiction of the town that helps to provide a tension with the forest, as if the
town were already much like the forest and therefore more liable to be absorbed by its influence.
Ambiguity
While the importance of ambiguity as a theme has already been emphasized, it must still be described as one
of Hawthorne's most important techniques. Repeatedly, where the reader expects to be given sure information,
Hawthorne qualifies and withdraws assurance to the point that the reader is often left frustrated. In chapter
sixteen even the small forest brook by which Hester discards the scarlet letter threatens Hawthorne's narration
with the disclosure of meaning, and so, the surrounding "giant trees and boulders of granite seemed intent on
making a mystery of the course of this small brook; fearing perhaps, that, with its never-ceasing loquacity, it
should whisper tales out of the heart of the old forest whence it flowed, or mirror its revelations on the smooth
surface of a pool." Hawthorne renders this beautiful passage to remind the reader, seemingly at every turn,
The Scarlet Letter: Style
45
that meaning, or truth, will be profoundly difficult to uncover.
The Scarlet Letter: Historical Context
The Transcendentalist Movement
The Scarlet Letter, which takes as its principal subject colonial seventeenth-century New England, was written
and published in the middle of the nineteenth century. Hawthorne began writing the novel in 1849, after his
dismissal from the Custom-House, and it was published in 1850. The discrepancy between the time
represented in the novel and the time of its production has often been a point of confusion to students.
Because Hawthorne took an earlier time as his subject, the novel is considered a historical romance written in
the midst of the American literary movement called transcendentalism (c. 1836-60).
An 1882 woodcut, "At the Church Door," showing a Puritan Thanksgiving in the seventeenth century.
The principle writers of transcendentalism included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret
Fuller, and W. H. Channing. Transcendentalism was, broadly speaking, a reaction against the rationalism of
the previous century and the religious orthodoxy of Calvinist New England. Transcendentalism stressed the
romantic tenets of mysticism, idealism, and individualism. In religious terms it saw God not as a distant and
harsh authority, but as an essential aspect of the individual and the natural world, which were themselves
considered inseparable. Because of this profound unity of all matter, human and natural, knowledge of the
world and its laws could be obtained through a kind of mystical rapture with the world. This type of
experience was perhaps most famously explained in Emerson's Nature, where he wrote, "I become a
transparent eyeball, I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part
and parcel of God."
Even though Hawthorne was close to many transcendentalists, including Emerson, and even though he lived
for a while at the transcendentalist experimental community of Brook Farm, he was rather peripheral to the
movement. Hawthorne even pokes fun at Brook Farm and his transcendentalist contemporaries in "The
The Scarlet Letter: Historical Context
46
Custom-House," referring to them as his "dreamy brethren indulging in fantastic speculation." Where they
saw the possibilities of achieving knowledge through mystical experience, Hawthorne was far more skeptical.
Abolitionism and Revolution
More important to Hawthorne's literary productions, and particularly The Scarlet Letter, was abolitionism and
European revolution. These, in Hawthorne's view, were episodes of threatening instability. Abolitionism was
the nineteenth-century movement to end slavery in the United States. Though it varied in intensity,
abolitionism contained a very radical strain that helped to form a climate for John Brown's capture of Harpers
Ferry in 1859. (John Brown intended to establish a base for armed slave insurrection.) The rising intensity and
violence of abolitionism was an important cause of the Civil War. Hawthorne's conservative position in
relation to abolitionism did not necessarily mean that he was pro-slavery, but he did quite clearly oppose
abolitionists, writing that slavery was "one of those evils which divine Providence does not leave to be
remedied by human contrivances."
What Hawthorne feared were violent disruptions of the social order like those that were happening in Europe
at the time he wrote The Scarlet Letter. The bloody social upheaval that most interested Americans began in
France in 1848. This, and other revolutions of the period, pitted the lower and middle classes against
established power and authority. While the revolutions eventually failed, they were largely waged under the
banner of socialism, and it was this fact that caused concern in America; as one journalist wrote, as quoted by
Bercovitch, here there were "foreboding shadows" of "Communism, Socialism, Pillage, Murder, Anarchy, and
the Guillotine vs. Law and Order, Family and Property." Critics have recently pointed to Hawthorne's
guillotine imagery in "The Custom-House" (where he even suggests the title "The Posthumous Papers of a
Decapitated Surveyor" for his tale) and metaphors of his own victimization as some evidence of his
sympathies with regard to revolution and social order.
The Puritan Colonies
The novel was written in the mid-nineteenth century, but it takes the mid-seventeenth century for the events it
describes (1642-49). The Massachusetts Bay Colony was established by John Winthorp (whose death is
represented near the center of the novel) and other Puritans in 1630. They sought to establish an ideal
community in America that could act as a model of influence for what they saw as a corrupt civil and religious
order in England. This sense of mission was the center of their religious and social identity. Directed toward
the realization of such an ideal, the Puritans required a strict moral regulation; anyone in the community who
sinned threatened not only their soul, but the very possibility of civil and religious perfection in America and
in England. Not coincidentaliy, the years Hawthorne chose to represent in The Scarlet Letter were the same as
those of the English Civil War fought between King Charles I and the Puritan Parliament; the latter was
naturally supported by the New England colonists.
The Scarlet Letter: Critical Overview
Most reviewers gave Hawthorne's novel high praise at the time of its publication. Evert A. Duyckinck, one of
the most influential critics of his day, called the tale a "psychological romance . . . a study of character in
which the human heart is anatomized, carefully, elaborately, and with striking poetic and dramatic power." He
also praised Hawthorne's departure from the overly ornate writing style popular at the time, which displayed
"artifice and effort at the expense of nature and ease." Duyckinck's review was supported by that of Edwin
Percy Whipple, who considered the novel "deep in thought and . . . condensed in style." A striking theme
common to both critics is Hawthorne's difference from French literary models. Both saw French fiction,
particularly that of George Sand (a woman novelist), as far too immoral in its depiction of issues similar to
those treated in The Scarlet Letter. Whipple wrote that the novel had "utterly undermined the whole
philosophy on which the French novels rest, by seeing further and deeper into the essence both of
conventional and moral laws." The terms of the anti-French attitude of those early reviewers, placing
The Scarlet Letter: Critical Overview
47
Hawthorne's positive insight into convention and morality against the French lack of such insight, is of special
significance. It refers inevitably to the historical fact of the 1848 revolution in France and American anxieties
about its spread overseas.
This is not to say the positive critical appraisal of Hawthorne's moral representations was unanimous. Arthur
Cleveland Coxe, writing in the Church Review, considered Hawthorne's novel the story of "the nauseous
amour of a Puritan pastor," who commits adultery with "a frail creature of his charge, whose mind is
represented as far more debauched than her body." (However one interprets the moral order—or its lack—that
Hawthorne describes, very few have considered Hester a "frail creature.")
Henry James's 1874 study, Hawthorne, stands as the first "modern" analysis of the novel, insofar as he
considered it not as a work of entertainment but one of serious art. James declared that the novel was the
"finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth in the country." Yet he was put off by what he considered an
almost ridiculous level of symbolic effect, writing of the scene where the scarlet letter appears in the sky
above Boston as one of nearly "physical comedy" rather than high "moral tragedy." Henry James was himself
a great author of literary realism, and this preference is shown in his criticism of Hawthorne's symbolism.
Most modern critics have wrangled with The Scarlet Letter's unresolved tensions. One of the most insightful,
F. O. Matthiessen, describes Hawthorne's method as one of "multiple choice," where different interpretive
possibilities are offered by the narrator, who withholds resolution of the reader's inevitable questions. "For
Hawthorne," writes Mattheissen, the value of a particular literary moment "consisted in the variety of
explanation to which it gave rise." In the climactic final scene where Dimmesdale presumably confesses and
exposes the stigmata on his chest, Hawthorne leaves the reader not only with a variety of options on how the
letter got there, but even questions about whether there was a mark or confession at all.
Other critics have not been generous with Hawthorne's penchant for mystery. Frederic I. Carpenter, in an
essay titled "Scarlet A Minus," calls the book a classic of a "minor order," and complains that "its logic is
ambiguous." Carpenter finds the narrative generally characterized by a confusion "between romantic
immorality and transcendental idealism." This unresolved tension is most obvious in the character of Hester,
who is at once condemned as immoral and glorified as an ideal of courage.
Hester's courage has been the positive subject of criticism by feminist readers, including Nina Baym. Baym
wrote a strong and persuasive essay against male critics, particularly of the 1950s, who read the novel as a
story primarily about Arthur Dimmesdale. Baym explains the critical subordination of Hester to Dimmesdale
as part of a masculinist ideology which held that "it would be improper for a woman character to be the
protagonist in what might well be the greatest American book." Baym shows that Hester occupies by far the
greater part of the novel (including the preface) and that she clearly takes full responsibility for her actions in
a way that Dimmesdale does not. In short, "Hester and her behavior are associated with the ideals of passion,
self-expression, freedom, and individualism against ideals of order, authority, and restraint. . . . Nothing in the
plot shows Hester attempting to evade responsibility for her actions."
As Baym suggests, The Scarlet Letter is arguably the most important work of fiction ever written in America.
Naturally, it gathers enormous critical attention. Important recent works include those by Jonathon Arac,
Michael Davitt Bell, and especially, Lauren Berlant and Larry J. Reynolds. These critics are highly various,
but generally speaking they have examined the way the novel elaborates—that is, both represented and helped
to produce—the powerful symbols and myths of dominant American structures of power. But by far the most
influential of recent studies with such an emphasis is Sacvan Bercovitch's The Office of The Scarlet Letter.
Bercovitch maintains that the most telling point in the novel is the one sentence paragraph in chapter thirteen
where the narrator tells us, "the scarlet letter had not done its office." Here, according to Bercovitch, we learn
that the scarlet letter "has a purpose and a goal," thus, "Hawthorne's meanings may be endless, but they are
The Scarlet Letter: Critical Overview
48
not open-ended." So what is the "goal" of the scarlet letter? To transmute "opposition into complementarity."
By this Becovitch means that the letter, in the end, defuses dissent and reestablishes unity: The Scarlet Letter
"is a story of socialization in which the point of socialization is not to conform, but to consent. Anyone can
submit; the socialized believe. It is not enough to have the letter imposed; you have to do it yourself." The
scarlet letter is at first imposed on Hester by the Puritan magistrates, but this does not represent the best form
of socialization because Hester does not wear it willingly but bears it as a punishment. An important turning
point is the scene in the forest where she discards the letter by the brook, but then, through Pearl's imploring,
takes the letter back upon her chest. Also, according to this reading, her planned escape with Pearl and
Dimmesdale from Boston must fail, for leaving would represent an unwillingness to fully accept the letter. It
is clear that the letter has finally accomplished its office when, after eventually going with Pearl to Europe,
Hester willingly returns to the community of her shame. As Hawthorne writes in the Conclusion, "She had
returned, therefore, and resumed,—of her own free will, for not the sternest magistrate of that iron period
would have imposed it,—resumed the symbol of which we have related so dark a tale." Instead of being a
figure of scorn and shame, she becomes a valued counsellor in the community, resolving conflict, as opposed
to representing it. For Bercovitch this is an allegorical representation of an American method of controlling
dissent. "To understand the office of the A . . . is to see how culture empowers symbolic form, including
forms of dissent, and how symbols participate in the dynamics of culture, including the dynamics of
constraint."
The Scarlet Letter: Essays and Criticism
A Characterization of the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale
The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne unfolds its plot during the era of Puritanism, not less than
two centuries ago, in Boston, Massachusetts. One’s attention is drawn to the character of the Reverend Arthur
Dimmesdale. As the father of a child, born out of wedlock to Hester Prynne, Dimmesdale is portrayed as a
character who, though consumed with guilt for his part in an action which brings ignominy to Hester, is
unable to publicly announce his culpability as a partner in this scandal.
Thus, the Reverend begins to lead a double life – a life which brings him torment. To the outside world, he is
the model Reverend. He assumes the posture of one totally innocent regarding such misdeeds; in fact, he
condemns them. As his parishioners note, “he took it very grievously to heart that such a scandal should have
come upon his congregation.” (Hawthorne). When Hester is forced to stand upon a scaffold in public view as
atonement for her sin, The Scarlet Letter A (for Adulteress emblazoned upon the bosom of her garment, it is
Dimmesdale who self-righteously implores her: “I charge thee speak out the name of thy fellow sinner and
fellow-sufferer!” (Hawthorne 73). When the clergy elect to take the child, Pearl, away from Hester,
considering her unfit to raise the child, Dimmesdale does nothing to stand in the way of proceedings to this
end until Hester beseeches him to speak on her behalf. Only then does he come to her defense, saying: “This
child of its father’s guilt and its mother’s shame hath come from the hand of God . . . It was meant for a
blessing . . . for a retribution too. . . .” (Hawthorne 114). It was due to his persuasive argument that Hester
was allowed to keep the child.
One is amazed by the fact that Dimmesdale can utter words of condemnation with such passion, yet keep his
identity as the child’s father concealed. However, as a direct result of his guilt, the Reverend becomes
increasingly ill. Those best acquainted with him attributed his decline to a too earnest devotion to study and
fulfillment of parochial duties. Yet the Reverend is aware of the fact that the “poison of one morbid spot was
infecting his heart’s entire substance. . . .” (Hawthorne 137). Knowing his public venerated him caused him
agony: he knew he was being deceitful. Thinking of his grave, he wondered whether grass would ever grow
on it, “because an accursed thing must there be buried!” (Hawthorne 139).
The Scarlet Letter: Essays and Criticism
49
Thus, although he longed to speak out and tell the people who he was: “I, your pastor, whom you so
reverence and trust, am utterly a pollution and a lie!” (Hawthorne 140), he could not. His own stance to the
world was revealed when he stated those that are guilty go about “looking pure as new-fallen snow; while
their hearts are all speckled and spotted with inequity of which they cannot rid themselves.” (Hawthorne 130).
However, he realized that admission would be a great relief: “It must need be better for the sufferer to be free
to show his pain, as this poor woman Hester is, than to cover it all up in his heart.” (Hawthorne 132).
It is through the character of Roger Chillingworth, Hester’s ex-husband who, while symbolically representing
the Devil, acts as the Reverend’s physician and friend, that Dimmesdale’s character is revealed: his inability
to step forward publicly and act in Hester’s defense. It is not by direct revelation that his thinking pertaining
to this matter is exposed, but rather in response to a particular incident involving Chillingworth. Having
gathered some herbs in a graveyard for medicinal purposes, Chillingworth states to Dimmesdale that the herbs
grew out of the man’s heart “and typify, it may be, some hideous secret . . . which had done better to confess
during his lifetime.” (Hawthorne 129). Chillingworth, knowing the Reverend’s physical illness is a
manifestation of his spiritual sickness, makes the remark in order to elicit a response from Dimmesdale. It is
Dimmesdale’s answer which illiminates his inability to reveal himself as Hester’s accomplice in sin:
“Perchance . . . he earnestly desired it, but could not. . . . There can be . . . no power, short of the Divine
mercy, to disclose, whether by uttered words, or by type or emblem, the secrets that may be buried with a
human heart.” (Hawthorne 129). Dimmesdale maintained that the ultimate judgment could only be made by
the Divine. Since no earthly good could come from confessing sins which already had been perpetrated and
could not be undone, there was no justification in admitting his guilt.
However, it would seem that Dimmesdale’s beliefs provided a convenient excuse for him to hide behind
when, in actuality, it was he himself who could not allow the world to condemn him. He continues to allow
Hester and his faith to act as a shield for him against public morality. When asked by Chillingworth why one
would not want to reveal one’s guilt during one’s lifetime, the Reverend replies: guilty as they may be . . .
they shrink from displaying themselves black and filthy in the view of men; because, thenceforward, no good
can be achieved by them; no evil of the past be redeemed by better service.” (Hawthorne).
Thus, though Dimmesdale remained constantly introspective, he could not purify himself: “The only truth
that continued to give Mr. Dimmesdale a real existence on this earth was the anguish in his inmost soul. . .”
(Hawthorne 142). Remorse dogged the Reverend everywhere, “and whose own sister and closely linked
companion was that cowardice which invariably drew him back . . . just when the other impulse had hurried
him to the verge of a disclosure.” (Hawthorne 144). It was thus that Dimmesdale went to the scaffold one
night where, seven years ago, Hester had stood. Seeing him there on her walk home from a deathbed watch
with Pearl, Dimmesdale calls out to her that she and Pearl should ascend the scaffold “and we will stand all
three together!” (Hawthorne 148). But, when asked by Pearl if he would stand with them the following day at
noon, for all to see, his reply was no, for the dread of public exposure was too great for him to bear.
Eventually Hester, who had been allowing Chillingworth to keep close watch upon Dimmesdale, decides to
reveal Chillingworth’s true intent towards the Reverend. Asking Hester how he should cope with this deadly
enemy reveals Hester as being the strong one in their relationship: “Think for me, Hester! Thou art strong.
Resolve for Me!” (Hawthorne 187). She responds by telling him to leave seven years of misery behind him
and depart to begin again. But, by this time, Dimmesdale’s spirit has been broken – he has not the strength or
courage to go alone: “Wretched and sinful as I am. I have had no other thought than to drag on my earthly
existence in the sphere where Providence hath placed me.” (Hawthorne 188). It is when they decide to leave
together that he believed he should go, realizing he needed her companionship: “so powerful is she to sustain
– so tender to soothe!” (Hawthorne 191).
At the thought of their departure, Dimmesdale’s spirit is renewed. On the day he was to give a final sermon,
there was a procession in the marketplace: “So etherealized by spirit as he was, and so apotheosized by
A Characterization of the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale
50
worshipping admirers, did his footsteps in the procession really tread upon the dust of earth?” (Hawthorne
233). Yet, the excitement being great, he realizes his death is imminent and thus, before the crowd, he calls
Hester and Pearl to go upon the scaffold with him: “At last! – at last! – I stand upon the spot where, seven
years since, I should have stood. . . .” (Hawthorne 237). Passionately, he admits his guilt, tearing away his
garment to reveal his own red stigma upon his breast.
Thus, in Dimmesdale’s greatest moment of pain, he had won his greatest victory. By his admission, he had
escaped the clutches of Roger Chillingworth. The moral, for the Reverend, may have been in his departing
words to Hester: “I fear! It may be . . . when we violated our reverence each for the other’s soul – it was
thenceforth vain to hope that we could meet hereafter, in an everlasting and pure reunion.” (Hawthorne 239).
For Hester, however, in his final moments, he had provided vindication of her character and his as well.
Edition Used: Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. 1850. New York: New American Library, 1959.
What is Sin? The Art of Forgiveness in The Scarlet Letter
The Puritans whose world was disrupted by Hester Prinn’s presence and actions have an extremely orthodox,
structured view of sin. To them, a sin is a simple refusal to follow their laws, which they claim are supported
by Biblical truth. Apparently, sin is also permanent; the red letter A Hester is forced to wear as a result of her
adulterous affair and the child that results from it guaranteed that her sin would never be forgotten, or
forgiven. But forgiveness, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s view, can be found elsewhere. By standing up to her
situation, facing her sin, and getting on with her life, Hester is forgiven by not only her peers, but herself,
perhaps the most important forgiveness of all.
In the beginning of the novel, Hester stands on a scaffold, accused of adultery. The child she clutches to her
chest is proof of her sin. Rather than put her in the stocks or have her whipped, as they might for other crimes,
Boston’s Puritan government chooses permanent public humiliation, a constant reminder to others that Hester
is less then perfect. The sin of such humiliation, of treating a person like an animal with a brand, goes
unmentioned. By not having any of the characters mention it, Hawthorne makes this sin as bold as the one
Hester committed, and as permanent.
In addition, the Puritans commit a sin by allowing Hester to take full blame for what is obviously a sin that
can only be committed by two people. The identity of the father doesn’t seem to warrant a full investigation
once Hester accepts the letter; simply having a scapegoat is enough to appease their need for justice. This lazy
neglect of their own laws counts as another sin.
But then, there is plenty of sin to go around in The Scarlet Letter; Dimmesdale, for committing adultery, lying
about it, and putting his “co-conspirator” in jeopardy; Chillingworth, for concealing his identity and outright
murdering Dimmesdale; so many unnamed townspeople, for simply letting Hester be humiliated. By today’s
standards, none of these characters would be free of guilt. There is one profound difference between these
sinners and Hester, however. Hester’s sin is confessed, and she lives with two constant reminders of that sin
– the scarlet letter itself, and Pearl, the child conceived with Dimmesdale.
By taking the blame for hers and Dimmesdale’s sin, Hester shows herself to be selfless, a virtue. Rather than
hiding in her home with her shame, Hester goes about her usual activities, eventually supporting herself by
becoming a seamstress – apparently, years of sewing red letters on her clothing developed a skill within her.
Her quiet strength gradually makes her sin and its symbol less of a stigma, and the people of the small
community where she and Pearl live accept her as more than anyone else – she is an asset to their society,
performing good deeds and conducting herself as a kind and understanding person.
What is Sin? The Art of Forgiveness in The Scarlet Letter
51
The others’ sins, the ones that go unconfessed and unpunished because the sinners believe themselves to be
above such things, manifest themselves in debilitating ways. Dimmesdale’s lies simmer inside him, gradually
breaking down his sanity and his physical health. The day he refuses to publicly acknowledge Pearl as his
daughter his condition worsens even faster, with a meteor tracing a red A in the sky. Only when he finally
reveals his secret family, and the letter A he has carved into his own chest, does Dimmesdale find redemption
through confession. This redemption comes too late to save his life.
Chillingworth’s sins drive him to pure evil, and he continues to sin as Dimmesdale’s live-in caretaker. He
makes an already-bad situation worse by torturing the young minister, poisoning his body and his soul. But all
Chillingworth’s work is for nothing; Dimmesdale dies with his family, not at the bitter doctor’s hands.
Chillingworth has no wife, no heirs, and no real place within the community except his willingness to go
along with laws that offer him some measure of revenge.
And what of Puritan Boston and its laws? The consequences of the Puritans’ collective sin are the most subtle
of all. In living her life without shame, Hester gradually makes the punishment inflicted on her absolutely
meaningless. Hester and Pearl leave Boston for years, yet when Hester returns she resumes her charity work,
presumably still helping those who once condemned her. In the end, Hester is the character Hawthorne holds
up as an example of strength and unwavering faith. Her faith in herself wins out over the Puritans’
comparatively weak religious faith, which relies on hiding from the world. Hester becomes a part of the
world, accepting the consequences of her sinful acts but refusing to be less of a person because of it. We hear
nothing about the Puritans themselves by the end of the novel; they drift away into anachronism as Hester
remains a valuable part of her community.
The key is forgiveness. The Puritan elders may not forgive Hester, but she is able to forgive herself, just as
Pearl forgives her. Those who are unforgiven die harsh, or worse, lonely, deaths with nothing to mark their
passing. Hester literally carries the symbol of her sin to the grave, buried along with Dimmesdale beneath a
tombstone featuring a red letter A. Hawthorne’s message is simple – those who acknowledge and confess
their sins can be redeemed, while those who consider themselves too good for confession get exactly what
they deserve.
Is Hester Prynn a Role Model?
Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is centered on the sin and punishment of Hester Prynn, but Hester is a far
more complex character than these black and white terms. The women of Boston gossip in the opening
chapters of the book about Hester’s crime, suggesting that she be branded or killed instead of having to wear
a red A.
When we first see Hester, it’s obvious why the women are so angry and jealous, as she is a beautiful woman.
She is also very strong under the scrutiny of the Puritans; she appears on the scaffold with Pearl clutched
tightly against the A, but realizes she can’t hide what she is:
In a moment, however, wisely judging that one token of her shame would but poorly serve to
hide another, she took the baby on her arm, and with a burning blush, and yet a haughty
smile, and a glance that would not be abashed, looked around at her townspeople and
neighbours. 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. It was so artistically
done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the effect of
a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore. . . . (80-81)
Is Hester Prynn a Role Model?
52
Hester is already a skilled seamstress, and she maintains a certain pride in her appearance even in prison.
Some might consider this pride in her actions themselves – she was proud to commit adultery. Later in
chapter 2, however, we see a woman whose every instinct is to hurl herself off the scaffold, or go mad, or
both. Hester’s pride is her strength, a strength uncharacteristic for a woman of her time. It is this strength,
along with Hester’s resourcefulness and kindness, that make her a model not of perfection, but of a quiet
feminine reserve that is worth emulating.
Hester doesn’t let the scarlet letter get her down once she is released from prison; she refuses to “borrow
from the future to help her through the present grief” (118), determined to make the best of her situation. She
ends up contributing to the community, both as a seamstress and as a humanitarian. She visits the sick and
dying, makes “coarse garments” for the poor, and generally applies herself to making up for the letter she still
wears on her own unremarkable clothes. Eventually, after disease ravages the town, some begin to reinterpret
the scarlet letter – the A “meant Abel, so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman’s strength” (243).
Strength becomes a common reference to Hester – she defies Puritan traditions that equate women with
weakness and servitude. Hester does serve her community, but she does so in her own way, fearlessly.
After Dimmesdale’s death, and after Chillingworth dies and wills an impressive amount of money and
property to Pearl, Hester takes her child away, presumably to England. Hawthorne indirectly tells us that Pearl
has married and is making a love for herself. Hester, however, returns to New England, where she is insistent
on completing her penance. She has become a legend, but on her return she resumes her caring, charitable
ways. In the process, she becomes even more of a legend, the scarlet letter becoming a far different symbol:
In the lapse of the toilsome, thoughtful, and self-devoted
years that made up Hester’s life, the scarlet letter
ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world’s scorn
and bitterness, and became a type of something to be
sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, yet with
reverence too. (392)
To her community, Hester is a model of the redemption that can come from a person who is truly repentant
and works his or her penance for a lifetime.
For the women of her community, Hester becomes much more:
Women, more especially—in the continually recurring trials of wounded, wasted, wronged,
misplaced, or erring and sinful passion—or with the dreary burden of a heart unyielded,
because unvalued and unsought came to Hester’s cottage, demanding why they were so
wretched, and what the remedy! (393)
Hester councils these women, sharing what she has learned from her own experiences and the strength she
called from within herself to survive them. She is buried under the same scarlet letter, having been changed by
it. The women under her care change through knowing her, and gradually the “New truth . . . revealed, in
order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness” comes
to pass in New England and throughout America. Hester is a role model in her literary life and in real life, as
women reading The Scarlet Letter today can still derive strength and empowerment from this woman who
more than pays her penance.
The Evolution of Symbols in The Scarlet Letter
The Evolution of Symbols in The Scarlet Letter
53
All of the symbols Hawthorne uses in The Scarlet Letter point to the book’s most obvious symbol, the scarlet
letter A itself. Images of light and dark, crosses, scaffolds, even Hester Prynn’s daughter Pearl can be found
within the symbolism of the letter. As such, that one letter could be considered the hub around which the story
revolves, a character in itself. It is this symbol, and the evolution of its character, that Hawthorne uses to
change the lives of all around it. A symbol of evil and sin gradually becomes a symbol of hope and
redemption, not only for its immediate characters, but for us all. Hawthorne uses the symbol and its “echoes”
almost as characters themselves, causing them to shift as he wants our understanding of a Puritan village and
its inhabitants to shift.
In our first glimpse of the scarlet letter, Hawthorne shows us what is to come, as the letter takes on an
otherworldly character:
My eyes fastened themselves upon the old scarlet letter, and would not be turned aside.
Certainly there was some deep meaning in it most worthy of interpretation, and which, as it
were, streamed forth from the mystic symbol, subtly communicating itself to my sensibilities,
but evading the analysis of my mind. (50)
The author presents the older Hester Prynne, her community’s kind, selfless “voluntary nurse,” not the
young girl whose attraction to a clergyman ruined her life. As a result, our initial view of Hester is one of pity,
and the letter is tarnished. How do we rationalize the brand-new scarlet letter of punishment with the one the
narrator finds in the introduction? We create exactly the kind of context the narrator seeks in that introduction,
making Hester’s strength clear even through the lens of her punishment.
The lines of the letter A, which the narrator carefully describes – “each limb proved to be precisely three
inches and a quarter in length. . . .” - are repeated in the first couple of chapters of the book. The scaffolding,
the Christian cross, shadows extending at length all over – these lines seem to place As all over the village, as
if all are responsible for Hester and Dimmesdale’s sins. Through the larger sin of humiliation, the community
dooms itself to wear the same letter A, at least in the way Hawthorne presents it.
As the narrator tells it, everything about the village takes on a sinister cast because of Hester, or the villagers’
treatment of her: “the world was only the darker for this woman’s beauty. . . .” and shadows linger all
around, the lines mentioned above turning into pools. The Puritan tendency to dress in black only intensifies
this darkness. Hester’s elaborately sewn letter A stands out like a bloody dagger on such a dense black field.
But symbols have a way of changing as the characters they are attached to change; Hester’s change is
profound, and she begins to see the letter as a source of pride for her own strength of will:
the scarlet letter was her 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, but taught her much amiss. (300)
Not long after this scene, a rapidly diminishing Dimmesdale confesses his complicity in Hester’s crime to the
townspeople – who swear they see a red letter A branded in his bare chest. This is, in a sense, a kind of
transference, as Dimmesdale takes up the burden that the woman he secretly loves has carried for seven long,
punishing years. Afterwards, his public forgiveness of her, and the resulting guilt in the townspeople, allows
Hester to remove the A if she chooses. To her credit, Hester doesn’t, and the symbol gradually begins its
change.
Hester ends up stronger than Dimmesdale, stronger than Chillingworth, stronger than the villagers who
refused to speak up when she was cast into darkness for her actions. From this darkness, in the chapter
ironically titled “A Flood of Sunshine,” she begins to find her own light out of the darkness. The faith she
The Evolution of Symbols in The Scarlet Letter
54
was thrown out of leads her to a faith in herself, and dependence on men and government leads her to
independence, with no one to turn to. Hester is a survivor, and the scarlet letter becomes a testament to
survival, and to the gentle humanitarian manner she adopts.
As the narrator tells us, after Hester and Pearl moved to England, “The story of the scarlet letter grew into a
legend” (390). She continues to wear the letter on her return, letting people see the legend in furtive glances,
keeping to herself but still doing good. In time:
the scarlet letter ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world’s scorn and bitterness, and
became a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, yet with
reverence too. (392)
Hester’s experience comes full circle, the darkness replaced with light, the letter A shifting into a positive
until it adorns the grave built for her and Dimmesdale, finally together under its watch.
Historical Concerns and the Emblem
Nathaniel Hawthorne envisioned The Scarlet Letter as a short story to be published in a collection, but it
outgrew that purpose. Most critics accept Hawthorne's definition of it as a "romance," rather than as a novel. It
usually appears with an introductory autobiographical essay, "The Custom House," in which Hawthorne
describes working in his ancestral village, Salem, Massachusetts, as a customs officer. Hawthorne describes
coming across certain documents in the customs house that provide him with the basis for The Scarlet Letter.
But this essay fictionalizes the origins of the story in that it offers "proofs of the authenticity of a narrative
therein contained." Following other literary examples in early American literature, like Washington Irving's
History of New York, Hawthorne masks his literary invention by making it seem "historical." He calls his
motivation for writing the essay "a desire to put [himself] in [his] true position as editor, or very little more."
This editorial positioning indicates his interest in creating a aura of "authenticity" and historical importance
for his narrative.
Not surprisingly, therefore, much criticism of The Scarlet Letter focuses on its relation to history. Many critics
have investigated the Puritan laws governing adultery and searched for an historical Hester Prynne. Other
critics have used clues within the tale to specify its context. For example, when Dimmesdale climbs on the
scaffold at midnight, Hester and Pearl have been watching at the governor's deathbed. Charles Ryskamp
associates this with the death of Governor Winthrop on March 26, 1649, and notices that celestial disturbances
were actually recorded after his death. Similarly, Election Day, on which Dimmesdale's sermon
commemorates the inauguration of a new Governor, can be located historically on May 2, 1649. To notice
these dates, however, is to notice that Hawthorne takes liberties with them. ("The Minister's Vigil" chapter
takes place in "early May," not March, and so on) His role in composing The Scarlet Letter far exceeds that of
a mere "editor " The tale is an invention, and Hawthorne's use of disparate historical details should be
understood not only as significant, but also as symbolic.
Hawthorne's interest in the history of the colonies and his Puritan ancestors was deep and genuine, but
complicated. He was interested in not just documenting, but creating an "authentic" past. In "The Custom
House" and elsewhere in his writing, Hawthorne imagines an ancestral guilt that he inherits; he takes "shame
upon [himself] for their sakes." (One of his ancestors, John Hathorne, ruled for executions during the Salem
witch trials.) At still another level, Hawthorne invites the reader to relate The Scarlet Letter to contemporary
politics of the 1840s. "The past is not dead"— it lives on in the custom house, and other contemporary political
institutions. He writes The Scarlet Letter after having lost his administrative position, as a self-proclaimed
"politically dead man." Hawthorne insists that the nation both enables and impedes the lives of its constituents
and the telling of its histories.
Historical Concerns and the Emblem
55
In the novel's opening pages, we wait with the crowd for Hester to emerge from the prison. We overhear
snatches of conversation among the women of the crowd, who express little sympathy for Hester and even
wish for a harsher sentence. The narrator interrupts these bitter sentiments, which match the prison's "gloomy
front," and contrasts them with a wild rosebush that blooms by the prison door. He hopes this rosebush may
serve "to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found" by the reader of this "tale of human frailty
and sorrow." Explicitly, then, Hawthorne identifies The Scarlet Letter as a moral parable, which offers its
readers a "sweet" and "moral" lesson. This lesson emerges from the faults made by the Puritans' early
experiment in society, which the narrator consistently uses irony to deflate. He comments, for example, that
"whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness" the founding Pilgrims had envisioned, a cemetery and a
prison both became necessary institutions. He aims his irony not at the fact that the need for a prison arose,
but at the naive fantasy that it could have been otherwise. As he does in The Blithedale Romance (1852),
Hawthorne deflates the tradition of American dreams of Utopia and new social orders. In The Scarlet Letter,
the fault shared by the Puritan settlers, the women outside the prison, and Arthur Dimmesdale most of all, is
pious hypocrisy: they naively imagine that sin, or "human frailty and sorrow," can be avoided through denial
and pretense. Chillingworth, using an assumed name and hiding his intent of revenge, becomes an
increasingly diabolical villain by his own duplicity. At the other end of the spectrum, Hester Prynne, because
she wears a sign of shame on the surface of her clothing, cannot feign innocence; consequently she has a
greater potential for salvation and peace.
For Hawthorne, his Puritan ancestors and the society they built seemed to forget the wisdom of the great
Puritan poet John Milton author of Paradise Lost. Hawthorne repeatedly invokes Paradise Lost in order to
reassert its vision of mankind as fallen, and its poetic dramatization of Adam and Eve's fall and expulsion
from Eden. Fallen, with the world "all before them," they gain the potential for ultimate redemption. So
Hester, let out of prison, "with the world before her," seems to have a better chance of redemption than her
hypocritical neighbors.
Hawthorne's allusions to Paradise Lost also provide him a way of introducing the question of sexuality and
woman as the site of temptation and sin. Hester Prynne repeatedly feels herself to be responsible for the sins
of both Dimmesdale and Chillingworth. Dimmesdale and Chillingworth each reinforce this interpretation. The
narrator dramatizes the self-serving structure of their accusations, and calls it into question. The irony of
Dimmesdale's initial entreaty to Hester illustrates this:
Be not silent from any mistaken pity and tenderness for [thy fellow-sinner]; for, believe me,
Hester, though he were to step down from a high place, and stand there beside thee, on thy
pedestal of shame, yet better were it so, than to hide a guilty heart through life. What can thy
silence do for him, except it tempt him—yea, compel him, as it were—to add hypocrisy to sin?
Dimmesdale, as he stands at a literally high place, transfers his own responsibility to acknowledge his part in
the crime to Hester. Hester serves both Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, and indeed the whole community, as a
scapegoat. The "rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic" in her nature, which implies sexuality, is something
that the community simultaneously desires and disavows. They ostracize her, but continue to consume her
needlework, surreptitiously borrowing from the exotic principle she seems to symbolize.
In this way, Hawthorne directs his irony at Puritan hypocrisy. However, he softens the didacticism (intent to
teach) of his tale with the other means he uses imagery and symbolism. Again, the rosebush should
"symbolize some sweet moral blossom"—the key word is "symbolize" The novel's most important symbol, the
eponymous (name-giving) scarlet letter "A," takes on several different meanings. To the townspeople, the
letter has "the effect of a spell, taking [Hester] out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and inclosing her
in a sphere by herself." The spell of this scarlet letter is akin to that of The Scarlet Letter—the book itself. Like
the community of Boston, we are invited to enter a separate sphere, where both imagination and moral growth
can occur. As Hawthorne describes it in "The Custom House," modern life (of the 1840s) has a dulling effect
Historical Concerns and the Emblem
56
on the mind and the spirit. In his fiction, he wants to create a richer and more challenging world. Just as the
meaning of Hester's "A" gradually expands for the townspeople, meaning not just "Adultery" but also "Able,"
and perhaps "Angel," The Scarlet Letter has an ambiguity that opens possibilities of meaning for its readers.
Readers continue to speculate on what the "A" additionally suggests: Arthur (Dimmesdale), Ambiguity,
America, and so on.
The ambiguity of Hester's scarlet letter "A" has been used as a textbook case to illustrate the difference
between two kinds of imagery in writing: allegory and symbolism. Allegory, in which the name of a character
or a thing directly indicates its meaning, can be seen in Hawthorne's early story "Young Goodman Brown,"
about a young, good man. Symbolism, on the other hand, requires more interpretation; the "A," for instance,
suggests many possibilities which are in themselves contradictory ("adultery" versus "angel"). Most critics
understand symbolism as a more sophisticated technique, and see it as more rewarding for the reader, who
must enter into the text in order to tease out its possible meanings. In The Scarlet Letter, this act of
interpretation outside the text mirrors what happens in the story itself.
The narrator of The Scarlet Letter continually provides more than one interpretation of events. When the
strange light shines in the sky during "The Minister's Vigil," it makes "all visible, but with a singularity of
aspect that [seems] to give another moral interpretation to the things of this world than they had ever borne
before." The narrator only reports a "light." He suggests that Dimmesdale reads it as a giant "A"—his own
secret sin writ large in the heavens—because of his "highly disordered mental state." But this account is in turn
undermined when the sexton and the townsfolk also read a large "A" in the sky, which they "interpret to stand
for angel."
These moments suggest that part of the appeal of The Scarlet Letter is the act of reading itself. Hawthorne
dramatizes the effect of reading most clearly through Pearl. Up until a certain point, she is more a symbol than
a character. The narrator comments, as Pearl dances by, "It was the scarlet letter in another form; the scarlet
letter endowed with life." But at a particular moment, Pearl ceases to be a symbol, an "it," and becomes
human. That moment occurs on the scaffold, when she kisses her father; his grief transforms her, by calling
upon "all her sympathies." This moment emblematizes the moral effect that aesthetic philosophers of the
nineteenth century believed literature and art could have on their audiences. Hawthorne, by inscribing such a
moment, puts forth high aesthetic claims for his work. The fact that Pearl—here the figure for an ideal
reader—is feminine may suggest that Hawthorne has a feminine audience in mmd. Occasionally, Hawthorne
seems to voice a certain anxiety about the fact that aesthetic appreciation is "seldom seen in the masculine
character after childhood or early youth," and whether or not writing might have a disturbingly feminizing
effect on writers and readers. On the other hand, work as a customs officer poses a threat to "self reliance" and
"manly character"—a threat Hawthorne escapes by returning to writing. In any case, the scene of Pearl's
transformation, as the text's central moment of redemption and resolution, emphasizes the importance of the
emotions in a richly lived and moral life. In this way, Hawthorne seems to bring two opposites together. Pearl,
as a younger, virginal version of her mother, neutralizes the threat Hester initially posed. Hawthorne brings
the possibility of sensual and feeling feminine character back into the realm of moral life.
Source: Pearl James, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale 1997. James is a doctoral candidate at Yale
University.
The Scarlet Letter
There is something reminiscent of now familiar processes in Hawthorne's account of the origin and growth of
the idea of The Scarlet Letter in the introductory essay to the novel, "The Custom House." He tells (albeit
whimsically) of finding one day the scarlet letter itself—"that certain affair of fine red cloth"—in his
rummagings about the Custom House and of how it, and the old manuscript which told its story, set him to
The Scarlet Letter
57
certain somber musings. The old story of a bygone, dire event and its decaying symbol rayed out meanings to
his imagination as surely as the ancient myths and legends revealed new meanings to the Greek and
Elizabethan dramatists. "Certainly [Hawthorne writes], there was some deep meaning in it, most worthy of
interpretation, and which, as it were, streamed forth from the mystic symbol, subtly communicating it to my
sensibilities, but evading the analysis of my mind." The "half a dozen sheets of foolscap" of Mr. Surveyor
Pue's account of the letter, which seemed at first glance to give "a reasonably complete explanation of the
whole affair," stood to the novel as (we might hazard) the ancient legend of Oedipus stood to Sophocles or
Holinshed's account of Lear's story to Shakespeare. With mock apology, Hawthorne acknowledged the
liberties he took with Pue's document: "I must not be understood as affirming, that, in the dressing up of the
tale, and imagining the motives and modes of passion that influenced the characters who figure in it, I have
invariably confined myself within the limits of the old Surveyor's half a dozen sheets of foolscap." Meditating
upon the simple outlines of Hester's story as the old document recorded it, Hawthorne asked, as it were, the
existential questions: What (to Hester) did it mean to be a woman of flesh and blood, caught in that situation
of guilt but sanctioned by a kind of inner necessity, the promptings of her own high spirit, which neither she
nor her pious lover could repudiate as entirely evil ("What we did had a consecration of its own.")? What did
it feel like to live through a dilemma so potent with destructive possibilities? What must have been the impact
on a powerful yet sensitive nature? Is there not here, too, a "boundary-situation" sufficient to call in question
man's very conception of himself and what he lives by? Hester's religious heritage and her community
pronounced her utterly guilty; she had sinned "in the most sacred quality of human life." She was ostracized,
imprisoned, and put on trial for her life: "This woman [said one of her persecutors] has brought shame upon
us all, and ought to die. Is there not a law for it? Truly, there is, both in the Scripture and the statute-book." In
her extremity, what was she to do? To accept the community's verdict of total guilt would be to renounce the
element of "consecration" she knew to be true of her relationship with Dimmesdale; and yet to renounce the
community in the name of her consecration was equally unthinkable. She had sinned, and she knew guilt. But
hers was no passive nature and, from some mysterious promptings of her own being, she took action in the
only way she knew how; in the dim light of her prison cell, she embroidered the scarlet letter—with matchless
artistry and in brilliant hue.
That is, she accepted, yet defied. She wore the "A" as the sign of her sin, which she publicly
acknowledged—but she wore it on her own terms. Preserving a margin of freedom, she asserted the partial
justice of her cause. The letter, when she appeared in public, "had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the
ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself." Facing the Puritan crowd, she
could have cursed them—and God—and died, either spiritually, or actually by suicide (she thought of suicide in
prison). She could have revealed the name of her lover and got a mitigation of sentence, or prostrated herself
in guilt and got the sympathy of the community. Instead, she decided to "maintain her own ways" before the
people and her judges—though it slay her. Her final answer was to live out her dilemma in full acceptance of
the suffering in store.
In the penultimate chapter of the novel, as Hawthorne prepares for the climactic revelation of the scarlet letter,
he himself sums up the result of his meditations on Surveyor Pue's brief summary. With Hester and Pearl
headed for the scaffold to join Dimmesdale, "Old Roger Chillingworth," he writes, "followed, as one
intimately connected with the drama of guilt and sorrow in which they had all been actors, and well entitled,
therefore, to be present at its closing scene."
It had been the work of the Enlightenment, the Romantics, and (in America) the Transcendentalists, so to shift
the perspective on man and his problems as to render needless or meaningless or irrelevant (as they thought)
this "drama of guilt and sorrow" which Hawthorne saw in the old story. Emerson was aware of the
contrarieties of life and of the soul's struggle, but neither he nor his fellow Transcendentalists saw in them the
stuff of drama, much less tragic drama. It was for Hawthorne, who "alone in his time," writes Allen Tate [in
On the Limits of Poetry, 1948], "kept pure, in the primitive terms, the primitive vision," to transmute "the
puritan drama of the soul," which for the faithful ended in the New Jerusalem, into tragic drama. The essence
The Scarlet Letter
58
of Hester's seven-year course is conflict— of Hester with her self, her society, and her God. The conflict
throughout is fraught with ambiguity, with goods and bads inextricably mixed, and constantly and bitterly
recognized as such by Hester. Contrarieties are never resolved, and the issues of the soul's struggles are
unsettled either way. "Is not this better," murmured Dimmesdale to Hester after the confession on the scaffold,
"than what we dreamed of in the forest"—to which Hester could only reply: "I know not' I know not!"
This is the sum of Hester's seven years of penance and agonized self-questioning. The Puritan code, which
tortured and yet sustained her, failed in the end to answer her question. And in the multiple ambiguities of
action and character, in the prevailing "tenebrism" of the novel, in the repeated images of the maze, the
labyrinth, the weary and uncertain path, Hawthorne sets (by indirection) the Emersonian promise in a harsh
and tragic light. Hester and Dimmesdale had "trusted themselves"; their hearts had "vibrated to that iron
string." And it was not entirely wrong, the novel says, that they should have done so. But Hawthorne, in the,
true vein of tragedy, dealt not with doctrinaire injunctions but with actions in their entirety, with special
regard, in this instance, for their consequences—a phase to which Emerson was singularly blind. These
consequences, Hawthorne saw, are never clear, they involve man not only externally as a social being but
internally, to his very depths, and they can be dire. . .
The seven-year action which is precipitated by Hester's Antigone-like independence, or (to the Puritan judges)
stubbornness, involved her and those whom it touched intimately in deep suffering and loss of irretrievable
values. Hester lost her youth, her beauty, her promise of creativity, and any sure hope she might have had of
social or domestic happiness. She lost Dimmesdale, whom a full confession at the outset might have brought
to her side, and whose life was ultimately ruined anyway. She was the cause of Chillingworth's long,
destructive, and self-destructive course of revenge. She anguished over Pearl's bleak and bitter childhood. Her
own loneliness and isolation, especially for one of so warm and rich a nature, was a constant sorrow and
reminder of her guilt, a kind of suffenng which Antigone or Medea, who in other ways are not unlike her,
never knew in similar quality or duration. And in the end, she knew not whether she had done right or wrong.
She goes out of our ken, a gray figure (still wearing her scarlet letter resumed "of her own free will"), and,
"wise through dusky grief," giving comfort and counsel to the perplexed or forlorn.
If a major salvage from her experience is this hard-won wisdom of Hester's, it is not the only point of light in
the dark world of mysteries and riddles that the novel in general portrays. By her stand Hester asserted her
own values against the inherited and inhumane dogma of her community as surely as Prometheus, in
Aeschylus' play, asserted his own sense of justice against Zeus. In both instances the suffering of the hero
"made a difference" Hester humanized the community that would have cast her out, even put her to death. She
forced it to reassess its own severe and absolute dogmas, as Antigone forced a reassessment in Thebes, or
Hamlet in Elsinore, or Prometheus on Olympus. She envisioned and in quiet corners whispered of it to those
who would hear, a "brighter period . . . a new truth . . . to establish the whole relation between man and
woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness." If Dimmesdale perished because of the ordeal her action
plunged him into, it was not before he had achieved a measure of heroic strength and a new insight which in
the normal course would never have been his. When he died he was "ready" as he had never been before. At
his death Pearl achieved a new humanity: "The great scene of grief in which the wild infant bore a part, had
developed all her sympathies; and as her tears fell upon her father's cheek, they were the pledge that she
would grow up amid human joy and sorrow, nor forever do battle with the world, but be a woman in it."
Hester, Dimmesdale, and now Pearl learned what it is "to be men and women in it"— what it means to be.
Dimmesdale in his faith died praising God—a religious death. Hester lived out her "tragic" existence, giving
counsel but, "stained with sins, bowed down with shame," denied the prophetic voice she might have raised,
still believing, yet not believing (as witness the "A" which she wore to the end) in herself. "After many, many
years," she was buried with her lover, and even her burial, like everything else in her life, was ambiguous. She
was buried next to Dimmesdale, "yet with a space between, as if the dust of the two sleepers had no right to
mingle." No right to mingle? In the first scene of the novel, Hawthorne had said of Hester's judges: "They
The Scarlet Letter
59
were, doubtless, good men, just, and sage. But, out of the whole human family, it would not have been easy to
select the same number of wise and virtuous persons, who should be less capable of sitting in judgment on an
erring woman's heart, and disentangling its mesh of good and evil." Had Hester's and Dimmesdale's deed a
"consecration of its own," or had it not? The Puritan judges said no. Even Hawthorne, speaking through the
novel as a whole, suspends judgment. "We know not. We know not." Dimmesdale, the believer, could look
forward to the last day "when all hidden things shall be revealed," when "the dark problem of this life" shall
be made plain. But in this life he had wandered in a maze, "quite astray and at a loss in the pathway of human
existence," So, to a close and scrupulous observer like Hawthorne, it must ever be. The pathway is beset with
pitfalls and dubious choices. The shrewd pick their way warily. The passionate are likely to stumble or go
wrong, and "good intentions" have no bearing on the inevitable penalty, which often far exceeds the crime.
This is hard, but, to the heroic in heart, no cause for despair. There is wisdom to be won from the fine
hammered steel of woe, a flower to be plucked from the rosebush at the prison door "to relieve the darkening
close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow." To relieve, but not to reverse or redeem.
Source: Richard B. Sewall, "The Scarlet Letter," in The Vision of Tragedy, new edition, Yale University Press,
1980, pp 86-91.
Arthur Dimmesdale as Tragic Hero
It is my conviction that, even though Arthur Dimmesdale does not move down center until late in the action,
The Scarlet Letter is finally his story and, what is more important, that he is a tragic hero. He alone among the
major characters never functions symbolically, though he is the familiar figure of Every-Christian. Viewed
thus, Hawthorne's allegorical romance centers on a good man's struggle with and eventual victory over the
guilt he experiences after committing lechery. Hawthorne is saying that three courses of action are open to
such a sinner: he may keep silent and suffer "eternal alienation from the Good and True," the course urged by
Roger Chilling worth, or—and this implies that he will probably keep silent all the while—he may flee the
scene of the crime and with it his responsibility, the course eventually urged by Hester Prynne; or he may
make full and public confession, the course urged by the child Pearl. Having kept silent for more than seven
years, Dimmesdale finally has his Calvinist faith put to the supreme test and, having agreed to flee Boston
with Hester and their child, finds the strength to face his responsibility and confess before he dies.
Although Dimmesdale respects and, except in one instance, has never broken civil and ecclesiastical law,
theocratic authority at Boston is ultimately powerless to bring him to confession. John Wilson and Governor
Bellingham, the chief representatives of church and state, are ill-equipped to understand his condition and can
only point to the scaffold of the pillory as the place whereon sinners must stand and reveal their sin. Is it any
wonder, then, that Dimmesdale should reject their offers of assistance as he prepares to make his revelation?
On the other hand, he is intimately connected with the wronged husband, the wife who was his partner in sin,
and the natural child born of this sin, each of whom does in fact help him toward this revelation. And yet,
were it not for his steady observance of the law, a law whose operations are symbolized by the presence of the
prison, pillory, meetinghouse, and governor's hall, he could not have acted responsibly at the last. Hawthorne's
Bostonians, while certainly not drawn in an altogether sympathetic light, believe that a sinner can only
absolve himself of sin, God willing, by making public confession. Dimmesdale subscribes to this orthodox
Calvinist belief, as he does to its corollary that good works without true faith are less than naught. Holding
firmly to these beliefs, he knows from the first that nothing short of confession can bring to an end the
hypocrisy he has been making of his life. He finally realizes, as Wilson and Bellingham never do, that fallen
man in his search for redemption must have his faith tested by undergoing a lonely, dark, spiritual journey
before he can discover the way to responsible action. No community, not even God-fearing,
seventeenth-century Boston, can instruct its members what road to take. Like Job, like Bunyan's Christian,
Dimmesdale feels compelled to make his way alone, realizing that the individual, seeing as the community
never can how far his actual self has fallen short of his ideal, must judge himself and prescribe for his
Arthur Dimmesdale as Tragic Hero
60
condition.
Dimmesdale began his dark journey after the moment of passion he and Hester shared in the forest. Through
all the years before they meet there again, this man, a minister of God who loves the truth and loathes the lie,
has known only penance - has felt from the outset the endless searing of "his inmost heart," scourges his body
and fasts and keeps long vigils, feels the hypocrisy of his position mount as he stands in the pulpit on the
Sabbath and utters vague confessions, and, most painful of all, makes a "mockery of penitence" by attiring
himself in his vestments one obscure night in early May and standing falsely revealed in meteor light on the
scaffold where Hester was once made to stand with the infant Pearl in the bright morning sun. During this
long first stage of the journey Roger Chillingworth, "a chief actor, in the poor minister's interior world," is the
principal motivating force in the action; indeed, he continues forceful down to the moment Dimmesdale
decides to mount the scaffold in daylight and make public confession. Until Dimmesdale recognizes him as
"his bitterest enemy," Chillingworth, ostensibly the friendly physician concerned for the minister's physical
well-being, resembles a more familiar kind of "leech," seeking to know what guilt lies buried in his heart and,
when this secret is revealed to him, corrupting "his spiritual being" and bringing him to "the verge of lunacy."
In short, Chillingworth symbolizes that force within the Christian pilgrim which prompts him to conceal his
sin from the world; if ever he abandons himself to this temptation, it will destroy his moral nature and he will
die unrepentant.
Brought to the threshold of insanity by this never-ceasing, always secret agony, finding no spiritual relief in
the acts of penance he performs, Dimmesdale enters the most critical stage of the journey. Now his faith is to
be tested more severely than it has been these seven years and, as a condition of making the journey, under
circumstances that are not of his own choosing. In fact, until the second forest meeting his faith has not really
been tested; unlike Hester, who has long dwelt on the outskirts of the community and is critical of its
institutions, he has "never gone through an experience calculated to lead him beyond the scope of generally
received laws; although, in a single instance, he had so fearfully transgressed one of the most sacred of them."
The great question now is whether, for all his ministerial "eloquence and religious fervor," he will prove equal
to the test. Ever fearful about venturing far from the orthodox way, finding himself in the wild forest once
again, he is overwhelmed by the revitalized memory of the sin of passion committed there long ago and
experiences a new temptation more terrible than any he has yet known. The beautiful Hester, who has been
wandering morally ever since they sinned together, is now more his enemy than the diabolical Chillingworth.
Responding to the renewed strength of her love for him, he suffers temporary suspension of the
will—will-lessness being a necessary state at this stage of the journey—and calls on her to be his guide: "Think
for me, Hester! Thou art strong. Resolve for me! . . . Advise me what to do." Hester, "fixing her deep eyes on
the minister's, and instinctively exercising a magnetic power over a spirit so shattered and subdued, that it
could hardly hold itself erect," advises a course of action more unorthodox than that which Chillingworth long
ago imposed, though not necessarily inconsistent with it. "Leave this wreck and ruin here where it hath
happened! . . . Begin all anew! . . . Exchange this false life of thine for a true one. . . . Give up this name of
Arthur Dimmesdale, and make thyself another, and a high one, such as thou canst wear without fear or
shame." No Christian, certainly not if he be a Calvinist, can deny his past, indeed his very birthright, and live
at peace with himself, but at this moment a will-less Dimmesdale consents to deny his past.
At this point in the journey we take hope that the child Pearl, who would have the truth known to the world,
will bring her orthodox father to a sense of his responsibility, as she has not been able to bring her
transcendental mother. Standing at the brookside, she in effect demands as she has before that he publicly
acknowledge the existence of his daughter. Realizing that he will not "go back with us, hand in hand, we three
together, into the town" at this time, she runs to the brook and washes off his unwelcome kiss. Dimmesdale
must journey on for a time "in a maze" before he feels ready to act in a way that will satisfy Pearl's demand.
As he returns to the town he is incited at every step "to do some strange, wild, wicked thing or other. . . ."
Hawthorne offers the following explanation for his nightmarish encounters with people in the town: "Tempted
by a dream of happiness, he had yielded himself with deliberate choice, as he had never done before, to what
Arthur Dimmesdale as Tragic Hero
61
he knew was deadly sin. And the infectious poison of that sin had been thus rapidly diffused throughout his
moral system." But now an epiphany is at hand. Seated before his unfinished sermon, he is ready and eager to
follow the course of action Pearl has long been urging; contrite, he draws back from the state of moral anarchy
into which harkening to Hester's advice had momentarily plunged him, and for the first time knows the full
meaning of the verse in Genesis, "In the image of God made he man." ". . . flinging the already written pages
of the Election Sermon into the fire, he forthwith began another, which he wrote with such an impulsive flow
of thought and emotion, that he fancied himself inspired; and only wondered that Heaven should see fit to
transmit the grand and solemn music of its oracles through so foul an organ-pipe as he." The man who had
long looked down from his pulpit and seen his "flock hungry for the truth, and listening to my words as if a
tongue of Pentecost were speaking" has found his tongue at last. Feeling himself that "heaven-or-damed
apostle" his parishioners long imagined him to be, he is enabled to pen a vision of the "high and glorious
destiny for the newly gathered people of the Lord."
Hester's remark on the Election Day that follows, "a new man is beginning to rule over them," has a
significance she did not intend and cannot comprehend: at this moment Dimmesdale is just such a man, even
though his rule will last only for the time it takes him to deliver his sermon and make his revelation. As he
proceeds to the meetinghouse, no longer will-less but surcharged with spiritual energy, she senses that she has
lost the magnetic power she exercised over him in the forest. Here in the marketplace it is she who is weak
and he who is strong, for in the final stage of the journey he has found his way out of the maze in which she
still wanders. Pearl, who had washed off his kiss at the brook, wishes to "run to him, and bid him kiss me
now, before all the people. . . ." Knowing at last what it means to be a special instrument of God, Dimmesdale
gives tongue to his prophecy; "never had man spoken in so wise, so high, and so holy a spirit, as he that spake
this day. . . ." Then, mounting the scaffold, supported by Hester and holding Pearl's hand and followed by
Chillingworth, he confesses his sin and, stepping forth unassisted, reveals the stigma on his breast.
Whereupon Pearl, having heard her father acknowledge her existence, kisses him willingly in his dying hour.
Arthur Dimmesdale is a tragic hero. Tragedy as I here conceive it arises from the tension between illusion and
reality—illusion meaning the there and then, reality the here and now; illusion meaning the ideal and reality the
actual conception one has of himself. The quality of the illusion matters greatly, the noblest being man's
aspiration to free himself from his particular time and place; the aspiration, in Christian terms, to return to that
state of bliss in which he existed before the Fall. But here a dilemma arises: all men require illusion to bring
order out of the chaos of the present, but if a man persists in hiding behind his illusion he is incapacitated for
meaningful action. Ethically meaningful, that is to say tragic, action is possible only when a man, guided by
this noblest of illusions, steps out from behind it and, fronting the terrors of the here and now, acts in
obedience to a secret impulse of his character. Whereas Dimmesdale's full revelation on the scaffold is tragic,
Hester's dynamic but lawless behavior in the forest is at best heroically pathetic. Hester is incapable of acting
in a way that is ethically meaningful. Like Dimmesdale she dreams of regaining paradise, but unlike him she
finds she must forever hide behind this dream if she is to go on living. In suggesting that they three,
Dimmesdale, Pearl, and she herself, exchange the New World for the Old, she seeks to fulfill a temporalized
version of the Edenic illusion, Boston signifying the here and now, Europe the there and then. However noble
this illusion, it provides no basis for ethically meaningful action, since she is incapable of stepping from
behind it and facing the present circumstance. When Pearl demands that she fasten the letter on her bosom
again and Hester, having experienced temporary freedom, does so, it is with a heavy heart. "Hopefully, but a
moment ago, as Hester had spoken of drowning it in the deep sea, there was a sense of inevitable doom upon
her, as she thus received back this deadly symbol from the hand of fate. She had flung it into infinite
space!—she had drawn an hour's free breath!—and here again was the scarlet misery, glittering on the old
spot!" Her advising them to flee Boston was irresponsible because she did not gauge the actual situation
accurately and, being irresponsible, it was not ethically meaningful. Nowhere in the narrative does her
transcendental morality lead to tragic action. Strong she may seem tragic she is not.
Arthur Dimmesdale as Tragic Hero
62
Conversely, Dimmesdale's confession is the act of a man who is tragically great. Of course, he shares in
Hester's hour of transcendental freedom. Once resolved to leave Boston with Hester and their child, he is
overcome by a new sensation "It was the exhilarating effect—upon a prisoner just escaped from the dungeon of
his own heart—of breathing the wild, free atmosphere of an unredeemed, unchristianized, lawless region."
What saves him in the end from the self-deception that incapacitates Hester is the fact that his version of the
Edenic illusion is grounded in the infinite, not in the finite world; the fact that, except for the short time he is
required to wander in a maze, he knows himself to be a sinner and never mistakes penance done on earth for
penitence. Like all men tragically great he sees with unflinching honesty the distance separating his ideal from
his actual self and, seeing this, tries to bridge the gap. Before his hour of freedom he tells Hester, "I have
laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!" Like Young
Goodman Brown, he gains insight in this critical hour. "Another man," writes Hawthorne, "had returned out
of the forest; a wiser one; with a knowledge of hidden mysteries which the simplicity of the former never
could have reached. A bitter kind of knowledge that!" Unlike Brown because now secure in his faith, he
translates insight into meaningful action, prophesying a glorious destiny for Massachusetts and publicly
repenting him of his sin. Whereas Hester believes that what they did had a consecration of its own and seeks
assurance that they will be united in paradise, he must tell her in his dying breath: "The law we broke!—the sin
here so awfully revealed!—let these alone be in thy thoughts I fear! I fear! It may be, that, when we forgot our
God,—when we violated our reverence each for the other's soul,—it was thenceforth vain to hope that we could
meet hereafter, in an everlasting and pure reunion. God knows; and He is merciful!" Dimmesdale goes to his
early grave humbled and penitent, but when Hester follows him to hers many years later she is apparently
unrepentant still. Hawthorne tells us that although "one tombstone served for both," there was "a space
between, as if the dust of the two sleepers had no right to mingle."
Source: Bruce Ingham Granger, "Arthur Dimmesdale as Tragic Hero," in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol.
19, No. 2, September, 1964, pp 197-203. Granger is a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma.
The Scarlet Letter: Suggested Essay Topics
Hester in Disgrace
(Chapters 1-4)
1. Describe the narrator of the story. How does the narrator differ from a traditional first- or third-person
narrator?
2. Discuss the beadle as the personification of Puritan thinking.
Hester in the Community
(Chapters 5–8)
1. Discuss the effect of the punishment upon Hester’s personality.
2. Explore the relationship of the Governor’s mansion to the “old world” and to the Puritans.
3. Examine some of the many symbols surrounding Hester Prynne, including the scarlet letter, her apparel,
and her occupation.
Chillingworth and Dimmesdale
(Chapters 9–12)
1. Compare and contrast the effects of sin upon Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth.
2. Examine the strange relationship between Chillingworth and Dimmesdale.
The Scarlet Letter: Suggested Essay Topics
63
3. Discuss Hawthorne’s use of coincidence and irony in these chapters.
Changes in Hester
(Chapters 13–15)
1. Discuss the Puritan moral law and the crime of independent thinking.
2. Compare Puritan parenting and Hester’s raising of Pearl.
3. How do Hester, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth differ in their acceptance of what seems to be their fate?
Hester Attempts to Take Charge
(Chapters 16–19)
1. Compare and contrast the personalities of Hester and Dimmesdale in the forest. How does Hawthorne use
the forest as a multiple symbol?
2. Discuss the use of sunlight and shade in these chapters.
Dimmesdale Reconsiders
(Chapters 20–22)
1. Discuss Puritan values as exemplified by their celebrations.
2. Explain Dimmesdale’s emotional state since leaving Hester.
3. Discuss Hawthorne’s use of irony and coincidence in these chapters.
4. Discuss whether Mistress Hibbins is real or allegorical.
Resolution
(Chapters 23–24)
1. How does Pearl change after the scaffold scene?
2. Discuss Hester’s role as a counselor of troubled women.
3. Discuss Hester and Dimmesdale as pawns of fate.
4. How is the phrase “Be true” a central theme of the story?
5. How are Hester, Dimmesdale, Pearl, and Chillingworth redeemed by the end of the novel?
The Scarlet Letter: Sample Essay Outlines
The following paper topics are designed to test your understanding of the novel as a whole and to analyze
important themes and literary devices. Following each question is a sample outline to help get you started.
• Topic #1
Discuss Hawthorne’s blend of realism, symbolism, and allegory in The Scarlet Letter.
Outline
I. Thesis Statement: The Scarlet Letter is a blend of realism, symbolism, and allegory.
The Scarlet Letter: Sample Essay Outlines
64
II. Realism in The Scarlet Letter
A. Historical setting
B. Psychological exploration of characters
C. Realistic dialogue
III. Symbolism in The Scarlet Letter
A. The letter and its obvious manifestations
B. Pearl as a human manifestation of the letter
C. The settings as symbols
1. The settlement
2. The forest
3. The scaffold
4. The market-place
IV. Allegory in The Scarlet Letter
A. Definition
B. Character types
1. The beadle
2. Hester
3. Dimmesdale
4. Chillingworth
5. Pearl
• Topic #2
How are Puritans represented in The Scarlet Letter?
Outline
I. Thesis Statement: Hawthorne’s opinion of the Puritans may be understood by examining their
actions within the novel and the narrator’s comment on them.
II. Historical background on the Puritans
III. Hawthorne’s ancestors as described in “The Custom-House” essay
IV. The Puritan’s actions in The Scarlet Letter
A. The ministers
B. The common people
1. Attitudes toward work and relaxation
2. Attitudes toward their religious beliefs
3. Attitudes toward Hester and Pearl
V. The narrator’s comments about Puritans
A. Negative comments
B. Positive comments
• Topic #3
Discuss Hester Prynne’s conflicts with herself, with others, and with Nature.
Outline
I. Thesis Statement: Hester Prynne has several conflicts, and as these are resolved, her character is
revealed.
The Scarlet Letter: Sample Essay Outlines
65
II. Types of conflict possible
A. Conflict with self
B. Conflict with another
C. Conflict with a group
D. Conflict with Nature
E. Conflict with the supernatural
III. Hester in conflict with herself
A. Accepts her actions as wrong
B. Retains a sense of pride
IV. Hester in conflict with another
A. Settles initial conflict with Chillingworth
B. Challenges Chillingworth about her promise
C. Attempts to outmaneuver Chillingworth
V. Hester in conflict with a group
A. Accepts the society’s punishment with patience
B. Fights the power structure and Dimmesdale to keep Pearl
C. Her thoughts defy conventional teaching
D. Resumes her punishment years later of her own choosing
VI. Hester in conflict with nature
A. Resists the “Black Man of the Forest”
B. Accepts the natural forest as promising freedom
VII. Hester in conflict with the supernatural
A. Resists the “Black Man of the Forest”
B. Allows God to judge her sin without any pleading for mercy
The Scarlet Letter: Compare and Contrast
• 1640s: The Puritans believed in their mission to establish a model community for the Protestant
world.
1850s: America had developed an ideology of "manifest destiny" that held that the prosperous
expansion of Americans across the continent was inevitable and ordained, and implied that the
country was destined to become a great global power.
Today: America's global power seems both assured with the splitting of the Soviet Union, and a thing
of the past with the rise of countries like Japan and Germany to economic power.
• 1640s: The colonists, though not clearly provoked, fought with the Narraganset Indians against the
Pequot Indians, at one point killing seven hundred Pequot men, women, and children.
1850s: Native land claims had all but been eliminated east of the Mississippi with President Jackson's
removal of the "five civilized tribes" in the late 1830s. Their bitter march to Oklahoma is known as
"The Trail of Tears."
Today: Native peoples survive and grow in geographically dispersed areas and continue to fight legal
battles over land claims.
The Scarlet Letter: Compare and Contrast
66
• 1640s: Anne Hutchinson had recently disturbed the Massachusetts Bay Colony by asserting that
inward knowledge of the Holy Spirit, not outward good works, led to salvation.
1850s: Transcendentalists disturbed orthodox religious views by claiming that God and the
knowledge of his laws could be experienced by the individual open to revelation.
Today: While religious fundamentalism is rising and many others are skeptical of religious belief, the
idea that God is present in Nature, or the individual, remains popular.
• 1640s: Women were rigidly excluded from official positions of political or religious power.
1850s: The women's suffrage movement gained strength after the first women's rights convention
took place in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. The two principal issues were ownership of property
and voting rights.
Today: After gaining the right to vote in 1920, women now hold political offices from mayor to
senator to governor. While women have made gains in the business world, they are still
underrepresented in executive positions and still encounter discrimination.
The Scarlet Letter: Topics for Further Study
• Research the role of Hawthorne's relative, John Hathorne, in the Salem witch trials and discuss how
this influences your interpretation of the novel.
• Read a work by one of Hawthorne's transcendentalist contemporaries (like Ralph Waldo Emerson's
Nature, or Henry David Thoreau's Walden) and compare what you think to be their world view with
that of Hawthorne's.
• Investigate the idea of crime and/or the role of women in colonial New England and compare your
findings with Hawthorne's representation of Hester. You might want to consider what the Puritans
feared that would justify their particular laws and actions.
• Look at some histories of the European revolutions of 1848 and consider why they may have caused
Hawthorne some anxiety.
The Scarlet Letter: Media Adaptations
• The Scarlet Letter has received several film adaptations beginning with director Victor Seastrom's
1926 silent version starring Lillian Gish as Hester Prynne. The first talkie version, directed by Robert
Vignola in 1934 (produced by London Films) and starring Colleen Moore, is available from Nostalgia
Family Video, though it is probably difficult to locate a rental copy.
• Recent film productions include a 1973 international version directed by Wim Wenders that received
good reviews (Ingram International Films; in German with English subtitles). PBS aired a four-hour
version in 1979 that stars Meg Foster as Hester and John Heard as Dimmesdale. Rick Harser's
direction is faithful to the novel (PBS Home Video; four video cassettes). A similar educational
version was produced in 1991 and is available from Films for the Humanities and Sciences
• One of the great flops of recent years is the 1995 Hollywood production directed by Roland Joffe and
starring Demi Moore as Hester, Gary Oldman as Dimmesdale and Robert Duvall as Chillingworth
(available from Hollywood Pictures Home Video). Be careful not to embarrass yourself by relying on
this film as a guide to the novel.
• There are also a number of sound recordings of the novel. Audio Partners Inc. (of Auburn, CA)
published an abridged version in 1986 read by Michael Learned (the full title is Michael Learned
reads The Scarlet Letter). The Brilliance Corporation produced an unabridged version read by Dick
Hill in 1993 (8 hours). Books in Motion also published an unabridged version in 1982 read by Gene
The Scarlet Letter: Topics for Further Study
67
Engene (7 5 hours).
• Finally, there are two audio study guides or discussions of The Scarlet Letter. Lecturer Robert H.
Fossum discusses the book on one 38 minute cassette in the series "19th Century American Writers,"
produced by Everett/Edwards (1976). Time Warner Audiobooks published a study guide narrated by
Julie Amato in 1994 on one 72 minute cassette.
Scene from the film The Scarlet Letter, starring Lillian Gish and Lars Hanson, 1926.
The Scarlet Letter: What Do I Read Next?
• The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Hawthorne's third novel, which he personally thought was a
better piece of work than The Scarlet Letter, about the cursed house of the Pyncheon family where the
sins of fathers are passed on to their descendants.
• The Bird Artist, Howard Norman's recent (1994) novel about an artist in a small Newfoundland
coastal village, is a story of crime and adultery in a place without the religious authority of
Hawthorne's Boston.
• The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (1987) by Carol F. Karlsen
shows that the violent Salem witch trials were not only directed primarily at women, but particularly
women who stood to inherit property and, thus, power.
• William Cronon's Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, (1983)
is a seminal work of environmental history that describes the impact the early settlers had on New
England native peoples and the environment.
• Life in the Iron Mills (1861) by Rebecca Harding Davis is the powerful story of the physical and
emotional oppression and struggle of a mid-nineteenth-century mill-worker. Published about a decade
after Hawthorne's novel, it is even more of an anomaly in the context of literary transcendentalism.
• Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" (1849) was originally titled "Resistance to Civil
Government." He argues here for the right of the individual to refuse to pay taxes or otherwise
support civil authority against his or her conscience. Thoreau spent some time in jail when he did not
pay taxes in 1843 in protest of the Mexican War.
• Harriet A. Jacobs's 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is a kind of "romance" slave narrative
that ties sexuality to race in pre-Civil War America.
The Scarlet Letter: Bibliography and Further Reading
The Scarlet Letter: Media Adaptations
68
Sources
Baym, Nina. "Plot in Hawthorne's Romances." In Ruined Eden of the Present, edited by G. R. Thompson and
Virgil L. Lokke. Purdue University Press, 1981, pp. 49-70.
———. The Scarlet Letter: A Reading. Boston: Twayn, 1986.
Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Office of the Scarlet Letter. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.
Carpenter, Frederic I. "Scarlet A Minus." In College English, Vol. 5, 1944, pp. 173-80.
Coxe, Arthur Cleveland. "The Writings of Hawthorne." In Church Review, January, 1851, pp. 489-511.
Duyckinck, Evert A. Review in Literary World, March 30, 1850, pp. 323-25.
Gerber, John C. Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Scarlet Letter. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey:
Prentice Hall, 1968.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Norwalk, Connecticut: Heritage Press, 1973.
James, Henry. Hawthorne. Macmillan & Co., London, 1879.
Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. Oxford
University Press, 1941.
The Scarlet Letter; an annotated text, backgrounds, and sources. New York: Norton, 1962.
Whipple, Edwin Percy. Review in Graham's Magazine, May, 1850, pp. 345-46.
Further Reading
Berlant, Lauren Gail. The Anatomy of National Fantasy, Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life. University of
Chicago Press, 1991. A discussion of the connections between The Scarlet Letter and the politics and political
character of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, including the concept of Utopia as it was applied
to American democracy.
Brodhead, Richard H. The School of Hawthorne. Oxford University Press, 1986. Explores the critical
reputation of Hawthorne and how the prevailing literary thought of the day helped create a "school" around
his work that led to his inclusion in the literary canon. A good history of Hawthorne's critical reputation.
Critical Essays on Hawthorne's 'The Scarlet Letter,' edited by David B. Kesterson. G. K. Hall, 1988. A
collection of previously published criticism on Hawthorne's novel.
Critical Response to Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'The Scarlet Letter,' edited by Gary Scharnhorst. Greenwood
Press, 1992. Another collection of critical essays by several critics on the novel.
DeSalvo, Louise A. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Harvester Press, 1987. A feminist analysis of Hawthorne's work
which decries the misogyny in his texts.
Harris, Kenneth Marc. Hypocrisy and Self-deception in Hawthorne's Fiction. University Press of Virginia,
1988. A study which focuses on Hawthorne's preoccupation with hypocrisy, relating it to the author's
fascination with the Puritans.
The Scarlet Letter: Bibliography and Further Reading
69
Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'The Scarlet Letter,' edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. Chelsea House
Publishers, 1986. An edition of the novel that contains a helpful introduction by a noted literary critic.
New Essays on 'The Scarlet Letter,' edited by Michael J. Colacurcio. Cambridge University Press, 1985. A
collection of original critical assessments of Hawthorne's novel.
Person, Leland S. Aesthetic Headaches: Women and a Masculine Poetics in Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne.
University of Georgia Press, 1988. Person's analysis of these authors' difficulties in creating artistic depictions
of female characters suggests the need for a "masculine poetics." Devotes a whole chapter to The Scarlet
Letter.
Reynolds, Larry J. "The Scarlet Letter and Revolutions Abroad." In American Literature, Vol. 77, 1985, pp
44-67. Reynolds shows how Hawthorne viewed and was influenced by the European revolutions that began in
1848.
Rosa, Alfred F. Salem, Transcendentalism, and Hawthorne. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980. A
study of several of Hawthorne's historical influences, including the witch trials in Massachusetts and the new
Transcendentalist school of religious thought.
Ryskamp, Charles. "The New England Sources of The Scarlet Letter." In American Literature XXXI,
November 1959, pp. 257-272. A look at some of the historical events that may have inspired the plot and
writing of Hawthorne's novel.
Swann, Charles. Nathaniel Hawthorne: Tradition and Revolution. Cambridge University Press, 1991. A
literary analysis of Hawthorne's work that offers much historical background which can be applied to several
readings of the author's work.
Thickstun, Margaret Olofson. Fictions of the Feminine: Puritan Doctrine and the Representation of Women.
Cornell University Press, 1988. An excellent summary of how Puritan views of women have influenced
literary works such as The Scarlet Letter.
Twentieth Century Interpretations of 'The Scarlet Letter': A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by John C.
Gerber. Prentice-Hall, 1968. A collection of important and groundbreaking essays on Hawthorne's novel
which discuss the novel's structure and themes and Hawthorne's technique and sources. Includes bibliography.
The Scarlet Letter: Bibliography and Further Reading
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