Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” is a classic look at the individual at odds with society. It’s the story of a woman who summons great psychological reserves in converting public shame into personal triumph.
One of the first works of fiction to take a critical look at American history and culture, “The Scarlet Letter” provokes thought on numerous issues – societal change, Calvinism, faith and good works, regeneration, and the bond between parent and child. The book’s tone is most prominent and critical when addressing the marriage of church and state and the suppression of free thinking by a tyrannical majority.
Hawthorne’s writing demonstrates: knowledge of colonial Puritan culture in references to daily life and historical figures; the Bible in his use of symbolism and mention of Biblical characters; and Shakespeare in the psychological exploration of his characters. In a couple of places, his florid writing style is maudlin and melodramatic to contemporary taste, but overall it is a welcome departure from what we are used to. His writing, characteristic of 19th century style, is ultimately readable, rhythmic and provides a portal into another time.
Published in 1850, “The Scarlet Letter” is set in the 17th-century Puritan-controlled Massachusetts Bay Colony. In the opening scene, Hester Prynne (name rhymes with sin) is led from prison to a scaffold. A harsh crowd watches her public humiliation. She’s wearing a scarlet “A” for “adultery” on her clothing and holding a baby she bore out of wedlock. A Puritan tribunal admonishes her to reveal the identity of her child’s father. She refuses, as she will throughout the novel. By choosing independence over conformity, Hester gives up community for isolation.
The greatest strength in Hawthorne’s writing is his use of Biblical allusions in the exploration of moral ambiguity and irony. He draws on the Genesis account of Adam and Eve in relating to Hester’s fall from grace and estrangement from her Boston village. However, for Hester, disengagement from a so-called “utopia” means emancipation. Freedom to interpret the knowledge of Good and Evil allows Hester to develop intellectually. While her village is stagnant, she is progressive, her worldview more consistent with the philosophies then taking root in Europe than Puritan dogma. Interestingly, while she possesses a freedom of mind that can cross an ocean, her lover -- a scholarly man of letters -- is "hemmed in" by the Puritan orthodoxy.
Hester is the strongest of the pair. She demonstrates self-reliance, industry and creativity. Through her self-assertiveness, she renders impotent any power of the male-dominated church hierarchy to label her. With her sin out in the open, she is able to move on with her life. Her lover doesn’t have that peace of mind. He is tortured by inner guilt, secret shame and the feeling that he is a fraud.
The permanent bond between Hester and her lover is their daughter, Pearl (whom Hawthorne based on his daughter Una). Here, Hawthorne creates his most thought-provoking element of moral ambiguity. Pearl is the source of Hester’s greatest joy & greatest torment in life. How can this living person be so beautiful, yet only exist because of a sinful act? Poignantly, her daughter’s name is taken from the scriptural reference at Matthew 13:45-46 to “one pearl of great price.”
This is part of the moral wilderness Hester has to make her way through, symbolic of the physical wilderness in which she lives. The town’s people lack Hester’s depth of mind. They invent myths and superstitions to explain things they don’t understand, such as their reference to the demonic “black man” in the wilderness.
The townspeople are short-sighted and lack insight. They see what they want to see. Clues to the paternity of Hester’s child lie in the open, but nobody would suspect a man of “whitest sanctity” to be guilty of such a vile sin.
Hawthorne invites the reader to consider those areas where sin and sainthood are not easily defined. Hester is martyred in her disgrace. She becomes a sister of mercy, offering succor to the poor & dying. In an excellent line, Hawthorne writes that the “scarlet letter had the effect of a cross on a nun’s bosom.” This is an interesting line, when compared with his description of Hester & her baby on the scaffold. “Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the Divine Maternity.” (Actually, Hawthorne’s daughter became a nun.)
Significantly, Hester is not entirely free of Puritan conventions. Inwardly contemplative, her outward life is conventional and restrained. She sublimates her passionate energy through her embroidery work. Aside from the iridescent letter on her bosom, her clothes and features appear sober. They hide her natural beauty, depriving her of qualities “that passion would ever dream of clasping in its embrace.” Hawthorne writes that she lost those qualities “of which had been essential to keep her a woman.” Essentially, he is saying she suppressed her natural womanly sensuality.
He suggests that our sins, those flaws that make us human, allow us to become better, more compassionate people. Here, Hawthorne is saying that if the closet door were open, we would all be guilty. Every one of us, as humans, could be wearing a scarlet letter.
Sin and redemption are recurring themes in “The Scarlet Letter.” Even one of the most despicable characters in the book makes atonement in the end. For Hawthorne, writing the book was his own way of penance.
His great-great-great grandfather, William Hathorne, a Puritan settler to Salem, Massachusetts in 1630, was a high-ranking magistrate who scourged and sometimes killed Quakers. This is significant, when considering a reference in “The Scarlet Letter,” to the “sainted footsteps of Anne Hutchinson,” the Quaker founder who was banished from Massachusetts. Hawthorne’s great-great grandfather, John Hathorne, presided over the Salem witch trials. Of all the judges, Hathorne was the only one to never express remorse. As a boy, young Nathaniel was haunted by the sight of the old Gallows Hill, visible from his back porch. On his mother's side, a relative was accused of having incestuous relations with his two sisters. He skipped town before going to trial. The young women were forced to go to church and in public with the word, INCEST affixed to their bonnets
In his adulthood, Hawthorne distanced himself from his infamous paternal family by adding the “w” to the spelling of his name. Unlike his ancestors, he had a mistrust of institutional authority and organized religion. He hated religious fanaticism and hypocrisy. In his most invective stab at colonial Puritanism, Hawthorne refers to their children as “little Puritans, being of the most intolerant brood that ever lived.”
Hawthorne’s book gives insight into the era he was writing in, as well as the period he was writing about. Hester Prynne’s proto-feminist character is significant to the cultural tides of the mid-19th century. Around that time, a convention in Seneca Falls, New York addressed women’s rights, and it has been speculated that Hawthorne modeled Hester on female activists of his time. Living in Connecticut, he was acquainted with some of the most influential minds of his time. He was familiar with leaders in the Transcendentalist, abolitionist and women’s movements. However, his hesitancy regarding any organizational structure kept him from affiliating himself with any of these movements.
Always independent, Hawthorne wore a scarlet letter of his own for much of his life. A graduate of the liberal arts Bowdoin College in Maine, he worked chiefly as a writer, meaning he often lived in poverty and was dismissed as “shiftless” and an “idler.” But, he had well-connected friends – most notably one who would become president, Franklin Pierce – and he managed to secure employment at the Salem Custom House. A few years later, he suffered the humiliation of being fired. That’s when his wife, Sofia, told him, “Now you can write your book,” which became “The Scarlet Letter.”
The book remains relevant today. Our Puritan past lives on with the Religious Right, which is also judgmental, intolerant and likes to get government and religion in bed together. We are both a prurient and puritanical nation. People love to pontificate about the moral corruption in society, yet they keep feeding the beast. We have our modern pillories of shame – “You Tube,” trashy “reality” shows, tabloids. Morals are more relaxed today, but people hypocritically cast stones at others.
America still hasn’t shaken the puritanical hang-ups of our past.
Gateway literature: “The Crucible,” Arthur Miller’s Cold War era play about the Salem witch trials. Nathaniel’s relative, John Hathorne, is a character in the drama.
Outside the box gateway: There are one or two references in “The Scarlet Letter” to earthly images being representative of a greater reality, which sounds like Neo-Platonism. Hawthorne refers to the Puritan clergy’s disdain for the “corrupted religion” of Rome, while scholarly pursuing the works of its influential theologians. So I would recommend “Confessions” by St. Augustine. He was strongly influenced by Plato.
