The Scarlet Letter — Commentary

In brief

A young woman stands on a scaffold in Puritan Boston with a baby in her arms and a red letter on her gown, refusing to name the child’s father. The father is on the balcony above her, one of her own ministers, publicly urging her to name him. Hawthorne needs nothing else: the rest of the book is what those two people, and her husband watching from the crowd, do to themselves over the next seven years.

Its reputation in schools, as a dutiful sermon on sin, is nearly the reverse of the thing itself. The word adultery never appears in it. The act is over before page one. What Hawthorne is interested in is what comes after a verdict: what shame does to someone who wears it openly, what secrecy does to someone who does not, and who has the right to look into another person’s heart.

The argument

The punishment fails, and the book says so outright. The letter was designed to cut Hester off, and it does: “It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself” (ch. 2). But a person standing outside everything can see everything. By the middle of the book her mind has gone further than any minister’s. “The world’s law was no law for her mind”, says the narrator, and a few lines on comes the sentence that is the book’s real turning point: “The scarlet letter had not done its office” (ch. 13).

Dimmesdale gets the opposite treatment, which is to say none. He keeps his reputation, and it destroys him. He preaches his own sinfulness to rapt congregations, who take it for humility, so that each confession makes him holier in their eyes and falser in his own. “He had spoken the very truth, and transformed it into the veriest falsehood” (ch. 11). A man can use the truth as a hiding place; that is the book’s coldest insight.

The book also ranks its sins, and not as Boston would. Chillingworth, the wronged husband, commits no crime the law knows of. He befriends the sick minister, moves in with him and tortures him privately for years. “That old man’s revenge has been blacker than my sin”, Dimmesdale tells Hester in the forest. “He has violated, in cold blood, the sanctity of a human heart” (ch. 17). Adultery, the sin in the title, is the least of the three.

Then Hawthorne loses his nerve, and that is the most interesting thing in the novel. Having given Hester a mind that doubts the whole order of society, including whether existence is worth accepting for women at all, he cannot let her be right. In the forest she throws off the letter and proposes flight, and the book lifts, and then the narrator steps in to say that shame, despair and solitude “had made her strong, but taught her much amiss” (ch. 18). I do not think that flinch is a flaw to be excused. It is the honest record of a man who could imagine a free woman and did not know what to do about her.

The shape of the book

The structure is as plain as a diagram. Three scenes take place on one scaffold. In ch. 2 and ch. 3 Hester stands there by day while Dimmesdale looks down. In ch. 12, at the book’s centre, he climbs it at midnight, where no one can see him, and calls Hester and Pearl up to hold his hands; Pearl asks whether he will stand with them “to-morrow noontide”, and he says not until judgement day. In ch. 23, seven years after the opening, he climbs it in daylight after his greatest sermon, with Hester and Pearl beside him, and shows the crowd his chest and dies.

Between those scenes everything moves in small, closed rooms and in pairs: Hester and Pearl, Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, Hester and Chillingworth, and only once, after seven years of silence, Hester and Dimmesdale, in the four forest chapters (ch. 16 to ch. 19). That conversation is the summit of the novel, and it is at once undone. Back in town Dimmesdale is giddy with temptations to shock his parishioners (ch. 20), and the plan to escape collapses when Hester learns from a shipmaster that Chillingworth has booked a passage on the same vessel (ch. 21).

The letter

The novel’s great invention is an object that will not hold still. The magistrates intend a single meaning. Hester at once breaks it, with “an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread” (ch. 2), turning a mark of shame into the most beautiful thing in a drab colony. From then on the letter belongs to whoever is looking at it. Reflected in the Governor’s armour it swells until it hides her (ch. 7). Pearl is “the scarlet letter endowed with life” (ch. 7) and makes a green one for herself out of eel-grass (ch. 15). A meteor writes an A across the sky on the night of the vigil, and the town reads it as Angel, because Governor Winthrop has just died; Dimmesdale reads it as his own (ch. 12). After years of Hester’s nursing the sick, many people say that it means Able (ch. 13).

No reader of the last chapters is given a settled answer. When Dimmesdale bares his breast, the narrator will not say what the crowd saw. Most swear to a letter in his flesh and offer rival theories of how it got there, while others, who claim they never looked away, “denied that there was any mark whatever on his breast” (ch. 24). The final image is a heraldic motto on a shared gravestone, “ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES”. Shame has become a coat of arms.

All this could be too neat. What saves it is that each meaning is held by someone with a motive: the symbol is what they fight over.

The Custom-House

Nearly a fifth of the volume is not the novel at all. “The Custom-House” is a long, sour, funny memoir of Hawthorne’s years as a government surveyor in Salem, full of sleeping old officials, and it is where he tells you what he is doing. He claims to have found in an upper room a rag of “fine red cloth” with some papers by an earlier surveyor, Mr. Pue, and when he lays the letter on his chest he feels “burning heat”. The discovery is invented, though Jonathan Pue was a real official.

He also confesses. His first American ancestor persecuted Quakers, and that man’s son, a judge at the Salem witch trials, made himself so conspicuous that “their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him”; Hawthorne says he will “take shame upon myself” for them. And he imagines them sneering at their descendant, “a writer of story-books”. So the novel’s judges are his family. He defines his kind of book, a romance set on “neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet”. Then he settles scores with the Salem politicians who sacked him, and signs off as the author of “the posthumous papers of a decapitated surveyor”. They were furious, and the preface to the second edition reprints it “without the change of a word”.

The voice

Hawthorne’s sentences are grave, balanced and slow, and their real quality is hesitation. His narrator is forever reporting what was said, what might be supposed, what some held and others denied. Did Chillingworth learn his arts from the poisoners of the Overbury affair? An old craftsman says so (ch. 9). F. O. Matthiessen called this Hawthorne’s device of “multiple choice”. It looks like a mannerism and turns out to be a position: nobody, the author included, has the right to look into a human heart and report with confidence. That is exactly Chillingworth’s sin.

The opening chapter shows the method in small. In one page he gives us the prison, “the black flower of civilized society”, and beside its door a “wild rose-bush”, which he offers to the reader as a possible moral blossom, and then declines to say what it means (ch. 1).

The people

Hester Prynne

Proud, sensual and clever, she stays in Boston when she could leave, supports herself by needlework so fine that it decks governors and corpses, yet “it is not recorded that, in a single instance, her skill was called in aid to embroider the white veil” of a bride (ch. 5). She is the book’s conscience and its radical. Her thoughts in ch. 13 would, the narrator says, have made her the founder of a sect “hand in hand with Ann Hutchinson”, had the child not kept her. Her last act, returning from Europe to wear the letter again “of her own free will” (ch. 24), is argued over to this day.

Arthur Dimmesdale

Easy to despise and hard to forget. He lets a woman stand alone for seven years, while he keeps a “bloody scourge” in a locked closet and fasts and sees visions (ch. 11). Yet his suffering is exactly what gives him his gift: “The people knew not the power that moved them thus” (ch. 11), and his sermons are great because he is a fraud in agony. His confession, when it comes, is on his own terms, and his last words give Hester no comfort: when she asks whether they will meet again, he says “I fear! I fear!” (ch. 23).

Roger Chillingworth

A scholar who began, as he says himself, as a decent man who married badly, and who took up his investigation “with the severe and equal integrity of a judge”, until “a terrible fascination” seized him (ch. 10). He digs in the minister “like a miner searching for gold”. When at last he pulls aside the sleeping man’s vestment, his joy is the most frightening moment in the book. When his victim dies he has nothing left, and withers within the year, leaving his fortune to Pearl.

Pearl

A symbol, and also a sharply observed child: wilful, watchful, unkind, unstoppable in her questions. She refuses to cross the brook to her mother until the letter is back on (ch. 19), and when Dimmesdale finally acknowledges her she kisses him, and her tears are the first sign that she will “be a woman” in the world (ch. 23).

How it was made

Hawthorne was forty-four, a Democrat with a family, when the Whig victory of 1848 cost him his post at the Salem Custom House in June 1849. His mother died the following month. He wrote the book in those months, in Salem, and read the end aloud to his wife Sophia, telling a friend that it broke her heart and sent her to bed with a headache, which he looked on as a triumph. To Horatio Bridge he called it a “h—ll-fired story”, into which he could hardly throw any cheering light.

Ticknor, Reed and Fields published it in March 1850. The old story that James T. Fields persuaded him to expand a tale into a novel is now doubted; Fields’s part seems to have been to publish it on its own, with “The Custom-House”, rather than in a collection of tales. The first printing of 2,500 sold within ten days, yet over fourteen years the book brought Hawthorne only about $1,500.

Readers and critics

Early response divided on moral lines more than literary ones. Hawthorne’s friend Edwin Whipple admired it but objected to its “morbid intensity”. Orestes Brownson complained that Hawthorne did not understand repentance, and a Church review said the author “perpetrates bad morals”. They had a point: the book is less sure of guilt than it pretends.

Henry James, in his 1879 study of Hawthorne, thought it the finest imaginative writing yet produced in America, and also thought it had too much symbolism. D. H. Lawrence, in 1923, read it as a perfect work of American imagination and a work of American duplicity, with Hester as the destroyer behind the pure surface. Feminist critics, Nina Baym among them, restored Hester as the book’s centre, and some have seen Margaret Fuller behind her. The sharpest recent challenge is Sacvan Bercovitch’s The Office of the Scarlet Letter (1991), which reads the ending in the context of 1850 and the sectional crisis: Hester’s return and her promise that the truth will come “at some brighter period” are, he argues, a counsel of patience, and the novel enrols its rebel in a liberal compromise. Hawthorne’s campaign biography of Franklin Pierce (1852) gives that reading some weight.

Afterlives

Walter Damrosch made an opera of it in 1896. Victor Sjöström’s silent film of 1926, with Lillian Gish, is the one worth seeing. Wim Wenders filmed it in 1973, and the Demi Moore version of 1995 gave it a happy ending by way of an Indian attack. Easy A (2010) moved it to a high school.

The writers have done better. John Updike wrote three novels around its triangle, A Month of Sundays (1975), Roger’s Version (1986) and S. (1988), one from each point of view. Bharati Mukherjee’s The Holder of the World (1993) sends a Hester-like woman to Mughal India. Suzan-Lori Parks’s Red Letter Plays, In the Blood (1999) and Fucking A (2000), put Hester among the American poor, where the verdict is still in force. The phrase itself has passed into English for any public branding, keeping the one meaning the book spent its length destroying.

How to read it

Read “The Custom-House”, perhaps last. It is a slow opening, but it holds the author’s grudge and his ancestors.
Follow the three scaffold scenes. Chapters 2–3, 12 and 23 are the skeleton; reread them in a row.
Read chapter 13 slowly. “Another View of Hester” is where the novel thinks hardest and where the narrator is least comfortable.
Distrust the hearsay. Note what you are told as fact and what only as rumour; the difference is the method.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown (1835). The same forest and the same Puritans, in one short, terrifying tale.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851). Written the next year by a neighbour who understood what was dark in Hawthorne, and dedicated to him.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1856). Another adulteress, with a narrator who refuses to judge at all.
Arthur Miller, The Crucible (1953). Hawthorne’s ancestor’s court on stage, and the same question of public confession.
John Updike, A Month of Sundays (1975). A modern Dimmesdale, funny and shameless, and a real reading of the original.