Scarlet Letter (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Free

their psychological cause. Hester, through her great skill in needlework and her acts of charity, redeems herself in the community, though she chooses to continue to live in isolation. Hester and Dimmesdale remain apart for all of this time, until Hester and her daughter, Pearl, encounter him at the pillory, where Dimmesdale, in a feverish state of guilt and self-loathing, has gone with the professed intent of exposing his crime, although it is late at night and his attempt to expiate his “crime” goes largely unwitnessed. The symbol of his guilt, however, appears in the sky in the form of a constellation in the shape of the letter A.
    After witnessing her former lover’s decline, Hester determines that she will reveal Chillingworth as her husband to Dimmesdale so she can warn the reverend of Chillingworth’s malicious design. She waits for Dimmesdale one day in the forest, where no one will see them. For Hester, their meeting is a release of the passion she has continued to feel for Dimmesdale since the time of their affair. Hester is desperate in this scene to assuage her former lover’s misery, not only out of concern for his well-being, but also because she wants him to accept her and her child into his life. She says of their affair, “What we did had a consecration of its own,” an apparent reference to Pearl that borrows religious terms to describe what Dimmesdale views as an offense against his faith. Dimmesdale’s response is far more equivocal: He initially chastises Hester for having caused him to stray, then blames Chillingworth for his miserable emotional state. Lastly, while he lacks the courage to propose the plan himself, he insinuates his desires to Hester, then passively accedes when she at last expresses the same desire—one that she kept hidden for seven years: that she, Dimmesdale, and Pearl leave Boston to live together as a family. Their happy plans never come off. When Hester confirms that the three of them will sail for Europe after the election-day sermon Dimmesdale will give, she learns that Chillingworth has booked passage aboard the same ship. But the father, mother, and child are never to board that ship together, for, after delivering the Election Sermon, the Reverend Dimmesdale takes Hester and Pearl with him onto the pillory to reveal his crime. Before the crowd, he exposes the stigmata that have broken out on his breast in the shape of the letter A. He then dies with his head resting on the scarlet letter.
    Although the mark of Hester’s crime is stitched in red across her breast, emblazoned in stigmata across the breast of her lover, and broadcast across the sky, Hawthorne never names her crime in The Scarlet Letter. The novel’s title alludes to, but does not reveal, the letter A, which itself suggests, but does not divulge, the crime of adultery. By the time Roger Chillingworth, concealing his relationship to Hester when he wanders into the crowd during her exposure, inquires of a spectator “wherefore is she here set up to public shame,” the two symbols of Hester’s crime—the scarlet letter A and the baby Pearl have all but revealed its nature. But the scarlet letter remains the fullest articulation of the crime, for Roger Chillingworth interrupts before the spectator has done more than insinuate the transgression that gives rise to the spectacle of public shame.
    If The Scarlet Letter evokes Hester’s crime without naming it, the novel tells almost nothing about Hester and Dimmesdale’s affair. During the reverie that briefly distracts her from the hideous spectacle of which she is the center, Hester recalls in sequence her childhood home, her father and mother, her own youthful likeness, and the early days of her marriage, but in her remembrance she skips over the time from her adulterous encounter with Dimmesdale to her present circumstance, as she stands at the pillory. Possibly Hester and Dimmesdale consorted with initially innocent intentions after one of his