Scarlet Letter (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Free Page A

sermons, although it is difficult to imagine Hester, even before her fall, as so devoted to Bible studies that she would seek or elicit her minister’s private tutelage. Nothing in the novel, apart from what the reader can glean from the natures of Hester and Dimmesdale, permits the inference that the couple had an enduring affair, although nothing contradicts this possibility, either. But by the time the novel opens, and even more so by its close seven years later, the characters are so transformed that the reader can hardly draw informed conclusions about their earlier selves. Despite the novel’s frequent references to Dimmesdale’s repressed passion, a sexual encounter between Hester and him seems as remote from the events described in the novel as the Puritan penal system is from contemporary mores. In Studies in Classic American Literature (see “For Further Reading”), D. H. Lawrence assumed that Hester seduced Dimmesdale, an explanation that renders the act of adultery more plausible, but not any easier to imagine. Depriving his readers of the means of imagining the event that triggers Dimmesdale’s unraveling, Chillingworth’s vendetta, Pearl’s birth, and Hester’s disgrace seems to be a deliberate part of Hawthorne’s artistic design.
    The crime that gives the novel its name and preoccupies all of the characters, then, is shrouded as much by the symbolism that overshadows the thing symbolized as by the shame of the characters. Without an account of the criminal act, readers of The Scarlet Letter apprehend Hester’s crime through the refracted light of multiple moral perspectives. In that he is Hester’s creator, Hawthorne’s view of Hester’s crime is at least interesting, if not determinative of how readers of his day, or of ours, should respond. The narrator and the Puritan community both overtly pass judgment on Hester’s act, although the former vacillates in the harshness with which he judges her. In addition, each of the three important adult characters—Arthur Dimmesdale, Roger Chillingworth, and Hester Prynne—present a particular response to Hester’s adultery that may inform our own. The fourth important character, Pearl, though a child and only intuitively aware of the crime, offers an additional perspective as well as a real challenge to a response of unmediated censure, for if the Puritans cannot qualify their judgment of Hester’s crime, they cannot acknowledge what Hester calls its “consecration.” Though the perspectives of Hawthorne, the novel’s narrator, the community, and each of the novel’s four main characters say more about these individuals and their Puritan society than about adultery, each perspective contributes to the reader’s multidimensional experience of the novel’s central, unmentionable event.

Perspectives on Hester’s Crime
    Hawthorne’s ambivalence toward his Puritan ancestry complicates the attempts to understand his response to Hester Prynne, her act of adultery, and the punishment inflicted on her. In the novel’s introductory section “The Custom-House,” Hawthorne refers to the “stern and black-browed Puritans” who were his forebears: William and John Hathorne, the author’s great-great-great grandfather and great-great-grandfather, who lived in Salem during the mid-1600s. These men were magistrates, and the records of early Massachusetts history, with which Hawthorne was acquainted, contain accounts of each of these men inflicting humiliating and often brutal sentences. The elder Magistrate Hathorne, for example, sentenced a burglar to having his ear lopped off and the letter B branded onto his forehead.
    But the notoriety of the Hawthorne forebears derives primarily from their treatment of women. In their roles as magistrates and Puritan patriarchs, the Hathornes had no squeamishness about inflicting physical punishments on women for their religion, sexual behavior, and, most infamously, supposed practice of witchcraft. The reference