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

in “The Custom-House” to the “incident of [William Hathorne’s] hard severity towards a woman” relates to the treatment of a Quaker woman, who was tied half-naked to the back of a cart and flogged ten times each in Boston, Salem, and Dedham, at the honorable William Hathorne’s direction. The Records of the Salem Quarterly Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts (Salem, 1914; vol. 4, p. 84) reveals a sentence issued by William Hathorne against an erring woman in November of 1668:
    Hester Craford, for fornication ... as she confessed, was ordered to be severaly whipped and that security be given to save the town from the charge of keeping the child.... The judgment of her being whipped was respitte for a month or six weeks after the birth of her child, and it was left to the Worshipful Major William Hathorne to see it executed on a lecture day.
    This passage likely influenced Hawthorne’s choice of name for his heroine in The Scarlet Letter. William Hathorne’s fifth son, John, added to the notoriety of the family name in his role examining many of those accused of being witches during the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692, a role he never repented even when other magistrates who served on the same panel expressed their remorse. Most of those accused and executed as witches were women. Hawthorne describes his feelings about his Hathorne ancestors with a mix of horror, awe, and kinship, asking that he not be cursed for their deeds, at the same time imagining their disdain for their descendant and noting that “strong traits of their nature have intertwined themselves with mine” (p. 11). Critics generally take the Hawthorne’s addition of a w to his ancestral name as evidence of a desire to distance himself from his ancestors; possibly, though, Hawthorne sought to spare the Hathornes the association with his literary career, which he characterized in “The Custom-House” as a source of ignominy.
    Hawthorne’s relationship to William and John Hathorne is similar in its ambivalence to that of the narrator of The Scarlet Letter to the Puritan patriarchs who impose sentence on Hester Prynne. In describing the Boston governor and the assemblage of elders who preside over the exposure of the scarlet letter, the narrator vacillates between qualified praise and open dissent:
    [Governor Bellingham] was not ill fitted to be the head and representative of a community, which owed its origin and progress, and its present state of development, not to the impulses of youth, but to the stern and tempered energies of manhood, and the sombre sagacity of age; accomplishing so much, precisely because it imagined and hoped so little. The other eminent characters, by whom the chief ruler was surrounded, were distinguished by a dignity of mien, belonging to a period when the forms of authority were felt to possess the sacredness of divine institutions. They were, doubtless, good men, just, and sage (p. 55).
    The narrator’s view of Hester’s crime is as complicated as his view of her persecutors. While observing the unsuitedness of the Puritan patriarchs to pass judgment on Hester’s crime, and commenting on the cruelty and coarseness of the Puritan crowd that gathers before the prison house, the narrator repeatedly refers to Hester’s crime as a sin, or a transgression of basic morality, rather than an infraction against the mores of a particular culture during a particular period.
    In contrast to the complicated, internal response of Hawthorne’s narrator and likely Hawthorne himself, the Puritan community responds in a manner that is fully public and only modestly nuanced. This response immediately eclipses the crime and its immediate consequences in the first months following the act of adultery. The reader never learns when or how the crime is exposed, the event that presumably initiates Hester’s confinement in prison, because Hawthorne makes the punishment the novel’s opening scene, before the reader knows the nature of