PEARL GREY VERSUS

SCARLET IN HAWTHORNE’S
“THE SCARLET LETTER”

COORDONATOR ŞTIINŢIFIC
Prof.Univ.Dr.Felicia Burdescu

ABSOLVENT:
Marinescu Denisa Floriana

CRAIOVA
-2007 –

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 CONTENTS

ARGUMENT 3

CHAPTER I : Hawthorne and Puritanism 4

CHAPTER II : The Symbolism in The Scarlet Letter 8

CHAPTER III: Hawthorne’s masterpiece 55

CONCLUSION 61

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 Argument

I have chosen Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter for my diploma paper,

because I consider it one of the first American great works. The writer belongs
to Transcendentalists and, as a representative of Puritanism, he critically and
objectively introduces the exaggerations, limits of the church.
The work has had an immense influence both on Americans and for
other cultures. In point of suggestivness, American symbolism seems to be
bound to colour and meaning. Not only Melville shows that black and white
are interchangeable but he also states that “Evil is in man”.
Hawthorne will show through the meaning of red that goes together with
love-hatered, love-creation(Pearl and grey) and the respect one can get for
Hester Prynne, an early feminist in America.
The text practically sustains A, the first letter of the alphabet is more
complex in meaning than Adultery.

Chapter I

Hawthorne and Puritanism

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 A religious group which migrated from England to Massachusetts Bay
Colony in New England in the early 1600s, the Puritans believed in a “pure”
interpretations of the Bible which did not include some of the traditional
practices of the Church of England.
Although the Church did not officially control the state of Puritan
settlements; religion and government were closely interwined. The ministers
counseled the magistrates in all affairs concerning the settlement and the
citizens. The Puritan had strict rules against the theater, religious music,
sensuous poetry, and frivolous dress.
To illustrate the fact that Puritan has influenced American mentality,
literature and culture as a whose enormously we use Hawthorne’s works as an
example because he has been one of the most popular American writers, he
seems to have experienced a very strong influence of Puritanism and reflected
it in his works brilliantly.
Hawthorne rounds off the Puritan cycle in America writing-belief in the
existence of an active evil (the devil) and in a sense of determinism (the
concept of predestination).
Hawthorne’s literary reputation is inextricably linked with Puritanism
and the Puritans. The critics have made much of his puritan subject matter and
his symphatetic treatment of puritan themes. Some have come close to
identifying Hawthorne with Puritanism as though he was a spiritual
contemporary of Cotton Mather born out of his time.
Some major themes in Hawthorne’s fictions are:the problem of guilt –a
character’s sense of guilt forced by the puritanical heritage or by society; also
guilt versus innocence; the Puritan New England –used as a background and
setting in many tales; pride- Hawthorne treats preide as evil.
He illustrates the following aspects of pride in various characters:
physical pride(Robin), spiritual pride( Goodman Brown, Ethan Brand) and
intellectual pride (Rappaccini). Some important problems include : individual

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versus society; self-fulfilment versus accommodation or frustration; hypocrisy
versus integrity; love versus hate; exploration versus hurting and fate versus
free will.
Due to his family background, Hawthorne could not help being imbibed
Puritan ideas such as belief in the existence of the devil.
The influences of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s unbringing Salem,
Massachusetts and his Puritan ancestry are evident in his literary works. Many
of his writings are expressions of Puritan ideals and the correlation of those
ideals with the human nature. Considered serious and solitary by nature,
Hawthorne used these characters traits to clearly portray his feelings toward
Puritanism.
W.C. Brownell, saw in Hawthorne a genuine son of the Puritans and
called “The Scarlet Letter” “The Puritan Faust”. In a rather sweeping
generalization he asserted that Hawthorne’s writing were almost invariably
successful when they dealt with Puritan themes, almost always a failure when
they did not. He attributed the didactic tone of Hawthorne’s fiction to his
preoccupation, with Puritanism, and in many other ways related Hawthorne’s
literary accomplishments with Puritan subjects and influences.1
Herbert Schneider similarly sees Hawthorne as reviving the best in
Puritanism, “the empirical truth behind the Calvinistic symbols. He recovered
what Puritanism professed but seldom practiced the spirit of piety, humility and
tragedy in the face of the inscrutable ways of God”2
Hawthorne found himself haunted as well as intrigued by the history of
his hometown of Salem. Surrounded by the town’s past, he struggled to rectify
in his mind the incongruence of Puritan practice.
Further adding to the complexity of his situation was the reality of the
Puritan ancestry. Not only was he the descendent of Puritan emigrants, but had
a great-great grandfather who served as a judge for the Salem, which
trials( Pennell 2; Bloom 11). Perhaps a feeling of personal responsibility and
guilt led Hawthorne to select Puritanism as a theme for so many of his works.
1
American Prose Masters (New York,1909)123,115;76-78
2
.The Puritan Mind(New York,1930)262-263

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 Exposing Puritan transgression and forcing the reader to acknowledge
the wrongdoings of the past gave Hawthorne an outlet for the misplaced blame
he laid on himself. According to Charles Ryskamp, Hawthorne had read
everything available to him about the Puritans.3 Part of that interest was a result
of two illustrations Puritan ancestors Hawthorne refers to in “The Custom
House”.
Other critics have found Hawthorne’s chief literary motivation in
criticism of Puritanism rather than emulation. Parrington saw him as a
criticizing the Puritans from a skeptical point of view4, while Stuard Pratt
Sherman called him “ a subtle critic and satirist of Puritanism from the
Transcendental point of view”5.
It is not that Hawthorne approved of Puritan excesses, but he came to
realize that they were probably necessary for survival, as he indicated in his
1832 sketch of Ann Hutchinson, as well as in the preface to “The Gentle Boy”
the same year.6
He noted that the Puritans seeking to establish a unified theocracy felt it
was necessary to be strict in discipline when it came to affairs of both church
and state. Since their concept of theocracy was drawn from the Bible,
especially important to his writing “The Scarlet Letter” was Hawthorne’s
knowledge of the holly book, as well as John Winthrop’s journal and the
writings of Cotton Mather.
Although Hawthorne found Calvinism distasteful, The Scarlet Letter
reveals that he knew the Bible well. Also, Theodore Maynard's A Fire Was
Lighted: The Life of Rose Hawthorne, reveals that Hawthorne set a Christian
example in his life and writings that influenced his daughter Rose eventually to
become a Catholic nun.7

3
Charles Ryskamp, "The New England Sources of The Scarlet Letter," American Literature 31 (1959),
257-72.
4
.The Romantic Revolution in America(New York,1927),442-450
5
. Americans(New York,1922)137.We may wonder now, in view of Hawthorne’s bitter attack upon
Transcendentalism in „The Celestial Railroad „; Sherman could apply the term Transcendental to its
author. That story seems to call for a reversal of Sherman’s formula; it is clearly critical and satirical
of Transcendentalism from an almost entirely orthodox Puritan point of view.
6
. Seymour L. Gross, "Hawthorne's Revision of `The Gentle Boy,'" American Literature 26 ( 1954), 196-208.
7
. Theodore Maynard, A Fire was Lighted: The Life of Rose Hawthorne (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1948), 258

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 With his knowledge of Puritanism and its dependence on Scripture, he
realized The Scarlet Letter would necessitate a biblical orientation; so he made
plentiful allusions to biblical material.

In general, however, critics have ignored specific scriptural influence on the

work. Francis J. Bremer observes regarding the influence of the Bible on the Puritans,
"The Old and New Testaments were . . . the source of codes of behavior, belief and
worship."8 Unfortunately, their years in the wilderness had distorted their biblical
hermeneutics. Recent scholarship also suggests that Hawthorne's awareness of the
Puritans' spiritual condition resulting from their spiritual deterioration had identified
the declension that had taken hold by Mather's time, and in the struggles of Hester and
Dimmesdale he accounts for a principal cause of the declension. Their preoccupation
with physical life and the survival of the visible community had compromised their
commitment to important biblical concepts and what is essential to membership in the
invisible community.

Chapter II

The Symbolism of Colours in The Scarlet Letter

8
. Francis J. Bremen The Puritan Experience, rev. ed. (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1995), 16.

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 Interpretations of “The Scarlet Letter” have been almost startlingly
various. This is not surprising, for Hawthorne has himself pointed the way to a
wide range of speculations.
In the three short paragraphs that make up his opening chapter,
Hawthorne introduces the three chief symbols that will serve to give structure
to the story on the thematic level, hints at the fourth, and starts two of the chief
lines of imagery.
The opening sentence suggests the darkness (“sad-colored”, “gray”),
the rigidity (“oak”, “iron”), and the aspiration (“steeple-crowned”) of the
people “amongst whom religion and law were almost identical”. Later
sentences add “weatherstains” , ” a yet darker aspect”, and “gloomy” to the
suggestions already begun through colour imagery.
In the opening “scene”, the women standing about the pillory serve as
a kind of “chorus”, expressing the outraged sense of community and especially
the female portion thereof, and Hawthorne digresses into a generalization that,
in a measure, anticipates the outrageous remarks about English women he
would later include in “Our Old Home”: ”The women, who were now standing
about the prison-door, stood within less than half a century of the period when
the mannish Elisabeth, had been the not altogether unsuitable representative of
her sex…”
The closing words of the chapter make the metaphorical use of
colours explicit: Hawthorne hopes that a wild rose beside the prison door may
serve “to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the
track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow”.
A large part of the opening chapter I allotted to this rose-bush and to
some weeds that also grow beside the prison. Having learned to respect the
economy with which Hawthorne worked in his tales, we should guess, even if
we had not read beyond this first chapter, that these will turn out not to be
merely “realistic” or “atmospheric” details. We should expect to meet them
again, with expanded connotations. Actually, the flower and weed imagery is
second in importance only to the colour imagery in this novel.

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 In addition to the Puritans themselves, the jail before which they
stand, and the weeds and the rose, one other subject, and only one, is
mentioned in this first chapter. In the only generalized comment in a chapter
otherwise devoted to objective description, Hawthorne tells us that “ The
founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness
they might originally project, have invariably allot a portion of the virgin soil
as a cemetery , and another portion as the site of a prison ” . The three
climactic scenes of the novel take place before the scaffold in front of the
prison. The cemetery, by contrast, remains in the background. We are not
allowed to forget it, we learn that Chillingworth has a special interest in it, but
we are not encouraged to make it the center of our attention until the end, when
it moves into the foreground as the site of the tombstone with the strange
inscription.Hawthorne's answer is not a systematized treatment of the problem;
indeed, because of the author-narrator problems, one cannot be sure from
reading the book what Hawthorne's own theology of good and evil was at the
time of writing.1 But it is clear that Hawthorne's world is a dualistic one, in
contrast to Emerson's bland monistic world. It is significant that Hawthorne
begins the story with a pessimistic statement about the environment in which
Hester and Dimmesdale must find happiness: "The founders of a new colony,
whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project,
have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a
portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a
prison." Sin and death are the ever-present realities for human beings, whom
Dimmesdale, after committing adultery, perceives to be the "sinful brotherhood
of mankind."1
The cemetery, the prison and the rose, with their associated values
and the extensions of suggestion given tem by the image patterns that intersect
them, as the ugliest weeds are later discovered growing out of graves, suggest
1
D.H. Lawrence, in his Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Viking, 1961), was
probably the first literary critic to emphasize Hawthorne's ambiguity in The Scarlet Letter. Lawrence
remarks, "Old-fashioned Nathaniel, with his little-boy charm, he' II tell you what's what. But he'll cover
it with smarm" (p. 96).
1
Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 142.

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a symbolic pattern within which nearly everything that is most important in the
novel may be placed. The cemetery and the prison are negative values, in
some sense evils.
The rose is a positive value, beautiful, in some sense a good. But the
cemetery and the prison are not negative in the same sense: death, “the last
great enemy” , is a natural evil, resulting as some theologies would have it
from moral evil but distinguished by coming to saint and sinner alike; the
prison is a reminder of the present actuality of moral evil. Natural and moral
evil, then, death and sin, are here suggested.
The rose is “good” in the same sense in which the cemetery is an
“evil”: its beauty is neither moral nor immoral, but is certainly a positive value.
Like the beauty of a healthy child or an animal, it is the product not of choice,
but of necessity, of the laws of its being, so that it can be admired, but not
judged. Pearl, later in the story, is similarly immune from judgment. There is
no strong suggestion of moral goodness in this chapter, nor will there be in
what is to follow. The cemetery and the weeds contrast with the rose , but
only the suggestions of worship in the shape of the hats of the Puritans
contrast with the prison, and those steeple-crowned hats are grey , a colour
which later takes on strongly negative associations.
During the first third of the book, therefore, Hester, her glowing letter,
and Pearl are as lights shining in the darkness of the community. The minister,
meanwhile, fasts and vigils in the darkness and preaches words that place him
in a false light. He attains a new perspective, however, when he begins to live
with his guilt. When Chillingworth moves in with him, Dimmesdale finds in
the physician’s mind a remarkable depth and scope. “It was as if a window
were thrown open”, but “the air was too fresh and chill to be long breathed with
comfort”.
Later, as Chillingworth keeps probing for “God’s own truth”, both
men hear Pearl’s laughter outside. “Looking instinctively from the open
window”, the minister sees Hester and Pearl in the adjacent burial ground.
Here, seen from the new perspective and clearly outlined in the bright sunlight

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of the summer day, is the very truth that Chillingworth is seeking, but neither
man can perceive it. Chillingworth looks at Pearl and asks, “What, in Heaven’s
name, is she?” and Dimmesdale is unable to explain her “principle of being “.
The extremes of Mr. Wilson’s “ light “ and Chillingworth’s “
blackness “ meet not only in the gray of Hester’s dress and the Puritan hats, and
in the indeterminate drabness of the Puritan clothing, but also in the ambiguous
suggestions of red. Images of colour, and of light and shade, are more
numerous than any other images in the novel. Readers have always been aware
that Hawthorne has used these images “ artistically “, and sometimes that he
has used them “ expressively “; yet precisely what they express and how they
express it have never, even in the extended treatments of the subject, been
adequately analyzed.
Some of them Hawthorne makes explicitly symbolic, others seem
obscurely to be so, while still others resist every effort at translation into
abstract terms. Faced with this profusion and complexity of evidence, most
commentators have wavered between the opinion that the colour images are
used “ allegorically “ and the even less discerning opinion that they are only in
the vaguest sense, as realistic background, functional. Here, as on a number of
other aspects of Hawthorne’s work, criticism is forced to make something like
a fresh start. I think it will prove useful as a preliminary to later analysis to
distinguish among three ways in witch images of colour and light and shade
appear in the novel.
There is, first, the pure sensory image used literally, not figuratively,
though the literalness of its use will not destroy whatever intrinsic symbolic
value it may have. Second, there is the colour or shade of light or darkness that
must be taken literally, but that also has explicit symbolic value. Finally, there
is the image that has only, or chiefly, symbolic value, so that it cannot be taken
literally. These may be called pure, mixed and drained images.
There is a real basis in the novel for making such distinctions – or that
the data will lend themselves to such manipulations without forcing. A look at
the first several chapters will be enough to give us an answer. Thus on the first

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page the grayness of the hats and the “ weatherstains “ of the jail and pure
images, sense impressions to be taken quite literally. Only after we have
become conscious of the part played by the colour in the tale are we apt to be
aware of the appropriateness of these colours, though to be sure they may have
had their effect on us before we became conscious of that effect. So likewise
the “bright “morning sun and the “ruddy“ cheeks of the spectators in the next
chapter are first of all, and always fundamentally, to be understood in a
perfectly literal sense.
Again, the first time the scarlet letter is mentioned, the colour image
is pure : “ On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an
elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold – thread, appeared the
letter A”.
Hawthorne's notable and unique use of the inanimate
letter A, the scenery of the rose bush, and the settings of
forest to make the characters -Hester, Dimmesdale,
Chillingworth, and Pearl- into symbols in the novel in order to
portray his moral and theme of: Be true. Be true. Be true!
The red letter A is presented but whose meaning has to
be deciphered. What does the letter mean? It is a question
every character in the novel repeats who confronts the blatant
red token and who has to deal with it.
The letter A manifests in a variety of forms and places.
Not only does the A manifest in various forms, but it also
acquires a variety of meanings. It represents more than just
the sin of adultery. Even as the original mark of adultery, the
scarlet letter has a different individual meaning to the various
characters.
To Hester, the A is a symbol of unjust humiliation. The A
magnifies in an armor breastplate at the Governor's mansion
to exaggerated and gigantic proportions, so as to be acutely

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the most prominent feature of [Hester's] semblance. In truth,
she emerges absolutely hidden behind it.. The A grows to be
larger than Hester signifying the town's view of her sin. They
do not see the human being behind the scarlet letter, they
only see a sinner.
For Hester, the A is not only a symbol of adultery, but
also a symbol of alienation. She is an outcast from society and
the women treat her differently by constantly sneering at her
in public. The scarlet letter is a symbol of what society wants
to see and the decision to create a relativity. The townspeople
soon began to accept her and believe that letter had
supernatural powers. They decide that it meant able; so strong
was Hester Prynne, with a woman's strength, that they were
allowing her to remove it. Their opinion and vision of the
scarlet letter changes into its complete opposite within a short
period of under ten year's time. This opinion conforms
according to their worldly view of convenience. To the Puritan
community, it is a mark of just punishment. In the beginning
of the story the letter struck fear into the society's hearts. It
symbolizes the unfair humiliation she endures, such as
humiliation standing on the scaffold at noon in public view.
The ornately gold-embroidered A on Hester's heart, at
which Pearl throws wildflowers and decorates with a border of
prickly burrs. To Pearl, the A is a bright and mysterious
curiosity which symbolizes her existence and the meaning
behind it. In mockery, Pearl creates an A on her chest made of
green seaweed which represents purity and innocence, but
also signifies Pearl's future as the daughter of sinner.

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 For Chillingworth, the A represents the need for revenge
and is the spur to this quest. To Dimmesdale, the A is a
piercing reminder of his the guilt engulfing his concealed sin. It
drives him to punish himself and endure Chillingworth's
torture.
In addition, the A also symbolizes attributes other than
adultery. On the night of his vigil on the scaffold, Dimmesdale
sees an immense red A in the sky.
It symbolizes Angel when a great red letter in the sky,
-the letter A, which [the townspeople] interpret to stand for
angel, as it manifests in the sky on the night of Governor
Winthrop's death. One of the most dramatic of the several A's
the book hints at is the A so frequently seen earlier and which
Dimmesdale finally reveals to be an A on his chest by most of
the spectators who witness his confession and death. At the
end of the novel, as a summary symbol, the scarlet A refers
against the black background on Hester and Dimmesdale's
tombstone.
Mixed images, on the other hand, have ore than that suggestion of
figurative extension that any image, however pure, will have: they may be said
to denote both literal and figurative colours, so that in them the natural
symbolism of the colour becomes explicit. The jail is “gloomy “, that is, both
physically and emotionally dark. The second time the letter is mentioned, its
colour has acquired a moral connotation from its context: Hester stood before
the crowd with “desperate recklessness“, while everyone looked at the sign of
her ignominy, “that SCARLET LETTER “.
More clearly an example of this mixed type of image is the beadle’s
statement that here in this righteous colony “iniquity is dragged out into the
sunshine “: for Hester has just been brought from the literal darkness of the jail
into the literal sunshine of the square, and this action is an example of “iniquity

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“, which has been hidden or unknown being made public, brought into the
(figurative) light.
The speaker has meant his remark as a figure of speech, while the
reader sees that it is literally appropriate too; there is a two – way movement,
from the literal to the figurative, and from the figurative back to the literal,
going on here and elsewhere in the colour images in the novel. One final
example in this preliminary survey of the mixed type of image: “his face
darkened with some powerful emotion “. Now powerful emotion may literally
darken the face by flushing it, but here the symbolic effect of darkness, as that
which is feared and evil, is also clear. This is the first reference to the
“darkness “ of Chillingworth.
The third of drained type of image is much less frequent than the
other two. On the first page, we hear of the “black flower “ of civilized society,
a prison, and we realize that “ black “ is here figurative, for though the jail has
been described as dark and weatherstained, it is not black in any literal sense.
Again, in the last sentence of the first chapter, we hear of the “ darkening close
“ of the table , and we read “ darkening “ to mean gloomy ( in the emotional
sense), sad.
Finally, when the Reverend Mr. Wilson speaks to Hester of the “
blackness “ of her sin, the primary significance of the word , both for Hester
and for the reader, is intensive and qualitative in a moral sense; the residue of
literal meaning merely adds to emotional overtones. Here, as in the “smile of
dark and self – relying intelligence “ displayed by Chillingworth, there is
hardly any literal meaning left.
The colours presented in these three types of images are associated
with natural good (beauty, health), moral and spiritual good (holiness), natural
evil (ugliness, death), and moral evil (sin). With the exception of the yellow
starch on the linen of Mistress Hibbens, in which we can discern only
historically verisimilitude, all the colours in the novel, including yellow as used
elsewhere, are associated with one or more natural or moral values, positive or
negative.

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 The most frequent colours are red, in its several shades and black,
pure or mixed, as in “ gray “, “ shadowy “, and “ darksome “. Red is
ambiguous throughout, suggesting both of sunlight and roses, on the other
hand, and the traditional associations called up by “the scarlet woman” on the
other. Pearl, a “ natural “ child, is dressed in red, Hester’s letter is red, the roses
are red, the bloom of healthy cheeks is red, and a glow in Chillingworth’s eyes
is thought to be red with the light of infernal fires. Black, dark gray, brown, all
the darker shades, ordinarily suggest both natural and moral evil. Green and
yellow are associated with natural good, with life and beauty.
Light is of various kinds. Sunlight suggests both truth and health. It is
analogous to the spiritual Light of Revelation, which in Hawthorne’s scheme of
values should “illumine“ nature, and to the light of grace. But there are also the
“ false light “ of meteors and the “ red light “ of evil. Mr. Wilson, the most
saintly of the Puritan ministers and the most sympathetic of the lesser
characters, has “ white “ hair and light – coloured ( gray ) eyes, in marked
contrast to the only colours assigned to Governor Bellingham, who has a “ dark
“ feather and a “ black “ tunic. Thus too, Dimmesdale, a mixed figure of lofty
aspirations and base conduct, is seen as having a “ white “, lofty, and
impending brow and “ brown “, melancholy eyes. Dressed in “black “, he
walks by choice in the “shadowy” bypaths. Hester is seen as red (her letter and
vivid complexion), gray (her dress), and black (her hair and eyes), the first two
ambiguous in their associations, the last saved from being wholly negative by
the glints of sunlight often seen in her hair. Pearl, though she has her mother’s
black hair and eyes, is usually seen as a flash of red and light : the “ deep and
vivid tints “ of her “ bright “ complexion and “ gorgeous robes “ often throw an
absolute circle of “ radiance “ around her. Chillingworths is compounded of
shades of “ darkness “, except for the red, or reddish blue, glow thought to be
seen in his eyes.
The relationship between the three types of images, the several
colours, and their associated moral and natural values are highly complex. The

16
use of colours in the novel is rhythmic, but it is more than that, for the rhythm
is functional and expressive.
In “The Interior of a Heart “, for instance, there are twenty-two colour
images, all but two of which are black or white. The heart is Dimmesdale’s,
and Dimmesdale wavers between good and evil, we might almost say between
the supernatural and the unnatural. It is conceptually right that he should be
associated with both the radiance of Wilson and the darkness of Chillingworth.
He is never associated with the greens and yellows and reds of sunlit nature.
Again, the chapter called “Hester at her Needle“ has eighteen colour
images, eleven of them red, seven black, dark and white. Hester stands in an
ambiguous position between Chillingworth and the white maidens, as
Dimmesdale does between Chillingworth and Wilson, but she differs from him
in her relation to nature. For a final example, on one page of “The Minister‘s
Vigil “, when the approach of Mr. Wilson and the threat of disclosure coincide,
there are nine colour images, eight of which are light or whiteness. Recalling
the beadle’s earlier remark about the Puritan effort to drag iniquity out into the
sunshine, in which light was associated with an uncharitable violation of the
human heart, we become aware of what is sometimes obscured in discussions
of Hawthorne : that colour imagery is functional in context, not static or
determined by some abstract scheme.
The most significant use of colour in the novel is in the three key
scenes, Hester on the scaffold with the infant Pearl, Dimmesdale with Hester
and Pearl on the scaffold at midnight, ant the three on the scaffold again at the
end.
In the first, Hester is dragged into the light ant stands there “with the
hot, mid-day sun burning down upon her face, and lighting up its shame; with
the scarlet token of infamy on her breast…“
In the second there is at first only the darkness of the “obscure night “,
which renders Dimmesdale’s gesture ineffectual.
The two kinds of light appear. First there is the gleam of the lantern of
the saintly Mr. Wilson, who appeared in his illuminated circle to be radiant

17
with the “ distant shine of the celestial city “; but Mr. Wilson’s light does not
reach Dimmesdale, who is thus “ saved “ by a narrow margin from disclosure.
After Mr. Wilson’s light recedes in the darkness, a meteor flames in the sky,
making all visible, but in a “false“ light, so that what Chillingworth sees by its
aid is not true.
Neither light in this scene accomplishes the necessary revelation. That
is left for the final climactic scaffold scene, in which the three come together
voluntarily in the light of the sun.
The marked predominance of pure images keeps the mixed and
drained ones from loosing force by becoming abstractly figurative, and this in
turn is one of the reasons why the novel never becomes an allegory. Thought
we must say that there is a struggle going on in the novel between the forces of
darkness and of light, the preponderance of pure images keeps this struggle
from becoming neatly dichotomous.
When we read that Chillingworth had conceived “a new purpose,
dark, it is true, if not guilty”, we do not read this as a pleonasm, for darkness
has acquired many associations beyond the guilt it may hide.
Again, the “ light “ of the church is saved from being a mere figure
for “ the teaching of the church “ by the fact that light has become associated
with a cluster of positive values, both natural and moral, that cannot be
translated adequately as “ doctrine “.
Finally, two drained images will illustrate the point. “ The holy
whiteness of the clergyman’s good fame “, in reference to Dimmesdale, draws
a part of its meaning from the light constantly associated with Mr. Wilson and
Christian Revelation, but another part from the false light of the meteor, which
has only recently ceased to cast its distorting glare over the scene.
And the smile that “ flickered “ over Chillingworth’s face so “
derisively ” that the spectator could see his “ blackness “ “ all the better for it“
is also a false light which nevertheless may reveal some things truly, as the
light of the meteor had revealed “ the black, freshly turned earth “ of the garden
plots near the scaffold.

18
 But the movement flows in another direction too, for the presence of
the mixed and drained images underlines the symbolic value of the pure
images.
When Pearl, inspired by her mother’s example, makes a letter out of
eelgrass for her own breast, and Hester says that “ the green letter, and on thy
childish bosom, has no purport “, we realize that the statement is true in several
different senses: from Hester’s point of view, the green letter has none of the “
purport “ that her own letter has, and she, of course, is preoccupied with just
that kind of meaning; but from the reader’s point of view, the greenness of the
letter is an appropriate reminder of Pearl’s association with nature.
And when we see the Indians in the square on Election Day, the
predominant reds and yellows of their barbaric finery and the black of their “
snakelike “ eyes carry associations with nature and with evil, but none at all
with “ celestial illumination “. Like the weathered wood of the jail, the Indian
costumes gather meaning from their context.
The point of view of the third generalization about the three types of
images has perhaps already become sufficiently clear from what has been said.
The movement of the different colours back and forth between pure and
drained images helps to keep what Hawthorne calls his “ mesh of good and evil
“, a true mesh, with the strands intricately interwoven.
Hawthorne usually presents a pure image first, establishing the sensed
colour, then expands it into a mixed image, exploring its connotations, then at
last uses the colour in a drained image that out of the total context of the novel
would be bare and lifeless, or merely whimsical, but that in context is rich in
associations it has acquired along the way.
But sometimes he reverses this process, and sometimes he jumbles the
order, so that the colours are never completely fixed in the degree of their
literalness or the extension of their symbolic values.
When we read, for instance, of the “ radiant halo “ surrounding the
head of Mr. Wilson as he walked through a “ gloomy night of sin “, the image
that we should expect to be merely figurative, the “ halo “ of sanctity, turns out

19
to be literal as well, for the light is shed by Mr. Wilson’s lantern; and the one
that we should at first expect to be literal – for we already known that it is a
dark night, and as we start reading “ this gloomy atmosphere night… “, we
think we are getting a mere restatement of the darkness – turns out to be also
figurative, forcing us to revise the reaction we had prepared.
The relation between the light and the colour images and their
symbolic values are, then, neither static and schematized nor wholly free and
arbitrary, but contextual within a general framework supplied by traditional
patterns of colour symbolism.
The traditional associations of light and dark, for example, are
apparently archetypal.
Literature is filled with the darkness of death and sin and the light of
life and goodness; and the common speech allows us to “ throw light “ upon a
problem as often as we “ explain “ or “ clarify “ it.
Perhaps the most nearly fixed on its symbolic values of all the colours
in the novel is black. Yet even it is sometimes used ambiguously. Hester’s
black hair, that glistened so often in the sunlight before she covered it with a
cap, and Pearl’s “ dark, glistening curls “, so well set off by her scarlet
costume, are examples.
On the other hand, the red that turns through the book as a motif is
almost always used ambiguously. Only a few examples, like the “red glare“ in
Chillingworth’s eyes, are wholly clear, with one set of suggestions canceled out
and another emphasized.
The wild roses and the scarlet letter, Pearl’s costume and her mother’s
complexion do not exhaust the possibilities.
Chillingworth’s light is thought to be a reflection of the infernal fires,
but Pearl is also said to be a flame. When the forest, seeking to recognize a
kindred spirit in Pearl, offers her partridgeberries, “ red as drops of blood “ the
gift carries with its memories not only of the rose bush, but of the scarlet letter.
The “ burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation”
growing beside the prison, that “ black flower of civilized society ”, where

20
grass should have been, begin the flower and weed imagery, which, in some
thirty images and extended analogies, reinforces and extends the implications
of the imagery of color and light. Since these implications have already been
drawn out, we shall simply focus to four relationships Hawthorne has set up.
First and most clearly, the unnatural flowers and unsightly vegetation
are aligned with moral evil and with Chillingworth in particular. He too with
his deformity is “unsightly”. Low, dark and ugly, he suggests to some people
the notion that his step must wither the grass wherever he walks. The sun
seems not to fall on him, but to create “a circle of ominous shadow moving
along with his deformity”.
It is natural enough then to find him explicitly associated with
“deadly nightshade” and other types of “vegetable wickedness”, to see him
displaying a “dark, flabby leaf” found growing out of a grave, and to hear that
prominent among the herbs he has gathered are some “black weeds” that have
“sprung up out of a buried heart”.
When his evil work was done “he positively withered up, shriveled
away… like an uprooted weed that lies wilting in the sun”. Flower and weed
imagery unites with light and colour imagery to define Chillingworth’s position
as that of chief sinner.
But Chillingworth is not the only one so aligned. Less emphatically,
the Puritans themselves are associated with weeds and black flowers. The
implications of colour imagery first set up the association: as their “Puritanical
gloom” increases in the second generation to “the blackest shade of Puritanism
“, we begin to see them as cousins to the “nightshade” and so are prepared for
Pearl’s pretense that the weeds she attacks in her solitary games are Puritan
children. Accustomed to her apparently infallible instinct for the truth, we see
in her game something more than childish imagination.
The second relationship deserving of note also starts in the first
chapter.
We recall Hawthorne’s saying of the wild rose-bush in bloom beside
the prison that he hoped it might “relieve the darkening close” of his tale. No

21
“sweet moral blossom” plays any significant part in the main story, but the
happy fortune of Pearl, related in the concluding chapter, does offer a contrast
with the “frailty and sorrow” of the tale proper.
Thus Pearl’s final role is foreshadowed in the first chapter. But
Hawthorne does not wait until the end to make this apparent.
He constantly associates her, not only with the scarlet letter on her
mother’s dress, but with the red rose. The rose bares “delicate gems” and Pearl
is the red-clad “gem” of her mother’s bosom. Her flowerlike beauty is
frequently underscored. And naturally so, for we are told that she had sprung,
“a lovely and immortal flower”, out of the “rank luxuriance” of a guilty
passion.
The position thus defined is repeatedly emphasized. Pearl cries for a
red rose in the governor’s garden. She answers the catechetical question who
made her by declaring that she had not been made at all, but “had been plucked
by her mother off the bush of wild roses that grew by the prison door”. She
decorates her hair with flowers, which are said to become her perfectly. She is
reflected in the pool in “all the brilliant picturesqueness of her beauty, in its
adornment of flowers”. Her “flower-girdled and sunny image” has all the glory
of a “bright flower”. Pearl is a difficult child, capricious, unintentionally cruel,
unfeeling in her demand for truth, but she has both the “naturalness” and the
beauty of the rose and like the rose she is a symbol of love and promise.
These are the associations Hawthorne most carefully elaborates, but
there are two others worth noting briefly. Weeds or “black flowers” are on
several occasions associated with Hester. The most striking instance of this
occurs when Pearl pauses in the graveyard to pick “burrs” and arrange them
“along the lines of the scarlet letter that decorated the maternal bosom, to
which the burrs, as their nature was, tenaciously adhered”. The burrs are like
Pearl in acting according to nature, and what they suggest in their clinging
cannot be wholly false. Hester implicitly acknowledges the truth of what the
burrs have revealed when she suggests to Dimmesdale that they let the “black
flower” of their love “blossom as it may”.

22
 But a more frequent and impressive association is set up between
Hester and normal flowers. Even the badge of her shame, the token of her
“guilty” love, is thus associated with natural beauty. The scarlet letter is related
to the red rose from the very beginning. As Hester stands before her judges in
the opening scenes, the sun shines on just two spots of vivid colour in all that
massed black, brown and gray: on the rose and the letter, both red. The
embroidery with which she decorates the letter further emphasizes the likeness,
so that when Pearl throws flowers at her mother’s badge and they hit the mark,
we share her sense that this is appropriate. Burrs and flowers seem to have an
affinity for Hester’s letter.
Hawthorne was too much of a Protestant to share the Catholic
attitude toward “natural law”: the imagery here suggests that moral law and
nature’s ways do not perfectly coincide, or run parallel on different levels; they
cross, perhaps at something less than a right angle.
At the point of their crossing the lovers’ fate is determined. No
reversal of the implied moral judgment is suggested when nature seems to
rejoice at the reaffirmed love of the pair in the forest: “Such was the sympathy
of Nature - that wild, heathen Nature of the forest, never subjugated by human
law, nor illumined by higher truth - with the bliss of these two spirits! Love,
whether newly born, or aroused from a death-like slumber, must always create
sunshine.”
Hester’s emblem, then, points to a love both good and bad. The
ambiguity of her gray robes and dark glistening hair, her black eyes and bright
complexion, is thus emphasized by the flower and weed imagery.
As Chillingworth is associated with weeds, Pearl with flowers and
Dimmesdale with no natural growing thing at all, so Hester walks her
ambiguous way between burdock and rose, neither of which is alone sufficient
to define her nature and her position.
There are almost twice as many heart images as there are flower and
weed images, but with one exception: Hawthorne insists upon them less. If they
are in some respects even more reveling, we may guess that that is because

23
they spring from Hawthorne’s deepest concerns and most abiding insights, not
from the top of his head, but from his own heart. It is even more difficult to
imagine Hawthorne’s style stripped of his heart images, than to imagine
Dimmesdale without his hand over his heart. The minister’s gesture is both
consciously emblematic and a stylistic reflex.
But the heart imagery begins before we meet the minister. When
Hester brings Pearl out of the dark “dungeon or … prison”, we have veiled
heart imagery, for the heart in Hawthorne is nearly as often a dungeon as it is a
cavern of tomb. But this bringing out of the heart’s secrets into the light is not
voluntary, it is forced. It cannot then in Hawthorne’s scheme of values be
beneficial. One must “be true”, but one cannot force the others to be true.
When the Puritans insist on “dragging” Hester into the public gaze – and get
clearly, a good deal of pleasure out of so doing – and then try to extort her
secret from her, what they are doing constitutes an attempt at what Hawthorne
calls everywhere “a violation of the human heart” – the sign of Brand,
Chillingworth, and other Hawthorne villains.
To those who might be inclined to think that society has a right to do
what the individual should not, Hawthorne has an answer, given in his
comment on the stocks, that more common Puritan instrument for pushing by
making the culprit publicly display his shame: “There can be no outrage,
methinks, against our common nature, - whatever be the delinquencies of the
individual, - no outrage more flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his face
for shame.”
The judges then stand in need for judgment. The Puritan people are
here playing the role later played by Chillingworth. The heart imagery of the
opening scenes establishes a tension that continues throughout the novel and is
central to its meaning.
That this interpretation does not constitute an over reading, is
suggested by the way light imagery reinforces heart imagery at this point: when
we first see her, Hester’s beauty shines out and makes a “halo”, and Hawthorne
says that to some she might have suggested an “image of the Divine

24
Maternity”. “The people’s victim and life-long bond-slave”, as Hawthorne calls
her, is not sinless, but neither is she a sinner among the righteous. She is
involved in a mesh between good and evil.
Many of the other uses of heart imagery are, as we should expect
them to be, casual, almost incidental. They serve chiefly to keep us aware that
we are here concerned finally with nothing less significant or permanent than
the truths of the heart. Running reminders of the central heart images, they
deepen and extend the reverberations of the action, sometimes into areas that
defy analysis. The governor’s mansion, for example, seems obscurely to be the
heart of the Puritan rulers:
Behind a façade that glitters with fragments of broken glass, there is a
suit of armor that reflects Hester’s badge in magnified and distorted form.
Despite the sunshine on the stucco walls, there would seem to be in this
mansion an exaggerated consciousness of sin and almost no awareness of
goodness, so that if we read the passage as a hart image we are reminded of
“Young Goodman Brown”.
Many of the others among the running heart images are clearer. The
heart is a grave, in which corpses are buried. The heart is a chamber, in which
the minister keeps his vigils in utter darkness; when Chillingworth enters the
chamber, he is violating the heart. The heart is a hearth, in which one is wise to
keep a fire. The heart is tomblike, or a niche in which images are set up and
surrounded by curtains. The heart (or breast or bosom) is the place where the
devil is most apt to set his mark.
But the images associated with Chillingworth are of special interest,
for, along with the imagery of light and colour and of weeds and flowers, they
are the chief indications of his place in the scheme of values in the novel. What
they do principally, of course, is once again to counter the judgment implied by
the overt situation. Chillingworth, the “wronged” husband, does not cease to be
the victim of injury when, he strives “to go deep into his patient’s bosom …
like a treasure seeker in a dark cavern”, but he makes it necessary to ask who is
more greatly injured, he or the man who has “wronged “him. As the images

25
continue the implication becomes clearer, so that, long before Dimmesdale has
risen through his final act of honesty and courage, Chillingworth is seen as
more sinning than sinned against, as more sinful even than the minister’s. “He
now dug into the poor clergyman’s heart, like a miner searching for gold; or,
rather like a sexton delving into a grave …”
He stole into the chamber of the heart like a thief and there turned
over, without valuing, “many precious materials, in the shape of high
aspirations for the welfare of his race, warm love of souls, pure sentiments,
natural piety, strengthened by the though and study, and illuminated by
revelation.” As he does so he imagines that his interest in what he finds is
purely objective and disinterested, even scientific: “He had begun an
investigation, as he imagined, with the severe and equal integrity of a judge,
desirous only of truth, even as if the question involved no more than the air-
drawn lines and figures of a geometrical problem, instead of human passions,
and wrongs inflicted on himself.” He is aided in his rationalization by the fact
that his own heart is like a “cheerless habitation”, cold in the absence of any
household fire. But all the while it is becoming clearer that he is like Ethan
Brand, who with “cold and remorseless purpose” conducted a psychological
experiment on the heart of a young girl and “wasted, absorbed, and perhaps
annihilated her soul, in the process”.
As Gordon Roper and John Gerber have argued2 , the subsequent
course of the story proceeds in a kind of chain reaction in which one character
or type dominates, expends its energy, and ignites the fuse that sets a new force
in motion. At first the Calvinist community dominates in punishing Hester;
then Chillingworth, recognizing Dimmesdale as his victim, begins to torture
him; next Hester acts to free her lover from his suffering; and finally the
delicate hero, Dimmesdale, takes control, makes his confession, and with a kiss
sets Pearl free of the spell that enthralled her. This, in a sentence, is the story of

2
Gordon H. Roper, ed. , ‘Introduction’ to The Scarlet Letter and Selected Prose Works ( New York,
1949); John Gerber , ‘Form and Content in The Scarlet Letter’, New England Quarterly, XVII (March
1944), 25-55.

26
the Puritan-American quest. We must consider each phase of it in detail, for
Hawthorne’s rendering is so rich that no incident or image is superfluous.
As a “type” of reason, he is disproportioned from the beginning; and
when he learns that he cannot rule the lush beauty, passion, and domestic
creativity typified by Hester, he becomes vengeful. In a second interview with
Hester he describes his relation with Dimmesdale: “A mortal man, with once a
human heart, has become a fiend for his especial torment.”3 And Hester
expresses her pity for “the hatred that has transformed a wise and just man to a
fiend!”
Hawthorne does not explain why Chillingworth decides to immigrate
to America, but it is clear that the Puritan reliance on law and reason are
agreeable to his temper, and that the community needs his talents. His tragedy
is that, when he fails to establish a true bond with Hester, he (like the Puritans)
condemns her passion as demonic, and vows to destroy the person or “type”
that was capable of winning her.
As his interest turns from healing to vengeance, he becomes wizened
and begrimed by the smoke of his furnace. At length he tells Hester that he
recalls his old faith; that their situation is “a kind of typical illusion” which he
is powerless to change. He has become the darkest, most deterministic Puritan
of them all.
Indeed Chillingworth is the darkest figure; Dimmesdale’s words
confirm that: “That old man’s revenge has been blacker than my sin. He has
violated, in cold blood, the sanctity of a human heart. Thou and I, Hester, never
did so.” As Harry Levin commented, “while their trespass has been sensual
passion, Chillingworth’s is intellectual pride.”4 Even his name betrays his frigid
nature, he is malevolence incarnated, possibly even the dark side of
Dimmesdale’s conscience, his private demon that torments him.
But Arthur is irresistibly attracted to Hester. Where he is pale and
ethereal, she is rich and voluptuous; where he is intellectual and imaginative,

3
C, I, 172
4
Harry Levin, p. 89

27
she is earthy and material-skilled in domestic arts. In secret couple conceive a
child – a Pearl – who unites in herself their two natures.
Arthur resembles the moonlight-mirror types of Hawthorne’s mythological
tales; in Chillingworth’s words, “the Creator never made another being so
sensitive as this.”5
But, for all his mercurial ability, Dimmesdale is neither a demi-god,
nor a champion; far from the virile questing Bellerophon, he wanders in the
dim dale of a world which his faith assures him is depraved, bearing the burden
of a nature which he believes to be evil. As a type of spirit or imagination, his
place in Puritan society is the pulpit, and he feels a piercing guilt over the part
of his nature that draws him to the things of this world.
At the beginning of the romance, then, we have not a bipolar conflict
between Head and Heart, but a situation in which a fecund, richly creative Dark
Lady is “wedded” to two men, neither of whom, in Puritan New England, will
admit his connection with her. The minister lacks the courage to admit that his
nature has a passionate side; the scientist reviles the lady and swears her to
secrecy so that he can pursue an inhuman revenge. And the righteous
community brands the lady with a scarlet letter that has “the effect of a spell,
taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a
sphere by herself.”6
Chillingworth has always been recognized as a personification, but it
will not suffice to see him simply as evil incarnate, “Under the appellation of
Roger Chillingworth … was hidden another name,” and the name is not only
Prynne – it is Guilt.7Hawthorne’s portrayal of Chillingworth illustrates how
beautifully his imagination could weld the abstract to the concrete. For the
physician is interesting in his own right as an alchemist-psychiatrist manqué,
who tries to solve the riddle of man’s existence by logical or psychological
analysis.

5
C, I, 171
6
C, I, 54
7
This interpretation of Chillingworth’s role was suggested by Hillel Chodos and John L. Murphy.

28
 As a symbol of guilt, Chillingworth is a leech, draining his patient of
nerve, will, and physical energy. But, as the whole book demonstrates, he is
also the healer. Only by knowing him, confronting him face to face, is moral
growth possible. Not that moral growth is guaranteed or that having this
welcome guest is “fortunate” – it is simply inevitable in human existence. “The
breach which guilt has once made into the human soul is never in this mortal
state repaired. It may be watched and guarded; so that the enemy shall not force
his way again into the citadel, and might even, in his subsequent assaults, select
some other avenue, in preference to that where he had formerly succeeded. But
there is still the ruined wall.”8
The initiated phrases remove all doubt of Chillingworth’s identity. As
guilt he invades the dwelling place, which, as we know, is customarily a
symbol for the heart in Hawthorne’s fiction. “My home”, he tells Hester, “is
where thou art and where he (the minister) is.” Early in the book Chillingworth
appears from nowhere to confront Hester in the prison cell of her heart; by the
middle of the book he has insinuated himself into Dimmesdale’s abode. “A
deformed old figure, with a face that haunted men’s memories longer than they
liked “, he gradually shrives as Hester and Dimmesdale come closer to full
recognition of him.
The concluding words of “The Scarlet Letter” summarily dismiss the
more cheerful readings, of which there are a number. In describing the heraldic
device on the common tombstone of Hester and Dimmesdale, they describe
“our now concluded legend; so somber is it, and relieved only by on ever-
glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow:

‘On A Field, Sable, The Letter A, Gules’ “

These words alone are sufficient evidence for disproving the notion
that “The Scarlet Letter” is “about” Hester Prynne, the advanced feminist, or
that the story can be satisfactorily summarized either by the moral which

8
VI, 241

29
Hawthorne attaches to Dimmesdale, “Show freely to the world, if not your
worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!’ “ or by the doctrine
of felix culpa, “the fortunate fall”, that out of sin and evil comes good and that
Hester is educated and refined by her wrongdoing. The sentiment is too darkly
tragic to be appropriate to any of these conclusions, though Hawthorne at one
place and another in “The Scarlet Letter” has suggested the possibility of all of
them.
The true conclusion of “The Scarlet Letter” is an unresolved
contradiction – unresolved not from indecision or lack of thought, but from
honesty of imagination. Hawthorne gives the only answer that his formulation
of the terms permits. If we consider that the problem of “The Scarlet Letter” is
primarily the problem of Hester Prynne, the verdict is at best suspension of
judgment after full examination of the evidence. And, as we know, Hester
emerges from trial in better condition than her codefendants Dimmesdale and
Chillingworth.
This is the contradiction, and a very widely representative
contradiction it is: the sin of “The Scarlet Letter” is a symbol of the original
sin, by which no man is untouched. All mortals commit the sin in one form or
another, which is perhaps the meaning of “your worst” in the exhortation
occasioned by the death of Dimmesdale. Hester, having sinned, makes the best
possible recovery; and the crime itself is of all crimes the most excusable,
coming of passionate love and having “a consecration of its own”. Yet the sin
remains real and inescapable, and she spends her life in retribution, the death of
her lover Dimmesdale having finally taught her that this is the only way. This
is the dilemma: human beings by their nature must fall into error – and yet it
would be better if they did not.
The letter, an “ever-glowing point of light,” is gloomier than the shadow
of its background. The shadow, the “Field, Sable”, is roughly the atmosphere of
the sin. These are the odds, and no absolute superiority is granted to either.
The Puritan doctors are no fit judges of a woman’s heart; nor, on the
other hand, is Hester to be absolved. The letter is glowing, positive, vital, the

30
product of genuine passion, while the sable may certainly be taken as the
negation of everything alive. Yet the letter is gloomier.
These shades are both of hell, and there is no hue of heaven in “The
Scarlet Letter” that really offsets them. Sunlight is the nearest approach to it,
and its sway is too fleeting to have any great effect. In the forest scene of
chapters XVI-XIX sunshine, “as with a sudden smile of heaven”, bursts over
Hester and Dimmesdale, but this is merely a momentary relief. The hope that
accompanies it is short-lived, delusory, and dangerous. A more steadfast light,
“The sun, but little past its meridian”, shines down upon Dimmesdale as he
stands on the scaffold to confess his guilt. This is triumph, indeed, but little to
counterbalance the continual power of the “bale fire” and “lurid gleam” of the
letter. Hope and regeneration are sometimes symbolized in Hawthorne by the
celestial colours of dawn, transfigured by light: blues, greens, and golds.
Only introducing the supernatural level of heaven, the sphere of absolute
knowledge and justice and – hesitantly – of complete fulfillment can solve the
problem of The Scarlet Letter. This may seem to be another paradox, and
perhaps a disappointing one. Without doubt “The Scarlet Letter” pushes
towards the limit of moral judgment, suggesting many possible conclusions.
It is even relentless in its search in the depths of its characters. There is
yet, however, a point beyond which Hawthorne will not go; ultimate solutions
are not appropriate in the merely human world. His sympathy with Hester and
Dimmesdale is clear enough, but he allows them only to escape the irrevocable
spiritual ruin that befalls Chillingworth.
Figuratively his good wishes pursue them beyond life, but he does not
presume himself to absolve them. Even in the carefully staged scene of
Dimmesdale’s death, where every impulse of both author and reader demands
complete forgiveness, Hawthorne refuses to grant it. With his “bright dying
eyes” Dimmesdale looks into eternity, but nothing he sees there permits him to
comfort Hester. To her questions, “Shall we not meet again...? Shall we not
spend our immortal life together?’ “, he can answer only, ‘The law we broke! –
the sin here so awfully revealed! – let these alone be in thy thoughts! I fear! I

31
fear!’ “ A grim and unflinching conclusion, considering everything.
Dimmesdale is not of course Hawthorne, but the very preservation of dramatic
propriety at this crucial point is significant.
There are four states of being in Hawthorne: one subhuman, two human
and one superhuman. The first is Nature, which comes to our attention in “The
Scarlet Letter” twice.
It appears first in the opening chapter, in the wild rosebush which stands
outside the black browed Puritan jail, and whose blossoms might be imagined
to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to
the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep
heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.
The second entrance of Nature comes in the forest scene, where it
sympathizes with the forlorn lovers and gives them hope. “Such was the
sympathy of Nature – that wild, heathen Nature of the forest, never subjugated
by human law, nor illuminated by higher truth…” The sentence epitomizes
both the virtues of Nature and its inadequacy. In itself good, Nature is not a
sufficient support for human beings.
The human levels are represented by Hawthorne’s distinction between
Heart and Head. The heart is closer to nature, the head to the supernatural. The
heart may err by lapsing into nature, which means, since it has not the
innocence of nature, into corruption. The danger of the head lies in the opposite
direction. It aspires to be superhuman, and is likely to dehumanize itself in the
attempt by violating the human limit. Dimmesdale, despite his considerable
intellect, is predominantly a heart character, and it is through the heart that sin
has assailed him, in a burst of passion that overpowered both religion and
reason.
The demoniac Chillingworth is of the head, a cold experimenter and
thinker. It is fully representative of Hawthorne’s general emphasis that
Chillingworth’s spiritual ruin is complete.
Hester Prynne is a combination of head and heart, with a preponderance
of the head. Her original sin is of passion, but its consequences expose her to

32
the danger of absolute mental isolation. The centrifugal urge of the intellect is
counteracted in her by her duty to her daughter Pearl, the product of the sin,
and by her latent love for Dimmesdale. Pearl herself is a creature of nature,
most at home in the wild forest: “ … the mother-forest, and these wild things
which it nourishes, all recognized a kindred wildness in the human child”. She
is made human by Dimmesdale’s confession and death: “The great scene of
grief, in which the wild infant bore a part, had developed all her sympathies…”
The fourth level, the superhuman or heavenly, will perhaps merely by
confused by elaborate definition. It is the sphere of absolute insight, justice and
mercy. Few of Hawthorne’s tales and romances can be adequately considered
without taking it into account. As Mark van Doren has recently emphasized, it
is well to remember Hawthorne’s belief in immortality. It is because of the very
presence of the superhuman in Hawthorne’s thinking that the destinies of his
chief characters are finally veiled in ambiguity. He respects them as he would
have respected any real person by refusing to pass the last judgment, by leaving
a residue of mysterious individuality untouched. The whole truth is not for a
fellow human to declare.
These four states are not mutually exclusive. Without the touch of
nature, human life would be too bleak.
The Puritans of “The Scarlet Letter” are deficient in nature, and they are
consequently dour and over righteous. Something of the part that nature might
play in the best human life is suggested in the early chapters of The Marble
Faun, particularly through the character Donatello.
The defects of either Heart or Head in a state of isolation have already
been mentioned. And without some infusion of superhuman meaning into the
spheres of the human, life would be worse than bestial.
Perhaps only the important character in all of Hawthorne’s works finds
it possible to dispense completely with Heaven – Westervelt, of The Blithedale
Romance – and he is essentially diabolic. In some respects the highest and the
lowest of these levels are most closely akin, as if their relationship were as
points of a circle.

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 The innocence of nature is like the innocence of heaven. It is at times,
when compared to the human, like the Garden before the serpent, like heaven
free of the taint of evil. Like infancy, however, nature is a stage which man
must pass through, whereas his destination is heaven. The juxtaposition of
highest and lowest nevertheless involves difficulties, when perfect goodness
seems equivalent to mere deprivation and virtue seems less a matter of
choosing than of being untempted.
The intensity of “The Scarlet Letter”, at which Hawthorne himself
was dismayed, comes from concentration, selection, and dramatic irony. The
concentration upon the central theme is unremitting. The tension is lessened
only once, in the scene in the forest, and then only delusively, since the hope of
freedom which brings it about is quickly shown to be false and even sinful.
The characters play out their tragic action against a background in
itself oppressive – the somber atmosphere of Puritanism.
Hawthorne calls the progression of the story “the darkening close of a
tale of human frailty and sorrow”. Dark to begin with, it grows steadily deeper
in gloom. The method is almost unprecedentedly selective. Almost every image
has a symbolic function; no scene is superfluous.
One would perhaps at times welcome a loosening of the structure, a
moment of wandering from the path.
The weedy grassplot in front of the prison; the distorting reflection of
Hester in a breastplate, where the Scarlet Letter appears gigantic; the tapestry
of David and Bathsheba on the wall of the minister’s chamber; the little brook
in the forest; the slight malformation of Chillingworth’s shoulder; the
ceremonial procession on election day – in every instance more is meant than
meets the eye.
The intensity of “The Scarlet Letter” comes in part from a sustained
and rigorous dramatic irony, or irony of situation. This irony arises naturally
from the theme of “secret sin”, or concealment. “Show freely of your worst”,
says Hawthorne; the action of “The Scarlet Letter” arises from the failure of
Dimmesdale and Chillingworth to do so. The minister hides his sin, and

34
Chillingworth hides his identity. This concealment affords a constant drama.
There is the irony of Chapter III, “The Recognition”, in which Chillingworth’s
ignorance is suddenly and blindingly reversed. Separated from his wife by
many vicissitudes, he comes upon her as she is dramatically exposed to public
infamy. From his instantaneous decision, symbolized by the lifting of his finger
to his lips to hide his tie to her, he precipitates the further irony of his sustained
hypocrisy.
In the same chapter Hester is confronted with her fellow-adulterer,
who is publicly called upon to persuade her as her spiritual guide to reveal his
identity. Under the circumstances the situation is highly charged, and his words
have a double meaning – one, to the onlookers, another far different to Hester
and the speaker himself. “If thou feelest it to be for thy soul’s peace, and that
thy earthly punishment will therefore be made more effectual to salvation, I
charge thee to speak out the name of thy fellow-sinner and fellow-sufferer!”
From this scene onward Chillingworth, by living a lie, arouses a
constant irony, which is also an ambiguity. With a slight shift in emphasis all
his actions can be given a very different interpretation. Seen purely from
without, it would be possibly to regard him as completely blameless. Hester
expresses this ambiguity in Chapter IV, after he has ministered to her sick
baby, the product of her faithlessness, with tenderness and skill. “Thy acts are
like mercy”, said Hester, bewildered and appalled.
“But thy words interpret thee as a terror!” Masquerading as a
physician, he becomes to Dimmesdale a kind of attendant fiend, racking the
minister’s soul with constant anguish. Yet outwardly he has done him nothing
but good. “What evil have I done the man?” asked Roger Chillingworth again.
“I tell thee, Hester Prynne, the richest fee that ever physician earned from
monarch could not have bought such care as I have wasted on this miserable
priest!”
Even when he closes the way to escape by proposing to take passage
on the same ship with the fleeing lovers, it is possible to consider the action
merely friendly. His endeavor at the end to hold Dimmesdale back from the

35
saving scaffold is from one point of view reasonable and friend like, although
he is a devil struggling to snatch back an escaping soul. “All shall be well! Do
not blacken your fame, and perish in dishonor! I can yet save you! Would you
bring infamy on your sacred profession?”
Only when Dimmesdale has successfully resisted does Chillingworth
openly reveal his purposes. With the physician the culminating irony is that is
seeking to damn Dimmesdale he has himself fallen into damnation. As he says
in a moment of terrible self-knowledge, “a mortal man, with once a human
heart, has become a fiend for his especial torment!” The effect is of an
Aristotelian reversal, where a conscious and deep-laid purpose brings about
totally unforeseen and opposite results.
Chillingworth’s relations with Dimmesdale have the persistent
fascination of an almost absolute knowledge and power working their will with
a helpless victim, a fascination which is heightened by the minister’s awareness
of an evil close beside him which he cannot place. “All this was accomplished
with a subtlety so perfect that the minister, though he had constantly a dim
perception of some evil influence watching over him, could never gain
knowledge of its actual nature”. It is a classic situation wrought out to its fullest
potentialities, in which the reader cannot help sharing the perverse pleasure of
the villain.
From the victim’s point of view the irony is still deeper, perhaps
because we can participate still more carefully in his response to it.
Dimmesdale, a “remorseful hypocrite”, is forced to live a perpetual lie in
public. His own considerable talents for self-torture are supplemented by the
situation as well as by the devoted efforts of Chillingworth. His knowledge is
an agony. His conviction of sin is in exact relationship to the reverence in
which his parishioners hold him. He grows pale and meager – it is the
asceticism of a saint on earth; his effectiveness as a minister grows with his
despair; he confesses the truth in his sermons, but transforms it “into the veriest
false-hood” by the generality of his avowal and merely increases the adoration
of his flock; every effort deepens his plight, since he will not – until the end –

36
make the effort of complete self-revelation. His great election-day sermon
prevails through anguish of heart; to his listeners divinely inspired, its power
comes from its undertone of suffering, “the complaint of a human heart,
sorrow-laden, perchance guilty, telling its secret, whether of guilt of sorrow, to
the great heart of mankind…”
While Chillingworth at last reveals himself fully, Dimmesdale’s
secret is too great to be wholly laid bare. His utmost efforts are still partially
misunderstood, and “highly respectable witness” interpret his death as a
culminating act of holiness and humility.
Along with this steady irony of situation there is the omnipresent
irony of the hidden meaning. The author and the reader know what the
characters do not. Hawthorne consistently pretends that the coincidence of the
action or the image with its significance is merely fortuitous, not planned, lest
the effect be spoiled by over insistence. In other words, he attempts to combine
the sufficiently probable with the maximum of arrangement. Thus the waxing
and the waning of sunlight in the forest scene symbolize the emotions of Hester
and Dimmesdale, but we accept this coincidence most easily if we can receive
it as chance.
Hawthorne’s own almost amused awareness of his problem helps us
to do so. Yet despite the element of play and the deliberate self-deception
demanded, the total effect is one of intensity. Hawthorne is performing a
difficult feat with sustained virtuosity in reconciling a constant stress between
naturally divergent qualities.
The character of Pearl illuminates this point. Pearl is pure symbol, the
living emblem of the sin, a human embodiment of the Scarlet Letter.
In Hawthorne's descriptions of Pearl as an infant and toddler, nature
imagery emphasizes Pearl's startling beauty and unpredictable, yet innocent,
character. Pearl's beauty and innocence are apparent from the time of her birth.
Hawthorne describes Pearl's "innocent life as a lovely and immortal
flower”.Even though Pearl is a product of the "guilty passion" between Hester
and Dimmesdale, both her soul and her body are untainted and flawless.

37
 Hester notices that Pearl has no physical defects, but Pearl's character
has an unexplainable aspect of oddity and unpredictability. When she plays
near Hester's cottage, Pearl "smites down and uproots most unmercifully the
ugliest weeds" which she pretends are the Puritan children. Hester believes that
Pearl is so emotional and temperamental because the passion which Hester and
Dimmesdale experienced during their sinful act somehow transferred into
Pearl's soul.
However, Pearl's antipathy for the Puritans is justified; the children often
torment her for no good reason. When Hester and Pearl go into town, the
Puritan children stop playing and either surround Pearl and stare at her or
prepare to hurl mud at the unfortunate pair. Both actions by the Puritans result
in a fit of outrage by Pearl. One reason that the Puritans treat Pearl badly is
because of her mother's sin.
The Puritans believe that since Pearl is the product of adultery, she is
automatically evil and depraved. The Puritan hatred for Pearl is also due to the
fact that she, like Hester's scarlet letter, is beautiful, and they are in a way
jealous of both. Supposedly, Hester's scarlet 'A' is a punishment, but she
embroiders it richly and wears it with subtle pride. When the Puritans first see
the 'A', they want to replace it with an 'A' made out of rheumatic cloth. The
Puritans look at Pearl in the same way; they do not think Hester deserves such
a beautiful child. The Puritans like simple, bland things and shun beauty
because it is tempting.
This view of the Puritans appears again when the Reverend Mr. Wilson
first sees Pearl in Governor Bellingham's mansion. Mr. Wilson calls her a
"little bird of scarlet plumage”and asks her "what has ailed her mother to
bedizen her in this strange fashion". Mr. Wilson first compares Pearl to a bird,
something from nature, which the Puritans distrust, then implies that something
is wrong with Hester for tastelessly dressing Pearl in such beautiful, striking
clothing. In this instance, Mr. Wilson's comments are hypocritical because
Governor Bellingham, the leader of the Puritans, decorates his mansion
lavishly and enjoys many worldly pleasures. Hawthorne, who lived in the

38
Romantic period, included this passage to indicate that in his eyes, Pearl
is beautiful and the Puritans are wrong in thinking that Pearl is wicked. When
Pearl tells Mr. Wilson that her name is Pearl, he answers ,"'Pearl?-Ruby,
rather!- or Coral!-or Red Rose'". Even though Mr. Wilson disapproves of
Pearl's attire, he still acknowledges her beauty by comparing her to beautiful
things in nature. At the same, time, he shows his disapproval because he, like
most Puritans, distrusts nature.
Later on, Mr. Wilson asks Pearl if she knows who made her. She replies
by saying that "she had not been made at all but had been plucked by her
mother off the bush of wild roses that [grows] by the prison-door". Pearl's
answer tells the reader that she understands both her physical beauty and her
internal wildness because she compares herself to a wild rose. The answer's
creativity and unexpectedness also reveal Pearl's unusual, whimsical character.
At this point in the novel, the reader can already discern Pearl's fundamental
character traits.
As Pearl grows older, her isolation from the Puritans leads her to spend
more time with nature, and she continues to remind Hester of her sin. When
Hester goes to the seashore to talk to Chillingworth, she tells Pearl to go "to the
margin of the water and play with the shells and tangled sea-weed". In
response, Pearl "flies away like a bird" to the margin of the sea. Pearl is eager
to play with nature. She has grown used to having nature as a playmate and
finds playing with it enjoyable. Pearl builds "boats out of birch-bark...seize[s] a
live horseshoe [crab] by the tail...catches several five-fingers...lays out a jelly-
fish to melt in the warm sun", throws foam, and pelts sea-birds with pebbles.
When Pearl thinks that she actually hit a bird, however, she feels remorse for
having "done harm to a little being that was as wild as...herself".
While Pearl is wild and unpredictable at times, she has a kind heart. Pearl's
kinship with nature becomes apparent through the seashore imagery. Pearl
obviously is at ease with and delights in nature. She has chosen nature as an
ideal playmate because of her isolation from other humans.

39
 The Puritan children treat her as an outcast and the only interaction
between them and Pearl is malicious. After she stops throwing pebbles at birds,
Pearl uses some eel-grass to make a "freshly green" letter 'A' on her bosom and
runs back to Hester. When she sees Hester, Pearl laughs and points to the 'A' on
her bosom. Pearl's A reminds Hester of her sin, but the reader learns that Pearl
does not make the 'A' to hurt her mother. Instead, she does it because she is
curious about the nature of her mother's 'A'. Pearl has grown more mature and
kind since her toddler years. Nature has taught her to be sensitive and curious.
Pearl's closeness to nature and her innocence develop further as the novel
approaches its conclusion. While Hester and Pearl stroll through the forest on
their way to meet Dimmesdale, Pearl observes that the sunshine "'does not love
Hester'". The sunshine seems to "run away and hide itself because it is afraid of
something on Hester's bosom". Pearl, however, easily catches the sunshine
because she "wears nothing on her bosom yet". As soon as Hester gets close to
Pearl, the sunshine vanishes and it appears as if Pearl absorbs the energy.
Hawthorne uses the sunshine as a judge of innocence. The sunshine,
which is part of nature, never graces Hester and even avoids her because she is
a sinner and has a tainted soul. Pearl is the opposite. The sunshine loves her so
much that it plays enthusiastically with her. The mother and daughter soon
come upon a babbling brook. The brook sounds "kind, quiet, soothing, but
melancholy", like an unhappy child or a person who knows only sadness. Pearl
calls the brook "foolish and tiresome" and asks it why it is so sad. Pearl is like
the brook in some ways. She has been through hardships in her life such as
isolation and insults, but she is still too young to understand how to be
unhappy. Therefore, Pearl is actually quite different from the brook. The brook
has experienced many things and has existed long enough to understand the
world. Pearl, on the other hand, is young, naive, and innocent. She knows only
how to be happy. Hester points out that if Pearl "had a sorrow of her own, the
brook might tell [her] of it even as it is telling Hester of hers". Hester
comprehends the brook's melancholy mood because she has been through
hardships herself and has enough experience to be sorrowful. When

40
Dimmesdale arrives and Hester talks to him, Pearl goes off on her own to play.
Pearl is so close to nature that a wolf comes up and "smells of Pearl's robe, and
offers his savage head to be patted by her hand"
. Wolves can be as large as grown men and are aggressive hunters. This
image is effective because it accentuates the kindred relationship between Pearl
and nature. Pearl, like nature, is wild and uncontrollable. The Puritans can not
understand either one and therefore equate both to evil and the Devil. These
similarities bring Pearl and nature closer and let them understand each other.
Once again, Hawthorn contrasts his Romantic view of nature with that of the
Puritans.
While the Puritans see nature as wicked and tempting, Hawthorne sees it
as something benevolent and compassionate.
In the end, Dimmesdale finally decides on the course of action that he
must take to free his, Hester's, and Pearl's souls. On the holiday to welcome a
new governor to his office, Dimmesdale makes his fateful decision. He knows
that he is going to die and will not be able to follow through on the plans that
he and Hester made. He also realizes that no matter where he goes in the whole
world, Chillingworth, his tormentor, will be able to follow him, so the only
place he can go is into the afterlife. After giving his sermon, Dimmesdale asks
Hester to support him. They and Pearl walk onto the scaffold. After asking
Dimmesdale to stand with her and her mother numerous times, Pearl finally
receives her wish. Dimmesdale confesses his sin to the audience, then falls
down. Before he dies, he asks Pearl to kiss him, and she complies. At this
point, a complete change in Pearl occurs. She starts to cry, her first taste of
human joy and sorrow. She does not have to constantly struggle against society
anymore, and her duty as a messenger of anguish to Hester is also done. With
her father's confession and sacrifice of his life, Pearl is able to begin a new
existence.
Hawthorne's utilization of nature imagery illustrates Pearl's character,
whose beauty excites fear in the Puritans and whose eccentricity reminds
Hester of her sin. The Puritans seem negative and ignorant. Everything that

41
they can not explain is evil to them. The Enlightenment caused people to think
rationally, so in Hawthorne's time, many things that the Puritans knew nothing
about were understood and people were able to view the world more
optimistically. Pearl's character is a perfect example of something that is
completely different when seen from two points of view.
Her mission is to keep Hester’s adultery always before her eyes, to
prevent her from attempting to escape its moral consequences.
Pearl’s childish questions are fiendishly apt; in speech and in action
she never strays from the control of symbolic function; her dress and her looks
are related to the letter. When Hester casts the letter away in the forest, Pearl
forces her to reassume it by flying into an uncontrollable rage. Yet despite the
undeviating arrangement of every circumstance that surrounds her, no single
action of hers is ever incredible or inconsistent with the conceivable actions of
any child under the same conditions. Given the central improbability of her
undeviating purposiveness, she is as lifelike, as the brilliantly drawn children of
Richard Hughes’s “The Innocent Voyage”.
These qualities of concentration, selectivity and irony, which are
responsible for the intensity of “The Scarlet Letter”, tend at their extreme
toward excessive regularity and a sense of over-manipulation, although irony is
also a counteragent against them. This tendency toward regularity is balanced
by Hawthorne’s use of ambiguity. The distancing of the story in the past has
the effect of ambiguity.
Hawthorne so employs the element of time as to warn us that he
cannot guarantee the literal truth of his narrative and at the same time to
suggest that the essential truth is the clearer; as facts shade off into the
background, meaning is left in the foreground unshadowed and disencumbered.
The years, he pretends, have winnowed his material, leaving only what is
enduring. Tradition and superstition, while he disclaims belief in them, have a
way of pointing to truth.
Thus the imagery of hell-fire that occurs throughout “The Scarlet
Letter” is dramatically proper to the Puritan background and is attributed to the

42
influence of superstitious legend. It works as relief from more serious concerns
and still functions as a symbol of psychological and religious truth.
In Chapter III, as Hester is returned from the scaffold to the prison,
“It was whispered, by those who peered after her, that the scarlet letter threw a
lurid gleam along the dark passage-way of the interior”.
The imagery of the letter may be summarized by quoting a later
passage: “The vulgar, who, in those dreary old times, were always contributing
a grotesque horror to what interested their imaginations, had a story about the
scarlet letter which we might readily work up into a terrific legend.
They averred, that the symbol was not mere scarlet cloth, tinged in an
earthly dye-pot, but was red-hot with infernal fire, and could be seen glowing
all alight, whenever Hester Prynne walked abroad in the nighttime. And we
must needs say, it seared Hester’s bosom so deeply, that perhaps there was
more truth in the rumor than our modern incredulity may be inclined to admit”.
The lightness of Hawthorne’s tone lends relief and variety, while it
nevertheless reveals the function of the superstition. “The vulgar”, “dreary old
times”, “grotesque horror”, “work up into a terrific legend” – his scorn is so
heavily accented that it discounts itself and satirizes the “modern incredulity”
of his affected attitude. The playful extravagance of “red-hot with infernal fire”
has the same effect. And the apparent begrudging of the concession in the final
sentence – “And we must needs say” – lends weight to a truth so reluctantly
admitted.
Puritan demonology is in general used with the same effect. It has the
pathos and simplicity of an old wife’s tale and yet contains a deep subterranean
power which reaches into daylight from the dark caverns of the mind.
The Black Man of the unhallowed forest – a useful counterbalance to
any too-optimistic picture of nature – and the witch woman Mistress Hibbins
are cases in point.
The latter is a concrete example of the mingled elements of the
superstitious legend. Matter-of-factly, she is a Puritan lady of high rank, whose
ominous reputation is accounted for by bad temper combined with insanity. As

43
a witch, she is a figure from a child’s storybook, an object of delighted fear and
mockery.
Yet her fanciful extravagance covers a real malignity, and because of
it she has an insight into the secret of the letter. With one stroke she lays bare
the disease in Dimmesdale, as one who sees evil alone, but sees it with
unmatched acuteness: “When the Black Man sees one of his own servants,
signed and sealed, so shy of owning to the bond as is the Reverend Mr.
Dimmesdale, he hath a way of ordering matters so that the mark shall be
disclosed to the eyes of all the world”.
This use of the past merges into a deep-seated ambiguity of moral
meaning. Moral complexity and freedom of speculation, like the lighter
ambiguity of literal fact, temper the almost excessive unity and symmetry of
“The Scarlet Letter” and avoid a directed verdict.
The judgment of Hawthorne upon his characters is entirely clear,
although deliberately limited in its jurisdiction. But he permits the possibility of
other interpretations to appear, so that the consistent clarity of his own
emphasis is disguised9. Let us take for example the consideration of the heroine
in Chapter XIII, “Another View of Hester”.
After seven years of disgrace, Hester has won the unwilling respect
of her fellow-townsmen by her good works and respectability of conduct. From
one point of view she is clearly their moral superior: she has met rigorous
cruelty with kindness, arrogance with humility.
Furthermore, living as she has in enforced isolation has greatly
developed her mind. In her breadth of intellectual speculation she has freed
herself from any dependence upon the laws of Puritan society. “She cast away
the fragments of a broken chain”. She pays outward obedience to a system that
has no further power upon her spirit. Under other conditions, Hawthorne
suggests, she might as this juncture have become another Anne Hutchinson, the
founder of a religious sect, or a great early feminist.

9
Male, Roy R., Hawthorne’s Tragic Vision, the University of Texas Press, 1964, p. 117

44
 The author’s conclusions about these possibilities, however, are
specially stated: “The scarlet letter had not done its office”. Hester is wounded
and led astray, not improved, by her situation. Hawthorne permits his reader, if
he wishes, to take his character from his control, to say that Hester Prynne is a
great woman unhappily born before her time, or that she is a good woman
wronged by her fellow men. But Hawthorne is less confident.
In the multiple interpretations, which constitute the moral ambiguities
of “The Scarlet Letter”, there is no clear distinction of true and false, but there
is a difference between superficial and profound. In instances where
interpretation of observed fact fuses with interpretation of moral meaning,
conclusions are generally relative to those who make them.
After Dimmesdale’s climactic death scene, most spectators testified to
having seen, on the breast of the unhappy minister, a scarlet letter – the very
semblance of that worn by Hester Prynne – imprinted in the flesh. As regarded
its origin, there were various explanations, all of which must necessarily have
been conjectural. Some affirmed that the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the
very day when Hester Prynne first wore her ignominious badge, had begun a
course of penance – which he afterwards, in so many futile methods, followed
out – by inflicting a hideous torture on himself.
Others contended that the stigma had not been produced until a long
time subsequent, when old Roger Chillingworth, being a potent necromancer,
had caused it to appear, through the agency of magic and poisonous drugs.
Others, again – and those best able to appreciate the minister’s peculiar
sensibility, and the wonderful operation of his spirit upon the body – whispered
their belief, that the awful symbol was the effect of the ever-active tooth of
remorse, gnawing from the inmost heart outwardly, and at last manifesting
Heaven’s dreadful judgment by the visible presence of the letter. Most singular
is the fact that some spectators have seen no letter at all.
The presence of so many possibilities hints strongly that the whole
truth is not to be found in any single choice, but Hawthorne’s own preference is
clearly indicated by “those best able to appreciate”.

45
In a different case all interpretations are equally false, or at least equally erring.
In Chapter XII, “The Minister’s Vigil”, a meteor flashes across the sky, which
to the morbid eye of Dimmesdale takes the form of a gigantic A. This vision is
attributed to the disordered mental state of the minister, though we cannot
accept even this disclaimer with complete simplicity. This being the night of
Governor Winthrop’s death, one good old Puritan interprets the portent as A
for Angel – an observation which has the effect of giving objective support to
Dimmesdale’s vision.
There is also the ambivalence of the Puritans. It is easy to pass them
by too quickly. One’s first impression is doubtless, as Hawthorne says
elsewhere, of a set of “dismal wretches”, but they are more than this.
The Puritan code is arrogant, inflexible, over righteous; and it is
remarked of their magistrates and priests that “out of the whole human family,
it would not have been easy to select the same number of wise and virtuous
persons, who would be less capable of sitting in judgment on an erring
woman’s heart…”
Nevertheless, after finishing “The Scarlet Letter” one might well ask
what merely human society would be better. With all its rigors, the ordeal of
Hester upon the scaffold is invested with awe by the real seriousness and
simplicity of the onlookers.
Hawthorne compares the Puritan attitude, and certainly not favorably,
to “the heartlessness of another social state, which would find only a theme for
jest in an exhibition like the present”. And it is counted as a virtue that the chief
men of the town attend the spectacle without less of dignity.
Without question they take upon themselves more of the judgment of
the soul than is fitting for men to assume, but this fault is palliated by their
complete sincerity. They are “a people amongst whom religion and law were
almost identical, and in whose character both were so thoroughly interfused,
that the mildest and the severest acts of public discipline were alike venerable
and awful”. By any ideal standard they are greatly lacking, but among erring
humans they are, after all, creditable.

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 Partly then as a result of the impact of the heart imagery, the reader
feels his principal concern altered once again. First he was in suspense about
the identity of Hester’s partner in sin. Then, as that question begins to be
answered, he wonders whether the minister will be publicly exposed and justice
be done. But almost immediately, in “The Leech” and “The Leech and his
Patient”, he becomes concerned to have the minister escape somehow the
persecutions of his tormentor. The central chapter of the relation between the
two men, “The Leech and his Patient”, begins and ends in heart imagery.
The most extended heart imagery is the forest scene. The forest in
which Hester and Pearl take their walk has all the attributes common to normal
human hearts in Hawthorne’s work. It is black, mysterious, dismal, dim,
gloomy, shadowy, obscure, and dreary. It is thought by the public to be where
the Black Man meets his accomplices. It has in its depths a stream which as it
mirrors the truth whispers “tales out of the heart of the old forest”. But when
Hester and Dimmesdale decide to follow the dictates of their hearts and,
escaping man’s law, live by nature, then “the wood’s heart of mystery”
becomes a “mystery of joy” and sunshine lights up the gloomy spot. In the four
chapters concerned with this meeting, heart imagery plays a leading part, so
that no analysis of the incident is likely to be adequate which does not take into
account.
Probably the implications contained in the names of the characters are
more important than the remaining patterns of imagery. Pearl, of course, gets
her name from the “pearl of great price” used in St. Matthew to suggest the
incomparable value of the hope of heaven. Hester’s initial mood of bitter
rebellion against her situation is clear in the naming of her child. And the other
chief characters too have significant names.
To the Puritans, Pearl is an imp, a demonic child, or a witch; she is
outside the law; unrestrained, apparently, by any of the strictures which shape
little Puritans, Hester, in her defiance of the Puritan interpretation, as if to
underline the absurdity of regarding as evil an infant who “was worthy to have

47
been brought forth in Eden; worthy to have been left there, to be the plaything
of the angels, after the world’s first parents were driven out.”
The scarlet or crimson colour links Pearl to roses, the traditional
symbol of beauty and love. The rose imagery helps us to understand why Pearl
must go to Europe at the end of the romance. She cannot thrive in the black-
flowering garden of New England, where English roses flourish but feebly and
native roses are unregarded.
“Hester” is a modern form of “Esther”; and in the Old Testament,
Esther is gifted with beauty, strength and dignity. Courageous and loyal, she
defends weak and oppressed people. The obvious parallel between the two
women contributes one more implication that Hester is to be seen as finally “in
the right”. And it offers another bit of evidence to those who like to stress the
feminist implications of the novel, for we may see the “weaker sex” defended
by Hester as but a variant of the weak people defended by Esther.
The minister’s name, Arthur, tends to suggest the devotion to a high
ideal associated to King Arthur. It is at once descriptive and ironic as the name
of Hester’s partner in adultery. His last name falls naturally into two parts, with
the root of the first part, “dim”, suggesting both weakness and darkness, and
the second part, “dale”, suggesting in its meaning of valley, the heart, of which
Hawthorne is so frequently reminded by any hollow, opening, or cavity.
Finally, “Chillingworth” is also made up of two parts, the first of
which suggests coldness and the second merit or worthiness. It is a name more
transparently descriptive of this man than Dimmesdale is of the minister. For
Chillingworth has, as he acknowledges to Hester, a cold heart, and his sin is
one of the cold sins. Yet he was once a worthy man: decent, self-controlled,
law-abiding, scholarly, “good” as the world tend to measure goodness, with
nothing lacking except the most important thing of all, the ability to love.
Names, then, are symbolic here, as they so frequently are in Hawthorne’s
works.
But Hawthorne’s richest symbol remains the scarlet “A”. Hawthorne
discovered the “A” in the Custom House, that deadening institution whose rigid

48
commitment to routine, mechanical measurement, and rules, threatened the
complete annihilation of his imagination. As a man “who felt it to be the best
definition of happiness to live throughout the whole range of his faculties and
sensibilities”, Hawthorne regarded the “A” as a bright point of hope – a release
from the latter day Puritan “custom” house of his age, and a promise of
imaginative fulfillment.
From the outset the A is an ambivalent symbol.
Its “scarlet woman” meaning for the Puritans is clear, but by the last
line of the story, when we see it as a heraldic “A Gules” on Hester’s and
Dimmesdale’s common tombstone, it has assumed a meaning that is beyond
the philosophy of any Puritan. All of the meanings with which Hawthorne
invests it are relevant; and all are united organically in Pearl, the living
embodiment of the “A”. The scarlet letter, finally, becomes Hawthorne’s
emblem of the human heart – of its imperfection, and its labyrinthine mixture
of good and evil. The letter is blood red (gules) rather than scarlet, for it
betokens “our common nature”.
From the Puritan point of view, the “A” stands specifically for
adultery and, in general terms, for sin – for the fallen aspects of man’s nature,
which must be brutally suppressed: sexual knowledge, sensory indulgence, and
the area of fancy and intuition which Puritanism labeled ”witch-craft”. The “A”
is further associated with the sin of Adam, with hell, infernal fire, Satan,
demons, fairies, and so on.
Hester’s understanding of the scarlet emblem comes slowly and
painfully, but Hawthorne’s treatment of the “A” leads the reader fairly quickly
to question its Puritan meaning and consider other possibilities. The sympathy
which the Madonna-like young mother of the first scaffold scene feels for
Hester suggests that the emotions of motherhood are perhaps closer to the truth
of human nature than the stern legality of “the righteous Colony of
Massachusetts, where iniquity is dragged out into the sunshine!”
If Governor Bellingham’s hollow steel armor reflects only glaring
sun, an enormously exaggerated “A”, and Pearl’s impish smile, the simple

49
Puritan “folk”, guided more by human feeling than doctrine and law,
sometimes think of Hester’s A as meaning able or angel. The A, it is rumored,
looks like “a nun’s cross”; it repels the devilish arrows of the Indians; as
embroidered by Hester, it is a work of art, it is a portent in the sky which the
“disease” in the minister’s “own heart and eye”10 makes him see as a cosmic
revelation of his depravity, but which Hawthorne sees as a sign of “the
daybreak that shall unite all who belong to one another”.
The point to be made here is that Hawthorne, however “tasteless” his
critics find his symbolism, is not merely fanciful. Every “A” image that he uses
adds a new shade of meaning to the symbol. The “A” becomes the center
towards which all extremes tend. And it is a living center, for Pearl represents it
in the flesh.

Pearl is also a victim of the Puritans' embracing works salvation in place

of Jesus' love ethics. A legalistic, works-oriented society must scrupulously
follow the law and perform the works prescribed. Failure to do so is believed to
bring down severe punishment.

The salient Old Testament concept in Pearl's case is described in

Exodus: "I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the
fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate
me" .A case that clearly demonstrates this is Achan's in the book of Joshua. He
violates God's injunction to take nothing sacred in a raid against Ai: he does
take some forbidden items and hides them in his tent. In a law-oriented society
what is the punishment for violating a commandment and keeping secrets from
the community? Not only does the community execute Achan but also his
family, who had no part in the sin.

In the same fashion, Pearl is alienated from the community because of

her mother's sin. In the chapter titled "Pearl," the narrator proclaims, "The child
could not be made amenable to rules. In giving her existence, a great law had

10
The Puritan ethos

50
been broken; and the result a being, whose elements were perhaps beautiful and
brilliant, but all in disorder. . . ."12 He goes on to discuss her passion and notes,
"All this enmity and passion had Pearl inherited by inalienable right, out of
Hester's heart. Mother and daughter stood together in the same circle of
seclusion from human society."13 He even suggests that at times "an evil spirit
possessed the child" and later that she was "the scarlet letter endowed with
life,"14 clearly a kind of punishment; but unlike Achan's punishment it is also an
instrument of salvation for her family because Hester's love and dedication to
the child "saved her [Nester] from Satan's snare."15

Hawthorne's "Conclusion" shows that Pearl turns out all right, though he
does not divulge the details of her development except to say that she is rich
because of the money left to her by Chillingworth. When the object of his
hatred dies, he is able to do something decent in taking care of his wife's child.
It is significant that Pearl, an illegitimate child, never assimilates into the
community that will not forget the stigma; instead, she establishes a good life
in England, where she marries a nobleman and sends expensive gifts of love to
Hester.

Pearl's turnaround is consistent with an often overlooked Old Testament

teaching about inherited sin from Ezek 18:19-20: "The soul that sinneth, it shall
die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father
bear the iniquity of the son; the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon

12
Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 91.

1
3Ibid., 94

1
4Ibid,102

15Ibid,117

51
him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him." Ezekiel further
notes that this son will be saved by good works. He does not mention grace or
love, which are vitally important to Christianity but often ignored or distorted
by the Puritans.

Although Hawthorne was aware of the sobriety and severity of

Puritanism, in some ways he found it more appealing than alternatives offered
by his contemporaries. For one thing, he must have realized that happiness was
a condition that Europeans and Americans came to believe they had a right to a
century after the events in The Scarlet Letter. In her time and place, being right
was more important than being happy, and being right consisted of keeping
one's covenants with God and with one's fellow humans.

Certainly, the Puritans believed that is how one overcomes the power of
evil in the universe. Puritanism, then, with its acceptance of the weakness of
the human and the presence of a powerful, corrupting evil force, was, for
Hawthorne, the most realistic arena in which to establish an understanding of
how to keep one's name, not in the invisible church as understood by the
Puritans, but on "the roll of mankind," to avoid breaking "the magnetic chain of
humanity." Less than forty years after The Scarlet Letter, Joseph Conrad in his
preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus ( 1897) articulates the same concept:

He [the artist] speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense
of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to
the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation-and to the subtle but invincible
conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts,
to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in
hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all
humanity-the dead to the living and the living to the dead.16

16
Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus: A Tale of the Sea (New York: Harper. 1951), 38.

52
 Puritanism was instructive for Hawthorne but too extreme, so he
modified it, suggesting that all who love and live honestly, keeping no vital
secrets from the community, can experience a kind of redemptive love.
Hawthorne's closing admonition to the reader is not unlike the conclusion to a
sermon on the essence of loving and being loved: "Be true! Be true! Be true!"17

Chapter III

Hawthorne’s Mastership

“The scarlet letter was [Hester’s] passport into

regions where other women dared not tread. Shame,
Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers –
stern and wild ones – and they had made her
strong ...” 1Arthur Dimmesdale said: “Then, and
there, before the judgment sea t, thy mother, and
thou, and , must stand together. But the daylight of
this world shall not see our meeting!”2

Since its publication in 1850, Hawthorne’s masterpiece romance The

Scarlet Letter has been hailed by average readers and literary critics alike as
one of the finest pieces of literature ever to have come out of the pen of an
17
58Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 260

1
.Hawthorne, p. 170
2
.ibid, p. 130.

3. Waggoner, p. 118

4. Ripley, p. 26.

53
American writer. Not only regarded as “Hawthorne’s most widely read and
admired novel”3, The Scarlet Letter has also given numerous generations of
critics bountiful opportunity for in-depth analysis of the novel’s plot,
characters, and meaning. A fair amount of scholarly attention has, for instance,
been devoted to Hawthorne’s “imposing splendor of portraiture”4.

In the case of The Scarlet Letter, this has been evidenced by critics´
particular interest in Hawthorne’s portrayal of two of the novel’s central
characters: the Boston townswoman Hester Prynne and the pastor Arthur
Dimmesdale.

Against the backdrop of mid-17th century Puritan society in the newly

founded American colonies, Hawthorne describes how these two characters´
lives are, each in its very own way, dramatically changed by one moment of
adulterous passion. It is the aim of the present paper to deliver a careful
analysis of Hester and Arthur at the center of which shall be the difficult social
and psychological circumstances the two characters encounter in the wake of
their adultery. It will equally be shown that Hester and Arthur embrace
different strategies in dealing with their situation. A plo t analysis reveals a
clear dilemma and duality of a confession versus concealment theme which
impacts greatly on the two characters and their behavior. Having been forced to
confess to adultery charges, Hester manages to reshape her life by confronting
pre sent demands while also hoping for future opportunities.

By contrast, Arthur is tormented and obsessed by his moment of moral

weakness in the past, wavering between reve - lation and dissimulation of his
deed as he doubletalks his way through the novel’s plo t. The first chapter of
this study intends to establish a framework for the ensuing character analysis.
Its aim will be to portray Puritan society as shown in Hawthorne’s work, so
that Hester’s and Arthur’s situation in the novel’s plot will become clear. An
interpretation of the two characters will follow in chapter two.

54
 First, Hester’s behavior and the role she plays in the novel shall be
analyzed under the aforementioned confession theme. The second part will
render a similar analysis of Arthur, albeit under a concealment perspective. Part
three will focus on the revelatory elements of the forest and final scaffold scene
as central culmination points in the novel. The remarks in the conclusion will
sum up this paper’s line of argumentation while also pointing to areas that
might present further worthwhile opportunities for research into The Scarlet
Letter’s intriguing plot and meaning.

At the moment when The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850, the
American literary scene was dominated by the Transcendentalist movement;or
better by the influence of a certain personality that despite his efforts to avoid
publicity and assume the leadership of the movement, ended by being
considered the very representative of it: R. W. Emerson. Though
Transcendentalism lost coherence and force after the disappearance of The
Dial, it came to its last days after the collapse of Brook Farm, in 1847, after
unsuccessfully going over to Fourierism. Yet its impact was so powerful that
the movement acquired new forms and meanings with Thoreau and Whitman.

It is important to envisage the whole atmosphere of this period, not only

because Poe and Hawthorne, as contemporaries of Emerson,were compelled to
take it into consideration, but also because it simply put its mark on an entire
decade in such an authoritative way that it has to be pointed out.
Beyond the three mains reasons that stood at the bottom of the
movement-utopianism,revulsion against capitalism and technology, and the
attraction of the American “pastoral ideal”5 -Transcendentalism imposed itself
by focusing on a single personality,considered as exponential. Nowadays,
Emerson the master has been put aside in favour of Thoreau the disciple, on
account of the latter’s more direct and appealing writings.

5
Lawrence Buell. The Transcendentalists in Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed.
Emory Elliot, Columbia U.P.,New York,1988,p.364

55
 But in the epoch of Nathaniel Hawthorne the literary scene was different
in opinion, and the publications of this important novel occurred in a special
climate. In form a Victorian novel, it cannot be expected to bear behind the
words chams of meaning and symbols. The conventionality of the writings
hides the unexpected and dizzing net of ideas teem beneath the apparently calm
and traditional phrases6.
The title itself invites a more profound pluge into the matter, becoming
step by step a sort of huge tower that closes inside a cluster of private
loneliness and private grief, all kept together by the feeling of guilt. While the
novel goes horizontally with the story, the author never ceases to look inwardly
in the hearts of his characters, in their conscience as mere mortals subjected to
errors.

Throughout the novel, 'The Scarlet Letter,'; Nathaniel Hawthorne

illustrates the themes with various dramatic colors. Of the array are the colors
green and gold, where green symbolizes different aspects of nature such as
tranquility, security, and gloominess, whereas gold represents all that pertains
to luxuriance, serenity and goodness. In certain chapters, it seems as if one
color is codependent with the other.

Light and darkness, sunshine and shadows, noon and midnight, are all
manifestations of the same images. Likewise, colors—such as red, gray, and
black—play a role in the symbolic nature of the background and scenery. But,
similar to the characters, the context determines what role the light or colors
play. The Scarlet Letter’s first chapter ends with an admonition to “relieve the
darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow” with “some sweet moral
blossom.” These opposites are found throughout the novel and often set the
tone and define which side of good and evil envelop the characters.

In Chapter 16, Hester and Dimmesdale meet in the forest with a “gray
expanse of cloud” and a narrow path hemmed in by the black and dense forest.

6
Michael Davitt Bell. Nathaniel Hawthorne, in Columbia Literary History of the United States,p.420

56
The feelings of the lovers, weighed down by guilt, are reflected in the darkness
of nature. Every so often, sunshine flickers on the setting. But Pearl reminds
her mother that the sun will not shine on the sinful Hester; it does shine,
however, when Hester passionately lets down her hair. The sun is the symbol
of untroubled, guilt-free happiness, or perhaps the approval of God and nature.
It also seems to be, at times, the light of truth and grace.

Darkness is always associated with Chillingworth. It is also part of the

description of the jail in Chapter 1, the scene of sin and punishment. The
Puritans in that scene wear gray hats, and the darkness of the jail is relieved by
the sunshine of the outside. When Hester comes into the sunshine from the
darkness, she must squint at the light of day, and her iniquity is placed for all to
see. Noon is the time of Dimmesdale’s confession, and daylight is the symbol
of exposure. Nighttime, however, is the symbol of concealment, and
Dimmesdale stands on the scaffold at midnight, concealing his confession from
the community. In the end, even the grave of Dimmesdale and Hester is in
darkness. “So sombre is it, and relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light
gloomier than the shadow ….” The light, of course, is the scarlet letter, shining
out of the darkness of the Puritanic gloom.

Colors play a similar role to light and darkness. One of the

predominant colors is red, seen in the roses, the letter, Pearl’s clothing, the
“scarlet woman,” Chillingworth’s eyes, and the streak of the meteor. At night
and always with the physician, the letter is associated with darkness and evil; in
the other associations, it is a part of nature, passion, lawlessness, and
imagination. The context determines the meaning.

Black and gray are colors associated with the Puritans, gloom, death,
sin, and the narrow path of righteousness through the forest of sin. Three
chapters that contain a multitude of color images are Chapters 5, 11, and 12.

57
 The implication of the color green was most abundant in chapter sixteen,
where Hawthorne used much description to depict the dreariness within the
woods, yet adding a sense of security to it all. 'Here they sat down on a
luxuriant heap of moss, which, at some epoch of the preceding century, had
been a gigantic pine, with its root and trunk in the darksome shade”.There is,
apparently, plenty of references to the color green. Not only does green
represent nature in general, its reference to the forest is also the very depiction
of freedom. Nobody watches in the woods to report misbehavior, thus it is here
that people may do as they wish.The color gold is of dominance in this novel. It
is used frequently to describe richness and luxuriance. 'On the breast of her
gown, in fine red cloth surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic
flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter 'A.''; However, it carries an even
more important reference to the sun in chapter sixteen, the sun also
symbolizing guilt-free happiness. Pearl seems to absorb the sunlight while it
flees from Hester and her mark of sin. In chapter eighteen, the two colors,
green and gold, intertwines and implicates pure serenity. Amidst the green, lush
forest, Hester takes the letter off her bosom and instantly transforms into a new
person, a person finally revealing herself from under a shield of shame.

The sunlight, which had previously shunned her, now seeks her out as
the forest seems to glow, the golden sunshine pouring 'a very flood into the
obscure forest, gladdening each green leaf, transmuting the yellow fallen ones
to gold, and gleaming adown the gray trunks of the solemn trees.

In this novel, the colour red acquires other connotations than usually,
standing not only for love, but also for life. On the other hand, black is death,
and Hester is compared in the beginning to a black flower (“It is our fate. Let
the black flower blossom as it may!”), while in the end, on the reverend‘s tomb
only black weeds grow at leisure. The fruit of their sinful relationship is black-
eyed Pearl, whose name brings in the whiteness and brilliancy of the pearl – in
the Christian tradition it symbolizes the absolute purity and sacredness, being

58
used to adorn Virgin Mary’s icons. It is the only shaft of light in the novel, the
rest of the writing is very much like the paintings of Rembrandt.
Red, black, grey, sunlight, firelight, and less frequent green, yellow,
blue, and purple are not simply descriptive of the setting and characters. In a
very real sense they are themselves actors in the story that moves through and
behind the story. Even in their absence they help to tell the tale. When we find
that the most strongly and frequently presented colours are those most
commonly associated with negative or ambiguous moral values, or with
positive natural values, and that the light of positive moral and spiritual values
is both less vivid and less frequent, we are not surprised. The first chapter
prepared us for this. Perhaps the largest generalization we may draw from a
study of the approximately four hundred and twenty-five light and colour
images is that Hawthorne conceived, but when writing the novel did not
strongly feel, the possibility of escape from evil and the past.
The technique Hawthorne uses underlines the idea that the past is not
a problem, and “The Scarlet Letter” is a transition to the present time, “though
that convention of the historical novel which evokes the story from faded relics
and fictitious documents”.11 The piece of embroidered cloth that still retains
some of the splendor of the stitch-work is very much similar to the cloth of
time, on which these possible events have traced a complicated pattern.

11
Agostino Lombardo, American Literature to 1900, The Penguin History of Literature, ed. By
Marcus Cunliffe, vol. 8, London, 1993, p. 180.

59
 Conclusion

Published in 1850, The Scarlet Letter met a warm reception being the
tragic story of a woman’s shame and the cruel treatment she suffers at the
hands of the Puritan society in which she lives.Hester Prynne as a character
proves that morality is not what conventions claim to be, and the symbol she is
forced to wear loses its firm contours. Chaucer’s Prioress wore a similar letter
„A”, but it signified sacred love, under the heading „Amor vincit omnia”.Due
to her courage and constant love, Hester could wear as proudly „A”for
„Admirable”. The same could not be said about Arthur Dimmesdale who
behaved like a hypocrite and only in the end, by means of the open confession,
redeems himself and Hester.
The scene of the gigantic projection of his inner anguish and shame
acquires thus a new dimension, even if the interpretation was centered on him
as an epicentre of the circular ripples created by his sin. The projection moves
outwards from within, expanding to the boundaries of the sky; the movement is
reversed in comparison with the movement of the meteor. But once again the
writing proposes two contradictory images, yet perfectely compatible.
Though on the scaffold the reader places Hester and Pearl too, what is
explicitly shown is the reverend; somewhere in front of him but on the bare
ground, there appears Chillingworth. Nothing is mentioned about any other

60
witness of the scene; it is as if the author simply effaced anybody else just to
concentrate better on the two men: the lover and the husband. It is an unusual
situation, and the injured party is represented as having an evil dimension in
spite of the Christian morals. It is the husband who reveals the darkest chasm, a
situation that could be guessed from his own name that gathers two antithetical
notions: „Chill” and „Worth”; each word has a semantic sphere of its own: the
first is bound to coldness and a lack of heart/human feelings, and moreover is
associated with the inflexible mind, the latter is linked with moral values,
human warmth and appreciation of merits.
Hawthorne foregrounds on various parts of the human structure: about
Dimmesdale he says that „we impute it, therefore, solely to the disease in his
own eye and heart” that the reverend saw the huge letter in the sky. As for the
physician, the „disease”is in his intellect, giving birth to a different kind of sin:
that of the pride of the mind.
Between the two men there stands only the image of the red
letter,already becoming of a heraldic element and less of a shameful mark. The
heraldry accepts few colours, and the red „A” is set against a background of
black and grey, but the final words engraved on Hester’s tombstone could be
accepted as the motto of this emblem: „ On a field, sable, the letter A, gules”.
The convension of the historical novel that springs up from a
supposedly found old document sustains the impression of veridicity, and the
novel is only an insight into the allegedly true ancient story. The proof the
narrator found-an old cloth embroidered lavishly with an „A”—introduces the
reader to a world lone gone from which only the red embroidery survuved. It is
then only love that braved time, since red is the colour of love and life, unlike
black which stands for death.

61
Selected Bibliography:

1. *** American Literature, The Penguin History of Literature, ed. By

Marcus Cunliffe, vol. 8, London, 1993.
2. Francis J. Bremen The Puritan Experience, rev. ed. (Hanover:
University Press of New England, 1995)
3. Burdescu, Felicia – American Literature, Tipografia Universităţii din
Craiova, 2003.

4.Burdescu, Felicia—Tracing American Literature,Scrisul Românesc

Craiova, 2004
5. Lawrence Buell. The Transcendentalists in Columbia Literary History
of the United States, ed. Emory Elliot, Columbia U.P.,New York,1988,

6.Michael Davitt Bell. Nathaniel Hawthorne, in Columbia Literary

History of the United States,

7.Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus: A Tale of the Sea (New
York: Harper. 1951)

8.Elder, Marjorie J. – Nathaniel Hawthorne. Transcendental Symbolist,

Ohio University Press, 1969

62
9.John Gerber , ‘Form and Content in The Scarlet Letter’, New England
Quarterly, XVII (March 1944)

10. Fogle, Richard Harter – Hawthorne’s Fiction: The Light and the
Dark, University of Oklahoma Press, 1964
11. Gollin, Rita K. – Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Truth of Dreams,
Louisiana State University Press, 1979
12. D.H. Lawrence, in his Studies in Classic American Literature (New
York: Viking, 1961),

13. Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter. A Romance, with a

Introductory by Alfred Kazin, David Campbell Publishers, 1992
14. Levin, Harry – The Power of Blackness, Alfred A. Knopf, New York,
1976
15. Male, Roy R. – Hawthorne’s Tragic Vision, The University of Texas
Press, 1957
16.Charles Ryskamp, "The New England Sources of The Scarlet Letter,"
American Literature 31 (1959),
17.Gordon H. Roper, ed. , ‘Introduction’ to The Scarlet Letter and
Selected Prose Works ( New York, 1949)
18. Martin, Terence – Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twayne Publishers, 1965
19. McPherson, Hugo – Hawthorne as Myth-Maker. A Study in
Imagination, University of Toronto Press,
1953
20. Wagenknecht, Edward – Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Man, His Tales
and Romances, The Continuum
Publishing Company, 1998
21. Waggoner, Hyatt H. – Hawthorne. A Critical Study, Harvard
University Press, 1963.

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