THE SCARLET LETTER BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

Submitted by-
Amisha Singh
Roll no.: 2310
B.A. LLB. (Hons.) 2nd semester
Submitted to-
Dr. Pratyush Kaushik
Assistant Professor of English

Final Draft submitted in partial fulfilment of Course titled “Law and Literature”
for the academic year 2020-2021.

6th June 2021

CHANAKYA NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
NYAYA NAGAR, MITHAPUR, PATNA- 800001
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

DECLARATION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

1. INTRODUCTION
2. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
3. PLOT SUMMARY: THE SCARLET LETTER
4. CHARACTERS AND THEMES
5. LEGAL ASPECTS HIGHLIGHTED IN THE NOVEL
6. COMPARATIVE STUDY WITH MODERN LAWS
7. CONCLUSION
8. BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCES
 DECLARATION

I hereby declare that the work reported in this project report titled “The Scarlet Letter by
Nathaniel Hawthorne” submitted at Chanakya National Law University, Patna is an authentic
record of my work carried out under the supervision of Dr. Pratyush Kaushik, Faculty of Law
and Literature. I have not submitted this work elsewhere for any other degree or diploma. I
am fully responsible for the contents of my project report.

(Signature of candidate)

Amisha Singh, 2310

B.A. L.L.B. (Hons.), 1st year

CNLU, Patna

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to show my gratitude towards my guide, Dr. Pratyush Kaushik, Faculty of Law
and Literature, under whom, I structured my project.

I owe the present accomplishment of my project to everyone, who helped me immensely with
resources the project and without whom I couldn’t have completed it the way it is.

I would also like to extend my gratitude to my friends and all those unseen hands that helped
me out at every stage of my project.

THANK YOU.

Amisha Singh

2310, 1st year, 2nd Semester

CNLU, Patna

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 INTRODUCTION

In 1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter, considered by many one of the
best and most moving novels in world literature. It is the story of forbidden love, denial,
public condemnation, jealousy, tragedy. Hester Prynne is a married woman, whose husband
has sent her ahead of him to the New World, where she lives alone in 17th-century Boston.
Sometime after her arrival it is discovered that Hester is pregnant. She is jailed for adultery.
Attempts to exact from her the father’s name fail. She protects the remnants of the privacy
she still has, and refuses to disclose her lover’s name. She is prosecuted, convicted, placed on
the scaffold of shame, with the infant, the fruit of her sin, before the entire settlement; then
she is sent away with her daughter to the edge of the settlement. She is condemned forever to
carry on her garments the stigma “A,” standing for “Adulteress.” Hester, the most skilled
needlewoman in the colony, herself embroidered the spectacular sign in scarlet; we may keep
in mind that “A” is also the first letter of the word “Artist.” The plot thickens: Hester’s
husband arrives in Boston, and Hester’s and her lover’s plan to leave the place and realize
their love fails. In the end the lover is exposed. He places himself on the scaffold of shame
before the eyes of the public and dies. Deviation from the community’s norms has brought
physical and spiritual quietus. Hawthorne wrote the book as a historical novel, apparently
drawing on authentic events of the 17th century. A native of the town of Salem,
Massachusetts, of ill repute for its “witch hunts,” Hawthorne describes the tragic twists of
extra-marital love in 17th-century Puritan New England, the community’s hypocrisy, and the
tension between the individual’s soul and society’s fetters. Some claim that the book was
written as an atonement for the role played by one of his ancestors, a judge in Salem who
convicted some of the “witches” of that time. The Scarlet Letter portrays a cultural and legal
reality. This reality could not be fully exposed in the minutest detail in the pages of 17th-
century American literature because such literature was proscribed. Intimacy could be
revealed only through court records and rulings, or through private diaries, which constituted
documentation of real life, not works of fiction.

The Scarlet Letter is planted in an oppressive Puritan world. America had not rid itself of the
Puritan shackles, certainly not in the second half of the 19th century, when Hawthorne wrote
his story. The prevailing moral code was that of the ancient and modern scriptures. Family
sanctity and sexual purity were norms of supreme importance. Adultery was a criminal
offense punishable by public censure, incarceration, sometimes death.

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In the oppressive shadow of the Puritan culture, life itself was the best story, and it could be
presented to anyone watching in a courtroom or the town square. Imitation of intimate life
usually presented in theatre and literature was heavily chained by the Puritan code. Stories of
criminal convictions for adultery sound outdated. But the law of adultery persists in many
countries to this day, and some people justify it in respect of civil actions against third parties
who have violated the marriage bond.

Down the course of history, the fate in life, literature and law of protagonists of intimate
books of the kind under consideration exhibits a reversal of socio-legal perceptions; today
adultery is not a tort or a criminal offense.

Today Hester’s story would probably not be considered a criminal offense and would not be
publicly exposed against her will. Hester, who in the past undermined the moral code, would
be deemed today a victim and possessor of lawful rights to prosecute her denouncers and
prevent her condemnation. At the time of state censorship, when the state policed the
individual’s intimate life and prohibited publication of fictional writing that corrupted moral
decency, the court served as a public forum for condemnation of sinners, exposing before the
public daring and forbidden life stories. Today personal freedom and artistic freedom are
almost unimpeded, but the principle of the court’s open doors has been eroded. Precisely the
legitimacy that swathes boldness and recognition of the right to privacy justifies blocking
access to the court and its documents. The result is that when courts deal with intimate
matters the names and other identifying details of the litigants are omitted from the judgments
and often such cases are heard in closed doors.

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

1. To study the various legal aspects and social issues highlighted in the book “The
Scarlet Letter”.

2. To study the modern provisions of adultery, privacy and modesty of women in legal
system.

3. To compare and analyse the idea of trial by society, working of courtrooms in

sensitive cases and the idea of sin and morality in modern times.

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 RESEARCH QUESTIONS

1. Is criminal penalisation of adultery justified?

2. Are laws based on religious ideas of sin consistent with justice and equity?
3. Do courts need to be more mindful about cases involving privacy and modesty of
women?

HYPOTHESES

1. Law is subjective to social change and consistent with social norms.

2. Laws based on religious notions of sins and morality may not be consistent with
justice.
3. Courts need not work in a mechanical way in gender and privacy sensitive cases
and put human and natural rights primary to mechanical justice.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
The researcher shall solely rely on doctrinal method of research where she will
utilise both primary and secondary sources of data for her research.

SOURCES OF DATA

1. The following are the sources of data for research:

2. Primary Sources – The original Novel “The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel
Hawthorne.
3. Secondary Sources- Commentaries and reviews on the book, articles,
journals, newspapers, websites.

LIMITATIONS
Since the researcher is still a student, she has limited access area. The
researcher has limited time to read various books, journals, magazine and
understand the problem. It would have been clearer had it been some readings
through more journal, e-resources and books.
The researcher has limited her research as she has to undergo through unavoidable academic
activity and prepare for her mid-semester exams and online classes. As the researcher is also
new to the Covid situation she had doubts regarding books and online materials of the
particular topic. The researcher has limited resource regarding the field work to finalize the
project. But still, with her hard work and dedication, the researcher will manage to complete
her project. Due to lack of time, finance and lack of resources the research work is wholly
based on doctrinal method of research, this research work does not rely on non-doctrinal
research or empirical research. For further research this can be a means of doctrinal research.

MODE OF CITATION

The researcher has followed Blue Book Citation (20th Edition) in this project report.

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 ABOUT THE AUTHOR: NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

Nathaniel Hawthorne, (born July 4, 1804, Salem, Massachusetts, U.S.—died May 19, 1864,
Plymouth, New Hampshire), American novelist and short-story writer who was a master of
the allegorical and symbolic tale. One of the greatest fiction writers in American literature, he
is best known for The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851).

Early years

Hawthorne’s ancestors had lived in Salem since the 17th century. His earliest American
ancestor, William Hathorne (Nathaniel added the w to the name when he began to write), was
a magistrate who had sentenced a Quaker woman to public whipping. He had acted as a
staunch defender of Puritan orthodoxy, with its zealous advocacy of a “pure,” unaffected
form of religious worship, its rigid adherence to a simple, almost severe, mode of life, and its
conviction of the “natural depravity” of “fallen” man.

Hawthorne was later to wonder whether the decline of his family’s prosperity and
prominence during the 18th century, while other Salem families were growing wealthy from
the lucrative shipping trade, might not be a retribution for this act and for the role of
William’s son John as one of three judges in the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. When
Nathaniel’s father—a ship’s captain—died during one of his voyages, he left his young
widow without means to care for her two girls and young Nathaniel, aged four. She moved in
with her affluent brothers, the Manning’s. Hawthorne grew up in their house in Salem and,
for extensive periods during his teens, in Raymond, Maine, on the shores of Sebago Lake. He
returned to Salem in 1825 after four years at Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine.
Hawthorne did not distinguish himself as a young man. Instead, he spent nearly a dozen years
reading and trying to master the art of writing fiction.

First works

In college Hawthorne had excelled only in composition and had determined to become a
writer. Upon graduation, he had written an amateurish novel, Fanshawe, which he published
at his own expense—only to decide that it was unworthy of him and to try to destroy all
copies. Hawthorne, however, soon found his own voice, style, and subjects, and within five
years of his graduation he had published such impressive and distinctive stories as “The
Hollow of the Three Hills” and “An Old Woman’s Tale.” By 1832, “My Kinsman, Major
Molineux” and “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” two of his greatest tales—and among the finest in
the language—had appeared. “Young Goodman Brown,” perhaps the greatest tale of
witchcraft ever written, appeared in 1835.

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His increasing success in placing his stories brought him a little fame. Unwilling to depend
any longer on his uncles’ generosity, he turned to a job in the Boston Custom House (1839–
40) and for six months in 1841 was a resident at the agricultural cooperative Brook Farm, in
West Roxbury, Massachusetts. Even when his first signed book, Twice-Told Tales, was
published in 1837, the work had brought gratifying recognition but no dependable income.
By 1842, however, Hawthorne’s writing had brought him a sufficient income to allow him to
marry Sophia Peabody; the couple rented the Old Manse in Concord and began a happy
three-year period that Hawthorne would later record in his essay “The Old Manse.”

The presence of some of the leading social thinkers and philosophers of his day, such as
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott, in Concord made the village the
centre of the philosophy of Transcendentalism, which encouraged man to transcend the
materialistic world of experience and facts and become conscious of the pervading spirit of
the universe and the potentialities for human freedom. Hawthorne welcomed the
companionship of his Transcendentalist neighbours, but he had little to say to them. Artists
and intellectuals never inspired his full confidence, but he thoroughly enjoyed the visit of his
old college friend and classmate Franklin Pierce, later to become president of the United
States. At the Old Manse, Hawthorne continued to write stories, with the same result as
before: literary success, monetary failure. His new short-story collection, Mosses from an Old
Manse, appeared in 1846.

Return to Salem of Nathaniel Hawthorne

A growing family and mounting debts compelled the Hawthorne’s return in 1845 to Salem,
where Nathaniel was appointed surveyor of the Custom House by the Polk administration
(Hawthorne had always been a loyal Democrat and pulled all the political strings he could to
get this appointment). Three years later the presidential election brought the Whigs into
power under Zachary Taylor, and Hawthorne lost his job; but in a few months of
concentrated effort, he produced his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter. The bitterness he felt
over his dismissal is apparent in “The Custom House” essay prefixed to the novel. The
Scarlet Letter tells the story of two lovers kept apart by the ironies of fate, their own mingled
strengths and weaknesses, and the Puritan community’s interpretation of moral law, until at
last death unites them under a single headstone. The book made Hawthorne famous and was
eventually recognized as one of the greatest of American novels.

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Determined to leave Salem forever, Hawthorne moved to Lenox, located in the mountain
scenery of the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. There he began work on The House of
the Seven Gables (1851), the story of the Pyncheon family, who for generations had lived
under a curse until it was removed at last by love.

At Lenox he enjoyed the stimulating friendship of Herman Melville, who lived in nearby
Pittsfield. This friendship, although important for the younger writer and his work, was much
less so for Hawthorne. Melville praised Hawthorne extravagantly in a review of his Mosses
from an Old Manse, and he also dedicated Moby Dick to Hawthorne. But eventually Melville
came to feel that the friendship he so ardently pursued was one-sided. Later he was to picture
the relationship with disillusion in his introductory sketch to The Piazza Tales and depicted
Hawthorne himself unflatteringly as “Vine” in his long poem Clarel.

In the autumn of 1851 Hawthorne moved his family to another temporary residence, this time
in West Newton, near Boston. There he quickly wrote The Blithe dale Romance, which was
based on his disenchantment with Brook Farm. Then he purchased and redecorated Bronson
Alcott’s house in Concord, the Wayside. Blithe dale was disappointingly received and did not
produce the income Hawthorne had expected. He was hoping for a lucrative political
appointment that would bolster his finances; in the meantime, he wrote a campaign biography
of his old friend Franklin Pierce. When Pierce won the presidency, Hawthorne was in 1853
rewarded with the consulship in Liverpool, Lancashire, a position he hoped would enable him
in a few years to leave his family financially secure.

Last years

The remaining 11 years of Hawthorne’s life were, from a creative point of view, largely
anticlimactic. He performed his consular duties faithfully and effectively until his position
was terminated in 1857, and then he spent a year and a half sight-seeing in Italy. Determined
to produce yet another romance, he finally retreated to a seaside town in England and quickly
produced The Marble Faun.

In writing it, he drew heavily upon the experiences and impressions he had recorded in a
notebook kept during his Italian tour to give substance to an allegory of the Fall of man, a
theme that had usually been assumed in his earlier works but that now received direct and
philosophic treatment.

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Back in the Wayside once more in 1860, Hawthorne devoted himself entirely to his writing
but was unable to make any progress with his plans for a new novel. The drafts of unfinished
works he left are mostly incoherent and show many signs of a psychic regression, already
foreshadowed by his increasing restlessness and discontent of the preceding half dozen years.
Some two years before his death he began to age very suddenly. His hair turned white, his
handwriting changed, he suffered frequent nosebleeds, and he took to writing the figure “64”
compulsively on scraps of paper.

He died in his sleep on a trip in search of health with his friend Pierce.

Major novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne

The main character of The Scarlet Letter is Hester Prynne, a young married woman who has
borne an illegitimate child while living away from her husband in a village in Puritan New
England. The husband, Roger Chillingworth, arrives in New England to find his wife
pilloried and made to wear the letter A (meaning adulteress) in scarlet on her dress as a
punishment for her illicit affair and for her refusal to reveal the name of the child’s father.
Chillingworth becomes obsessed with finding the identity of his wife’s former lover. He
learns that Hester’s paramour is a saintly young minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, and
Chillingworth then proceeds to revenge himself by mentally tormenting the guilt-stricken
young man. Hester herself is revealed to be a compassionate and splendidly self-reliant
heroine who is never truly repentant for the act of adultery committed with the minister; she
feels that their act was consecrated by their deep love for each other. In the end Chillingworth
is morally degraded by his monomaniac pursuit of revenge, and Dimmesdale is broken by his
own sense of guilt and publicly confesses his adultery before dying in Hester’s arms. Only
Hester can face the future optimistically, as she plans to ensure the future of her beloved little
girl by taking her to Europe. The House of the Seven Gables is a sombre study in hereditary
sin based on the legend of a curse pronounced on Hawthorne’s own family by a woman
condemned to death during the witchcraft trials. The greed and arrogant pride of the novel’s
Pyncheon family down the generations is mirrored in the gloomy decay of their seven-gabled
mansion, in which the family’s enfeebled and impoverished poor relations live. At the book’s
end the descendant of a family long ago defrauded by the Pyncheon lifts his ancestors’ curse
on the mansion and marries a young niece of the family. In The Marble Faun a trio of
expatriate American art students in Italy become peripherally involved to varying degrees in
the murder of an unknown man; their contact with sin transforms two of them from innocents

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into adults now possessed of a mature and critical awareness of life’s complexity and
possibilities.

Legacy

Hawthorne’s high rank among American fiction writers is the result of at least three
considerations. He was a skilful craftsman with an impressive architectonic sense of form.
The structure of The Scarlet Letter is so tightly integrated that no chapter, no paragraph, even,
could be omitted without doing violence to the whole. The book’s four characters are
inextricably bound together in the tangled web of a life situation that seems to have no
solution, and the tightly woven plot has a unity of action that rises slowly but inexorably to
the climactic scene of Dimmesdale’s public confession. The same tight construction is found
in Hawthorne’s other writings also, especially in the shorter pieces, or “tales.” Hawthorne
was also the master of a classic literary style that is remarkable for its directness, its clarity,
its firmness, and its sureness of idiom. Hawthorne’s greatness is also his moral insight. He
inherited the Puritan tradition of moral earnestness, and he was deeply concerned with the
concepts of original sin and guilt and the claims of law and conscience. Hawthorne rejected
what he saw as the Transcendentalists’ transparent optimism about the potentialities of
human nature. Instead, he looked more deeply and perhaps more honestly into life, finding in
it much suffering and conflict but also finding the redeeming power of love. There is no
Romantic escape in his works, but rather a firm and resolute scrutiny of the psychological and
moral facts of the human condition. A third reason for Hawthorne’s eminence is his mastery
of allegory and symbolism. His fictional characters’ actions and dilemmas fairly obviously
express larger generalizations about the problems of human existence. But with Hawthorne
this leads not to unconvincing pasteboard figures with explanatory labels attached but to a
sombre, concentrated emotional involvement with his characters that has the power, the
gravity, and the inevitability of true tragedy. His use of symbolism in The Scarlet Letter is
particularly effective, and the scarlet letter itself takes on a wider significance and application
that is out of all proportion to its literal character as a scrap of cloth. Hawthorne’s work
initiated the most durable tradition in American fiction, that of the symbolic romance that
assumes the universality of guilt and explores the complexities and ambiguities of man’s
choices. His greatest short stories and The Scarlet Letter are marked by a depth of
psychological and moral insight seldom equalled by any American writer.1

1
June 6, 2021 (10:45 AM) https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nathaniel-Hawthorne/Major-novels

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 PLOT SUMMARY: THE SCARLET LETTER

The Scarlet Letter opens with a long preamble about how the book came to be written. The
nameless narrator was the surveyor of the customhouse in Salem, Massachusetts. In the
customhouse’s attic, he discovered a number of documents, among them a manuscript that
was bundled with a scarlet, gold-embroidered patch of cloth in the shape of an “A.” The
manuscript, the work of a past surveyor, detailed events that occurred some two hundred
years before the narrator’s time. When the narrator lost his customs post, he decided to write
a fictional account of the events recorded in the manuscript. The Scarlet Letter is the final
product.

The story begins in seventeenth-century Boston, then a Puritan settlement. A young woman,
Hester Prynne, is led from the town prison with her infant daughter, Pearl, in her arms and the
scarlet letter “A” on her breast. A man in the crowd tells an elderly onlooker that Hester is
being punished for adultery. Hester’s husband, a scholar much older than she is, sent her
ahead to America, but he never arrived in Boston. The consensus is that he has been lost at
sea. While waiting for her husband, Hester has apparently had an affair, as she has given birth
to a child. She will not reveal her lover’s identity, however, and the scarlet letter, along with
her public shaming, is her punishment for her sin and her secrecy. On this day Hester is led to
the town scaffold and harangued by the town fathers, but she again refuses to identify her
child’s father.

The elderly onlooker is Hester’s missing husband, who is now practicing medicine and
calling himself Roger Chillingworth. He settles in Boston, intent on revenge. He reveals his
true identity to no one but Hester, whom he has sworn to secrecy. Several years pass. Hester
supports herself by working as a seamstress, and Pearl grows into a wilful, impish child.
Shunned by the community, they live in a small cottage on the outskirts of Boston.
Community officials attempt to take Pearl away from Hester, but, with the help of Arthur
Dimmesdale, a young and eloquent minister, the mother and daughter manage to stay
together. Dimmesdale, however, appears to be wasting away and suffers from mysterious
heart trouble, seemingly caused by psychological distress. Chillingworth attaches himself to
the ailing minister and eventually moves in with him so that he can provide his patient with
round-the-clock care. Chillingworth also suspects that there may be a connection between the
minister’s torments and Hester’s secret, and he begins to test Dimmesdale to see what he can
learn. One afternoon, while the minister sleeps, Chillingworth discovers a mark on the man’s
breast (the details of which are kept from the reader), which convinces him that his suspicions
are correct.

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Dimmesdale’s psychological anguish deepens, and he invents new tortures for himself. In the
meantime, Hester’s charitable deeds and quiet humility have earned her a reprieve from the
scorn of the community. One night, when Pearl is about seven years old, she and her mother
are returning home from a visit to a deathbed when they encounter Dimmesdale atop the
town scaffold, trying to punish himself for his sins. Hester and Pearl join him, and the three
link hands. Dimmesdale refuses Pearl’s request that he acknowledge her publicly the next
day, and a meteor marks a dull red “A” in the night sky. Hester can see that the minister’s
condition is worsening, and she resolves to intervene. She goes to Chillingworth and asks him
to stop adding to Dimmesdale’s self-torment. Chillingworth refuses.

Hester arranges an encounter with Dimmesdale in the forest because she is aware that
Chillingworth has probably guessed that she plans to reveal his identity to Dimmesdale. The
former lovers decide to flee to Europe, where they can live with Pearl as a family. They will
take a ship sailing from Boston in four days. Both feel a sense of release, and Hester removes
her scarlet letter and lets down her hair. Pearl, playing nearby, does not recognize her mother
without the letter. The day before the ship is to sail, the townspeople gather for a holiday and
Dimmesdale preaches his most eloquent sermon ever. Meanwhile, Hester has learned that
Chillingworth knows of their plan and has booked passage on the same ship. Dimmesdale,
leaving the church after his sermon, sees Hester and Pearl standing before the town scaffold.
He impulsively mounts the scaffold with his lover and his daughter, and confesses publicly,
exposing a scarlet letter seared into the flesh of his chest. He falls dead, as Pearl kisses him.

Frustrated in his revenge, Chillingworth dies a year later. Hester and Pearl leave Boston, and
no one knows what has happened to them. Many years later, Hester returns alone, still
wearing the scarlet letter, to live in her old cottage and resume her charitable work. She
receives occasional letters from Pearl, who has married a European aristocrat and established
a family of her own. When Hester dies, she is buried next to Dimmesdale. The two share a
single tombstone, which bears a scarlet “A.”2

2
(June 6, 2021, 10:09 AM) https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/scarlet/summary/

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 CHARACTERS AND THEMES

Hester Prynne

Hester is the book’s protagonist and the wearer of the scarlet letter that gives the book its
title. The letter, a patch of fabric in the shape of an “A,” signifies that Hester is an
“adulterer.” As a young woman, Hester married an elderly scholar, Chillingworth, who sent
her ahead to America to live but never followed her. While waiting for him, she had an affair
with a Puritan minister named Dimmesdale, after which she gave birth to Pearl. Hester is
passionate but also strong—she endures years of shame and scorn. She equals both her
husband and her lover in her intelligence and thoughtfulness. Her alienation puts her in the
position to make acute observations about her community, particularly about its treatment of
women.

Pearl

Hester’s illegitimate daughter Pearl is a young girl with a moody, mischievous spirit and an
ability to perceive things that others do not. For example, she quickly discerns the truth about
her mother and Dimmesdale. The townspeople say that she barely seems human and spread
rumours that her unknown father is actually the Devil. She is wise far beyond her years,
frequently engaging in ironic play having to do with her mother’s scarlet letter.

Roger Chillingworth

“Roger Chillingworth” is actually Hester’s husband in disguise. He is much older than she is
and had sent her to America while he settled his affairs in Europe. Because he is captured by
Native Americans, he arrives in Boston belatedly and finds Hester and her illegitimate child
being displayed on the scaffold. He lusts for revenge, and thus decides to stay in Boston
despite his wife’s betrayal and disgrace. He is a scholar and uses his knowledge to disguise
himself as a doctor, intent on discovering and tormenting Hester’s anonymous lover.
Chillingworth is self-absorbed and both physically and psychologically monstrous. His
single-minded pursuit of retribution reveals him to be the most malevolent character in the
novel.

Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale

Dimmesdale is a young man who achieved fame in England as a theologian and then
emigrated to America. In a moment of weakness, he and Hester became lovers. Although he
will not confess it publicly, he is the father of her child.

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He deals with his guilt by tormenting himself physically and psychologically, developing a
heart condition as a result. Dimmesdale is an intelligent and emotional man, and his sermons
are thus masterpieces of eloquence and persuasiveness. His commitments to his congregation
are in constant conflict with his feelings of sinfulness and need to confess.

Governor Bellingham

Governor Bellingham is a wealthy, elderly gentleman who spends much of his time
consulting with the other town fathers. Despite his role as governor of a fledgling American
society, he very much resembles a traditional English aristocrat. Bellingham tends to strictly
adhere to the rules, but he is easily swayed by Dimmesdale’s eloquence. He remains blind to
the misbehaviours taking place in his own house: his sister, Mistress Hibbins, is a witch.

Mistress Hibbins

Mistress Hibbins is a widow who lives with her brother, Governor Bellingham, in a luxurious
mansion. She is commonly known to be a witch who ventures into the forest at night to ride
with the “Black Man.” Her appearances at public occasions remind the reader of the
hypocrisy and hidden evil in Puritan society.

Reverend Mr. John Wilson

Boston’s elder clergyman, Reverend Wilson is scholarly yet grandfatherly. He is a

stereotypical Puritan father, a literary version of the stiff, starkly painted portraits of
American patriarchs. Like Governor Bellingham, Wilson follows the community’s rules
strictly but can be swayed by Dimmesdale’s eloquence. Unlike Dimmesdale, his junior
colleague, Wilson preaches hellfire and damnation and advocates harsh punishment of
sinners.

Narrator

The unnamed narrator works as the surveyor of the Salem Custom-House some two hundred
years after the novel’s events take place. He discovers an old manuscript in the building’s
attic that tells the story of Hester Prynne; when he loses his job, he decides to write a fictional
treatment of the narrative. The narrator is a rather high-strung man, whose Puritan ancestry
makes him feel guilty about his writing career. He writes because he is interested in
American history and because he believes that America needs to better understand its
religious and moral heritage.

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Themes:

Sin, Knowledge, And The Human Condition

Sin and knowledge are linked in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Bible begins with the
story of Adam and Eve, who were expelled from the Garden of Eden for eating from the tree
of knowledge of good and evil. As a result of their knowledge, Adam and Eve are made
aware of their humanness, that which separates them from the divine and from other
creatures. Once expelled from the Garden of Eden, they are forced to toil and to procreate—
two “labours” that seem to define the human condition. The experience of Hester and
Dimmesdale recalls the story of Adam and Eve because, in both cases, sin results in
expulsion and suffering. But it also results in knowledge—specifically, in knowledge of what
it means to be human. For Hester, the scarlet letter functions as “her passport into regions
where other women dared not tread,” leading her to “speculate” about her society and herself
more “boldly” than anyone else in New England. As for Dimmesdale, the “burden” of his sin
gives him “sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind, so that his heart
vibrates in unison with theirs.” His eloquent and powerful sermons derive from this sense of
empathy. Hester and Dimmesdale contemplate their own sinfulness on a daily basis and try to
reconcile it with their lived experiences. The Puritan elders, on the other hand, insist on
seeing earthly experience as merely an obstacle on the path to heaven. Thus, they view sin as
a threat to the community that should be punished and suppressed. Their answer to Hester’s
sin is to ostracize her. Yet, Puritan society is stagnant, while Hester and Dimmesdale’s
experience shows that a state of sinfulness can lead to personal growth, sympathy, and
understanding of others. Paradoxically, these qualities are shown to be incompatible with a
state of purity.

The Nature Of Evil

The characters in the novel frequently debate the identity of the “Black Man,” the
embodiment of evil. Over the course of the novel, the “Black Man” is associated with
Dimmesdale, Chillingworth, and Mistress Hibbins, and little Pearl is thought by some to be
the Devil’s child. The characters also try to root out the causes of evil: did Chillingworth’s
selfishness in marrying Hester force her to the “evil” she committed in Dimmesdale’s arms?
Is Hester and Dimmesdale’s deed responsible for Chillingworth’s transformation into a
malevolent being? This confusion over the nature and causes of evil reveals the problems
with the Puritan conception of sin.

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Identity And Society

After Hester is publicly shamed and forced by the people of Boston to wear a badge of
humiliation, her unwillingness to leave the town may seem puzzling. She is not physically
imprisoned, and leaving the Massachusetts Bay Colony would allow her to remove the scarlet
letter and resume a normal life. Surprisingly, Hester reacts with dismay when Chillingworth
tells her that the town fathers are considering letting her remove the letter. Hester’s behaviour
is premised on her desire to determine her own identity rather than to allow others to
determine it for her. To her, running away or removing the letter would be an
acknowledgment of society’s power over her: she would be admitting that the letter is a mark
of shame and something from which she desires to escape. Instead, Hester stays, refiguring
the scarlet letter as a symbol of her own experiences and character. Her past sin is a part of
who she is; to pretend that it never happened would mean denying a part of herself. Thus,
Hester very determinedly integrates her sin into her life. Dimmesdale also struggles against a
socially determined identity. As the community’s minister, he is more symbol than human
being. Except for Chillingworth, those around the minister wilfully ignore his obvious
anguish, misinterpreting it as holiness. Unfortunately, Dimmesdale never fully recognizes the
truth of what Hester has learned: that individuality and strength are gained by quiet self-
assertion and by a reconfiguration, not a rejection, of one’s assigned identity.

Guilt

Guilt is a major theme in The Scarlet Letter, and appears primarily in the psychology of
Arthur Dimmesdale. Dimmesdale is tormented both by guilt at his sinful act of fathering an
illegitimate child, and then by the guilt of failing to take responsibility for his actions and
having to hide his secret. As he explains, “Had I one friend…to whom… I could daily betake
myself and be known as the vilest of all sinners, methinks my soul might keep itself alive.”
The minister’s guilt is also exaggerated by a sense of hypocrisy, because he is considered by
many to be exceptionally holy and righteous: “It is inconceivable, the agony with which this
public veneration tortured him!” Dimmesdale spends a lot of time lamenting what a sinner he
is, but he only takes public responsibility for having fathered Hester’s child in the final
moments of his life, when it is too late for anything to change. If anything, his sense of guilt
is what makes him so vulnerable to being manipulated by Chillingsworth. Through the
character of Dimmesdale, Hawthorne suggests that guilt is not necessarily virtuous if it is not
accompanied by an effort to change or redeem oneself.

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 LEGAL ASPECTS HIGHLIGHTED IN THE NOVEL

In the scene of public witnessing that begins The Scarlet Letter, the Governor, magistrates,
and elders look down from their balcony to the platform where Hester Prynne stands in proud
shame, raised in turn above the grim faces of the milling crowd. The ground-level voices we
hear express a resentment quite appropriate to townspeople both beneath and outside the
nexus of unassailable power represented by that balcony, "the place whence proclamations
were wont to be made". Though they hold varying opinions of the letter-wearing sentence, in
one thing the townspeople's comments are consistent: not they but the magistrates have had
the sole power and authority to deal with Hester Prynne. "This woman has brought shame
upon us all and ought to die," rants one woman. "Is there not law for it? Truly there is, both in
the Scripture and the statute-book. Then let the magistrates, who have made it of no effect,
thank themselves if their own wives and daughters go astray!"

In Hawthorne's Puritan world, the only decision-makers standing between Hester and the
gallows are the all-powerful magistrates. Their word is law, their discretion untrammelled. If
the colony has a fully developed criminal justice system—grand juries returning indictments,
juries assessing trial testimony and returning verdicts, pre-determined criminal penalties
governing the sentencing of offenders—we don't hear about it. Instead, the entire apparatus of
the Puritan Rule of Law in The Scarlet Letter is signified by this small group of powerful
men, accountable apparently to none but themselves and their God.

Virtually all of the townspeople who comment on Hester's punishment note, in one form or
another, "the worshipful magistrates" who have "awarded" Hester’s sentence. One says the
magistrates are “God-fearing" but "merciful overmuch," while another wishes that they, not
the magistrates, had been in charge of determining the penalty. Every comment testifies to the
magistrates' power; none mentions a trial.

The conflation of religious, political, legislative, and judicial power in Hawthorne's early
New England is total: the monolith rules and sentences. The people may mutter, but they
must also unhesitatingly obey. The novel seems obsessed with crime and punishment, it
avoids—indeed erases—the institutions and procedures that constitute public criminal
process.

Explaining Hester's appearance on the scaffold to a just-arrived Roger Chillingworth, a

townsman says that our Massachusetts magistracy, bethinking themselves that this woman is
youthful and fair, and doubtless was strongly tempted to her fall; —and that, moreover, as is
most likely, her husband may he at the bottom of the sea;

2
they have not been holding to put in force the extremity of our righteous law against her. The
penalty thereof is death. But, in their great mercy and tenderness of heart, they have doomed
Mistress Prynne to stand only a space of three hours on the platform of the pillory, and then
and thereafter, for the remainder of her natural life, to wear a mark of shame upon her bosom.

Did Hester have a trial? If she chose a jury rather than a bench trial, of what specific crime
did the jurors convict her? Did the grim crowd that watched her mount the scaffold include
jurors whose votes helped put her there? And, perhaps most significantly, why did
Hawthorne invent a criminal case in which the determination of guilt or innocence would
have been made by a jury and then carefully construct the impression that the magistrates
acted as a law unto themselves?

The real power to determine sentencing in adultery cases thus often lay with the jury, who
rarely used it to its harshest capacity. Yet Hawthorne's townspeople suggest that whipping,
branding, or death would have been more appropriate punishment for Hester's crime. Clearly,
she is better off in the magistrates' hands than left to the townspeople's mercy. While
Hawthorne's narrator suggests that "out of the whole human family" it would be difficult to
find persons "less capable of sitting in judgment on an erring woman's heart" than the
magistrates, he situates Hester, with characteristic irony, above a throng of neighbours whose
judgment would have been far harsher and more vengeful. Erasing the Puritan jury not only
makes the magistrates the sole source of judgment, it also increases the ambit of their
sentencing discretion. This helps explain why the "express law" for which Hester is convicted
is never mentioned, and why the word "adultery" never appears in the text. Hester is
apparently convicted of adultery, a capital crime, but she receives a sentence which could
only have been imposed for a much less serious infraction. By implying that the magistrates'
range of options included these much harsher punishments, Hawthorne both inflates the
magistrates' powers and highlights their compassionate consideration for Hester's
circumstances.

Hawthorne's townspeople judge—but their judgments trigger no consequences. No matter

how extreme a punishment they call for, they are not responsible for any sufferings that
result. Because their "verdicts" float free from liability for the burdens they impose, they can
judge and, more importantly, rejudge Hester, until the harshness of those early judgments
melts into later admiration for her modesty and usefulness.

2
By the novel's end, the once reviled adulteress has become a woman respected for her
wisdom as well as her sufferings, as those who once reviled her (or their daughters) now seek
out her advice. The townspeople's freedom to interpret Hester is enabled by their position
outside the concentration of power up on that balcony.

While Hawthorne suggests that in different circumstances Hester might have been a
prophetess or a revolutionary, it is quite clear that in Hester's world, the satisfactions of
philosophical exploration are made available through her life of privation and are one of its
few compensations. Like the widely various juridical opinions of the milling crowd beneath
the scaffold, Hester's philosophical and historical conclusions can be radical, even
revolutionary, precisely because they are not muddied by the messy and corrupting process of
attempting change in the real world. It is significant too that outward obedience is all that the
Puritan rule of law requires; its justice system punishes only acts, not thoughts. Because
community stability depends on each member's self-restraint, Hester's conformity to
behavioural expectations helps hold the community together even when her thoughts may be
at their bitterest.

Hester is humiliated, first by being made to stand three hours on the scaffold, and then by her
lifetime of letter wearing; she is also apparently imprisoned, since Pearl is born in prison, and
Hester returns to the prison after her morning exposure. But she is not whipped. Hester's red
A, frequently characterized as a happily-vanished instance of Puritan severity, is most
noteworthy for its extraordinary leniency, its complete avoidance of the physical
chastisement so essential to Puritan programs for spiritual correction. Whipping in public,
was the standard colonial punishment for other sex crimes. Which raises the question- why
isn't Hester whipped? Hawthorne's avoidance of physical punishment is thus stunningly
ahistorical, whether considered in light of the typical punishment for lesser sex crimes or as
an example of an "old colony law" on adultery. such psychological punishments were widely
perceived as progressive.

When Hester visits the governor's mansion to protest Pearl's rumoured removal from her
custody, Hawthorne's narrator explains the "ludicrous" involvement of such eminent figures
in a small-scale dispute of this kind.

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Unlike the widow whose litigation exploited the availability of public process and judicial
review almost beyond human capacity, Hester's custody case is resolved immediately,
through an ad-hoc informal conversation in the ex-governor's garden. Hawthorne's
magistrates hold neither criminal trials for adultery nor legal hearings on child custody.
Applying their discretionary authority to the circumstances of the case at the moment it is
presented, they appear rigid but behave with compassion, leaving Hester her child as they left
her unmarked skin.

Upon discovering his wife being publicly punished for adultery, Roger Prynne could have
taken action against Hester by divorcing her, an option he is never described as considering."
With respect to her lover, however, he was legally obligated to leave the prosecution and
punishment of the crime to the colony's courts. Instead of doing so, he devotes his life to the
secret discovery and punishment of her partner. In what seems to be an act of kindness, he
assures Hester that though he will make it his business to find out the identity of her lover, he
will never "betray him to the gripe of human law". In actuality, his preservation of secrecy is
anything but kind. Unlike Hester, who protects Dimmesdale's identity in order to spare him
pain, Chillingworth's aim is to monopolize the power to investigate, condemn, and punish the
wrongdoer. Policeman, magistrate, judge, jury, and executioner in one, Chillingworth usurps
every governmental role in the criminal justice system. Though his methods do not include
the actual use of whips or stocks, Hawthorne describes his interaction with Dimmesdale as
the ongoing infliction of torture: "Would he arouse [his victim] with a throb of agony? The
victim was for ever on the rack; it needed only to know the spring that controlled the engine;
—and the physician knew it well!". If we assess Chillingworth's behaviour in terms of its
attitude toward law, it is clear that his rejection of public magisterial process in favour of
fanatical service to the private law of vengeance marks him as the novel's vigilante figure. If
Hester models the ultimate benefits to be derived from accepting the workings of legal
process, her husband presents the necessary disaster—both to the community and to the
vigilante himself—that results when individuals reject public process in favour of private
action. In Hawthorne's grim Utopia, the justice system is administered by men who rise
above any personal drive for revenge, eschew violence, and illustrate the superiority of
disinterested law making over the "barbarity" of private justice. The magistrates' cold
distance protects Hester from both her husband's and the townspeople's outrage.

2
If the magistrates' sentence inflicts years of lonely suffering on Hester, her submission to the
discipline of law also enables her intellectual growth and, the final chapter suggests,
something like serenity. Those who evade "the gripe of law" are destroyed, either by falling
victim to vengeance and private self-punishment, like Dimmesdale, or by suffering the self-
destructiveness of unregulated and inappropriately assumed punitive power, like
Chillingworth.

Positioned within the novel as a sympathetic heroine, Hester certainly does not reap the
traditional heroine's rewards of amatory and economic success. She is loved but not permitted
to live with or marry her lover, and the wealth that Chillingworth possesses is left to Pearl,
not to her. While Hester's heroism in resisting the temptation to rebel does bring such benefits
as privacy, intellectual independence, and an apparently useful wisdom, each is achieved as a
direct consequence of her suffering, isolation, and shame. If the violent resister proves his
commitment by his willingness to suffer imprisonment and public condemnation, perhaps the
person who chooses to obey in a time of general resistance must also be prepared to pay a
severe price. The novel resists providing any simplistic vision of happiness for those who
might follow in Hester's footsteps, insisting instead that this form of heroic compromise is
anything but an easy way out.

Hester's red "letter of the law" is an apt symbol of that continuity: like the text of the novel in
which it appears, it is both the product of and the textual stimulus for continuing
interpretation. But if law and literature both require interpretive readings, literary narratives
can provide a degree of specificity and closure unavailable to law.3

3
Korobkin, Laura Hanft. "The Scarlet Letter of the Law: Hawthorne and Criminal Justice." NOVEL: A Forum
on Fiction 30, no. 2 (1997): 193-217. Accessed June 6, 2021. doi:10.2307/1345700.

2
 COMPARATIVE STUDY WITH MODERN LAWS

DIVORCE:

Section 497 of the Indian Penal Code dealt with adultery. A man who had consensual sexual
intercourse with the wife of another man used to be punished under the offense of adultery in
India. However, this section of the Indian Penal Code was made defunct by an order passed
by the Supreme Court on 27th September 2018. The Supreme Court called the law
unconstitutional because it “treats a husband as the sole master”.

What the society considers as immoral is not necessarily punishable by the state. To prove
adultery as a crime in the court of law, is extremely difficult. It would require proof beyond
reasonable doubt of the parties complained against having actually committed sexual
intercourse.

Under Section 497 IPC, a married woman could not bring forth a complaint when her
husband engaged in sexual intercourse with an unmarried woman. The section also violated
Article 14 and 15 of the constitution.

With respect to extra-marital affairs, couples in India can seek relief by the given
options:

 Adultery remains a valid ground for divorce. Every community has personal laws
pertaining to divorce. The Hindu Marriage Act under Section 13(1) (i) and the
Special Marriage Act under Section 27 (1) (a) have very precisely mentioned that a
marriage can be dissolved by a decree of divorce on the ground of adultery.

 The Divorce Act, 1869 regulates divorce for Christians in India, and under Section
10 (1) (i) allows adultery as a ground for divorce. The statutory provisions for
marriage and divorce of Parsis have been provided by the Parsi Marriage and
Divorce Act, 1936. Section 32 (d) of the Act says that a couple can file a suit for
divorce on the ground of adultery within a period of 2 years after the plaintiff comes
to know about the fact.

 Jewish law has no statutory provisions relating to marriage and divorce. A Jewish

husband or wife can file a petition for divorce if either of them commits adultery. The
petition can be filed merely on a concrete suspicion of the spouse being involved in
adultery.

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  Under the Muslim Law, the husband can divorce his wife by repudiating the marriage
without providing any reason for such divorce. He can divorce his wife who is
involved in an extra-marital affair merely by saying words that signify his intention to
disown the wife. However, a Muslim wife can divorce her husband, on the grounds of
adultery, in the following three ways:

 Talaq-i-tafweez- If the husband has delegated to her the power to divorce, then she
may use such power to divorce her husband on any grounds including the ground of
adultery.

 Under section 2 (viii) (b) of the Dissolution of Muslim Marriage Act, 1939, which

says that a Muslim wife can file for divorce if her husband associates with women of
evil repute or leads an infamous life.

 Lian- If her husband falsely accuses her of committing adultery.4

CUSTODY OF ILLEGITIMATE CHILD:

Though India is a secular country, but to maintain the diversity and to provide equal
status to all the religion and to maintain the essence of every religion, some customary
laws are being promoted which guides the person who belongs to that particular religion.
The laws relating to the legitimate and illegitimate children are dealt under those
customary laws.

 Guardianship of a child under Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act

Guardianship basically means the authority and responsibility of an individual backed up

by law to take care of a minor child and his/her property till the child attains its majority.
Under Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act Sec. 6 which states that as per law the
natural guardian of a legitimate minor male or female child is the father.

Under Sec.6 of Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, which also deals with the concept
of illegitimate children where the mother of the illegitimate children has been stated as
the natural guardian of the children.  Where the mother of an illegitimate child without
any notice to the father is the natural guardian and after her the father may be given the
guardianship.

4
Extramarital Affairs And Indian Law (June 6, 2021, 6:45 PM) http://lawzilla.in/uncategorized/extra-marital-
affairs-and-indian-law/

2
  Guardianship of children under Mohammedan law

Under Mohammedan law mother is not the natural guardian of the legitimate and

illegitimate children. But the custody of the illegitimate child is given to the mother and
her relatives. Father is not entitled to have the guardianship or the custody of the minor
illegitimate children and in case of a minor legitimate child the father is the natural
guardian.

 Guardianship of a child under Guardians and Wards Act, 1890

With regards to the guardianship of a Christian and Parsi Children are dealt under the
Guardianship and Wards Act, where the provisions have been laid down that for
acquiring a guardianship of a child, the mother has to send a notice to the father of the
child, this has been dealt under Sec.11 of the Guardianship and ward Act.

New legislation was made in favour of the unwedded mother of the child, which ensured
the mother the power of the guardianship and custody of its child, when the father was
not in contact of the mother and the child.

 It is not necessary to state the name of the father in applications for admission in
school and while attaining passport for the minor child.

 If single mother or unwedded mother applies for the birth certificate, then the
authorities may only require the women to get an affidavit and on basis of it should
issue the birth certificate, unless there is a contrary court direction to it.

 The unwedded mother under the Guardianship and Ward Act, can have the
guardianship as well as the custody of the child without sending notice to the father.

Hence the appellant application for guardianship expeditiously without requiring notice to
be given to the father of the child was accepted.5

5
Guardianship of illegitimate children in India (June 6, 2021, 7:30 PM) https://blog.ipleaders.in/guardianship-
of-illegitimate-children-in-india/

2
 CONCLUSION

Openness to a necessary and evolving process of interpretation suggests a profound

continuity that links law to literature through a shared dependence on language and
rhetoric, with all the richness, complexity and ambiguity inherent in any discursive
enterprise. Hester's red "letter of the law" is an apt symbol of that continuity: like the text
of the novel in which it appears, it is both the product of and the textual stimulus for
continuing interpretation. But if law and literature both require interpretive readings,
literary narratives can provide a degree of specificity and closure unavailable to law.

The connection of legal cause to ultimate practical effect, the vivid, particular way that a
harsh law will change the lived experience of those it affects, can only be imagined as
among the possibilities that may ensue if this or that legal text becomes law. Literary
narratives in contrast, provide not just beginnings but endings, sequences of events in
which the consequences of actions can be traced through time. If we are used to
recognizing that a novel like The Scarlet Letter presents a complex and richly imagined
world characterized by ambiguity and multiple possibilities for interpretation, it is also
true that the story of Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth
describes not an infinity of paths but a course of connected events, producing these results
and conflicts, and, finally, this particular form of closure. In 1850 it was the novel, not the
statute, that could present a definite story of how the law affects the individual. For a
modern reader, Hester's punishment for adultery, being forced to wear a scarlet letter as a
mark of shame upon her breast for life, may seem harsh and unusual. But the punishment
is extraordinarily lenient in comparison to the Biblical and legal punishments that were
available at the time. In Puritan society, adultery was not seen merely as a matter between
the two parties but as a breach of contract between those individuals and the community.
Even if a husband wanted his adulterous wife to be saved, she could be sentenced to die
as a result of the community's obligations to its moral and legal statutes. The Scarlet
Letter offers a way of looking at adultery that would let people suffer appropriately for
their own sins without forcing the society to worry about which punishment was proper,
that is, redefining it as a private matter in which the society had no compelling interest to
get involved. This view was already palatable to many in Hawthorne’s generation,
although for many others, sexual sins of all kinds remained matters of public interest.
Hawthorne was moving minds to agree that if adultery was a crime, it was a crime of the
heart that need not be punished by society, since it had its own consequences in the guilt,
shame, and suffering accompanied by personal indiscretion.

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 BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCES

1. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (Penguin Classics, 2016)

2. Korobkin, Laura Hanft. "The Scarlet Letter of the Law: Hawthorne and Criminal
Justice." NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction (Vol. 30, 1997)
3. https://blog.ipleaders.in/
4. http://lawzilla.in/
5. https://www.sparknotes.com/
6. https://www.britannica.com/