2. Hawthorne, Puritanism, and The Scarlet Letter

The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850. Signet Edition, 1959.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter envisions the earliest era of Puritan settlement in New England, presenting an invented narrative Hawthorne describes as if it were accounted in an obscure historical document, a tale of folk-inheritance. The ideals and philosophies of that era and its people stand at a remove from Hawthorne’s time, and yet his novel affects to deal with the ideals of the Puritans in their own terms, and enacts the tradition of the morality play with aspects that could fit well into the fire-and-brimstone ideology of Jonathan Edwards. And yet the novel is finally more of an open dialogue with the past. Rather than embrace the ideals of his own era or Puritanical values, and see one victorious over the other, he identifies tensions between the two and the part they play in the psyche of America.

Hawthorne understood the importance of the Puritan founders, their character and world-view encoded in his sense of tradition. The novel’s vision is that of a writer who was cordial towards Emerson’s ideas, but for whom the tradition of Jonathan Edwards, the fierce preacher of The Great Awakening, retained a great metaphorical weight. The essential spirit of The Scarlet Letter is haunted by a past forbidding and strict to a modern eye, yet Hawthorne affirms it also as more resolute, authoritative, and inviting in its appreciation for human weakness and offer of all-embracing values. Hawthorne pays homage to the Puritans for their vital part in forming his character, imagines his ancestors disdaining their feckless descendent, and surveys a present-day America that Hawthorne sees as littered with clapped-out heroes and spindly, shrunken women. Though Hawthorne disparages his Puritans right back – their punishment of Hester betrays “severity”; they are “gloomy” – he also decides their women have “boldness”, the men have “fortitude and self-reliance”. They possessed the as-yet undimmed fecundity of Elizabethan England.

At the novel’s outset, Hester and Dimmesdale have expended physical passion and the novel charts consequence rather than event, mimicking the Biblical Fall from Paradise. The first real act of the human condition is to lose security of innocence. The actual mark adulteresses in New England were sentenced to wear, as Leslie Fiedler noted, was not a mere ‘A’ but ‘AF’, or ‘Adam’s Fall’, in reference to Eve’s causing Adam’s ruin, a more explicitly misogynistic designation. Hawthorne’s alteration quietly dilutes the potency of the denigration. Far from dismissing Hester as his “fall”, Dimmesdale, her lover, is consumed by guilt as an individual sinner, and by his failure to stand with Hester in the moment of shaming. He blames himself. The narrative of the novel has distinct aspects of a medieval morality play or gothic novel, where morality and superstition coalesce in emblematic figures. Pearl, offspring of Hester and Dimmesdale’s affair, takes on the aspect of a demonic personification, a perpetual reminder of sin, mocker of her mother’s pretences, scourge of other children, and she presses, without knowing why, Dimmesdale to join her and her mother on the scaffold. Her husband, Roger Chillingworth, reconfigures into a taunting devil, waiting for the moment when, as Edwards might have it, “their foot shall slide”. And Minister Dimmesdale’s soul becomes the object of this spiritual tussle, as he combats guilt and the threat of damnation.

There is in the novel just such a constant threat of damnation, or moral failure. The narrative acts out a spiritual principle as Hester, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth seem driven by forces beyond and outside themselves. The forest that surrounds Boston is identified as the playground of “The Dark Man”, Satan, where Mistress Hibbins, the witch, invites Hester. In that wood Hester and Dimmesdale meet and succumb to the asocial impulse again. The dramatic climax sees Dimmesdale reject a temporal union with Hester, which would seem, in his system of values, an embrace of sin, and escapes then the menace of Chillingworth, minion of The Dark Man who brought out of the woods with him improvements to his alchemic skill which he uses to keep alive and then taunt the priest. Dimmesdale’s spiritual victory saves, by implication, his soul, Hester’s, Pearl’s, and even Chillingworth’s. Sin is real in The Scarlet Letter, or at least the impact of sin as a social metaphor.

Much of Hawthorne’s narration affects the pose of an historical mediator, relaying the impressions of the townsfolk and civil legend as projected upon the event. Such refrains as “it was whispered” and “it grew to be widely diffused opinion” bear witness that the tale is being relayed via interpretations of its era. Such mystical signs as the great A that appears in the sky, and the mark on Dimmesdale’s chest, are differently construed by observers. What in Hester’s tale is folk myth and what is literal is not precisely identified. Running parallel is Hawthorne’s more modern delving into psychological perspective, where it’s possible to see Pearl’s childish wrath as stoked by resentment and isolation; Chillingworth’s anger likewise stoked by his aggrieved status as a cuckold, his pride as an intellectual injured, stung in having married a young woman against his better sense and gained exactly the result he might have expected; Dimmesdale tortured by his weakness before social wrath and all he holds sacred. Hawthorne refuses to force a distinction between the two viewpoints, making the novel ambiguous in effect, yet opening up an exploration of the relationship between the religious and the psychological view of existence, and of the transition from understanding humanity through religion concepts to a new viewpoint.

Hawthorne contrives to have Dimmesdale’s guilty lonely vigil on the scaffold coincide with the death of John Winthrop, the first Governor of Massachusetts and author of the famed text ‘A Model of Christian Charity’. He also has Hester, with Pearl, and Chillingworth attend his deathbed in their different capacities. This places all the major characters within the context of actual history. The haunted husband, wife, and minister are also in thematic proximity to Winthrop’s metaphysical charter for the colonial ideal, and reflect three things imported from the old world that Winthrop and the pilgrims could not leave behind: passion, hate, and frailty. Though the pilgrims Winthrop addressed were engaging in a fiscal enterprise, this he held to be a smokescreen for a real purpose: to make a perfect realm of Christian life. If “New England was not an allegiance; it was a laboratory”, as Perry Miller put it, sinners explicitly disappoint the experiment. Hester is thus rendered a branded outcast with special stringency. The communal punishment is intended to save the soul, as well as defend the ideal of the Christian community: it is as vital a collective act as any ritual of celebration.

Yet in Hawthorne it is Hester who appears a “model of Christian charity”. She makes no more money from her endless labouring than she needs to keep herself and her child. She visits the sick and dying and gives freely of herself to the whole community that initially loathes her and spurns her. That she could leave at any time and pursue a route of self-interest is never in doubt, and instead, by persevering, she is transformed in perception for many from unholy wretch to a sister of mercy. In both Winthrop’s vision and Edwards’ hellfire, there is a concept of chosen community, a double-sided coin of hope and threat. Winthrop promised his pilgrims that they would build a more perfect community, a beacon for the world’s salvation. Edwards promises eternal damnation for any sinner who does not come forth and seek salvation in his congregation. In both, the body of the faithful are the blessed, in opposition to the solitary, sorry lot of the sinner. And yet through an intimate knowledge of temptation and moral ambiguity, Hester becomes such a model.

By contrast, the dignity of, say, Governor Bellingham is of no more detailed substance than the devilishness of Mistress Hibbins. Dimmesdale faces diminution to the most impotent of moral figures in his stricken inability to cast aside his public face: private sin is far more corrosive to his soul than Hester’s public disgrace. Hester’s decision to remain in Boston, withstand her humiliation, and work in selfless expiation, seems initially to confirm Hester as a woman of deep conscience. In ‘The Market Place’, Hawthorne draws a likeness between the condemned sinner Hester and the “papist” image of the “Divine Maternity”, the Virgin Mary and child – reflecting, amongst other things, the editing-out of the Puritan Protestant ideal of the feminine in their religious icons: what’s left is the Scarlet Letter, Adam’s Fall, and the Witch. Only pages earlier, he notes that her passage from the prison passes by a bush supposed to have sprouted after Ann Hutchinson, the controversial evangelist who was exiled from Massachusetts, walked the same route. This echo will repeat, and there is more to these likenesses than mere ironic reflection. Such comparisons confirm Hester’s deeper moral knowledge, where the other Christians have no real substance in terms of how they experience their religion. Suffering turns Hester from woman to martyr and model Christian. That her most private universe is not, however, quite that of a penitent is a truth Hawthorne penetrates late in the novel.

As Hawthorne turns religious iconography to his own purpose, so too Hester reconfigures the A into her own symbol with her showy embroidery, one she casts off at the moment when it seems she will gain what she wants, and takes back when she loses that hope. The most crucial entrance into Hester’s interior life, in the chapter ‘A Flood of Sunshine’, confirms Hester’s interior debates on the nature of sin, society, and salvation. “For years past she had looked from this estranged point at human institutions,” Hawthorne tells us, not as reported by others, but with direct authorial voice, offering Hester’s distinct perspective: “The scarlet letter was her 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.” It seems an overture to something like the Emerson of Self-Reliance: “‘…if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil.’ No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.”

Hawthorne will nonetheless snatch back the import of Hester’s self-realisation with the addendum: “But taught her much amiss.” If only in terms of her reintegration into the society she shares, her self-directing bent is conceived as potentially destructive. Nonetheless, Hester’s temporary removal of the embroidered A, as she endeavours to put this private code into action and reconstitute herself and Dimmesdale as natural beings, sees a moment when “her sex, her youth, and the whole richness of her beauty came back” – reborn as a living, passionate female. This contradiction, the voluble natural life of Hester and the laudable spiritual yearning of the Puritans, is the warring heart of the tale. Mark Van Doren summarised this well: (Hawthorne’s) Puritan world is in its own way beautiful. It fully exists, as Hester fully exists. If their existences conflict, then that is the tragedy to be fully understood.” Society wins, as always, but the self keeps fighting.

If New England is the laboratory, then Hester is the by-product of experimentation, and such mutations will keep occurring, until the “American Revolution” comes of age. If the Puritan ideal is socially encompassing, the matter of the tale is the way private conscience alchemises what enters its contemplation, and the conflict this causes. The narrative vindicates Dimmesdale’s spiritual, over Hester’s natural, consummation – and yet it does not erase it. It is necessary that Dimmesdale’s conscience triumphs – his hypocrisy, his loss of private integrity, is the worst sin, and cannot be abided, as D. H. Lawrence pithily noted. Dimmesdale obeys his ideal, and he dies. Hester obeys her ideal, more earthly, which bade her suffer everything if she could not realise her version of fulfilment. Only the beatification of that ideal had the power to remove the letter for her satisfaction: yet in accepting the disdain of society, she becomes strong. This is Hester’s transcendence. She does not die.

Hester’s incapacity to voice dissent in a fashion that does not seem immoral by the codes of her society calls to mind Anne Bradstreet’s faintly sarcastic disavowal of any intention to dispute masculine hegemony. It can’t be argued with, and only the concession of a right to speak anyway can be requested. There is a lack of cultural form through which to approach dissent, amidst a community that considers everything else to be falsity. “The Greeks did nought but play the fools and lie. / Let Greeks be Greeks, and Women what they are,” Bradstreet insisted in her poem ‘The Prelude’, likewise relegating pagans and the female voice to a minor key. Hers is a society that takes shows of female independence, like that of the novel’s paragon of feminine purpose, Ann Hutchinson, as proof of ill intent. The historical figures of Hutchinson, on one, distant side of Hester, and Mistress Hibbins, executed witch, rather closer, confirm Hester in the centre, suffering the push and pull of the dualistic concepts that a Puritan ideal imposes on everything.

That Hester cannot become a figure like Hutchinson is both Hawthorne’s conclusion and that of Chillingworth, his creation: “I pity thee for the good that has been wasted in thy nature.” She’s a failure in Puritan terms, but not only those terms. It’s a failure in terms of being able to express, to turn her private learning into a philosophy, a final inability to build as well as give birth; a failure of mental self-involvement that counterbalances her social dedication. Her efforts all go into action, not into philosophy. What Hester has learnt will have to be re-learnt, and communicated, by others. Hester retreats to the margin of her society, hovering yet between the wild of the wood and the discipline of Boston, neither condemned nor liberated from within or without. That she refuses the easy way out confirms her as a moral entity. That she is trapped between the poles of her time and Hawthorne’s is the tragedy of her life and the novel.

© Roderick Heath 2009

Bradstreet, Anne 1985, ‘The Prelude’, in The Norton Anthology of American Literature Vol. 1, 2^nd edn, eds Murphy, F., and Parker, H., New York, Norton.

Edwards, Jonathan 1985 (1741), ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’, in The Norton Anthology of American Literature Vol. 1, 2^nd edn, eds Murphy, F., and Parker, H., New York, Norton.

Fiedler, Leslie A. 1967, Love and Death in the American Novel, Jonathan Cape Ltd, London.

Kaul, A.N. (ed.) 1966, Hawthorne: A Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Spectrum.

Lawrence, D.H. 1964 (1924), Studies in Classic American Literature, Heinemann, London.

Lewis, R. W. B. 1966, ‘The Return into Time: Hawthorne’, in Hawthorne: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Kaul, A.N., Spectrum, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.

Miller, Perry 1981 ‘The American Puritans’, New York, MacMillan Co, quoted in The Literary Guide to the United States, ed. S. Benedict, Blanford Press, Poole, Dorset.

Murphy, Francis, and Parker, Hershel (eds) 1985, The Norton Anthology of American Literature Vol. 1, 2^nd edn, Norton, New York.

Winthrop, John 1985 (1630), ‘A Model of Christian Charity’, in The Norton Anthology of American Literature Vol. 1, 2^nd edn, eds F. Murphy and H. Parker, Norton, New York.

Van Doren, Mark 1966, ‘The Scarlet Letter’ in Hawthorne: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. A.N. Kaul, Spectrum, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.