The Scarlet Letter. Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The Scarlet Letter: A Romance
Nathaniel Hawthorne.
New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. 1983 (1850).

Why read it? All people have secret sins. Many people use or manipulate others to gain something for themselves. Both characteristics are exemplified in this novel, an American classic.

Hester Prynne must wear the scarlet letter A on her breast to advertise her guilt as an adulteress, but she will not reveal the name of the father. It is Arthur Dimmesdale, a respected, godly, influential young preacher who has condemned publicly the very sin he has committed. Pursuing the knowledge of the father is Roger Chillingworth, Hester’s husband, an older man, a physician, who had remained in Europe when Hester had come to America. He continually baits Dimmesdale while gathering the evidence that he is the father.

Pearl, the daughter, is a trial for her mother, She is perverse, willful and uncontrollable. The product of sin. When Chillingworth thwarts the escape of Dimmesdale, Hester and Pearl, Dimmesdale mounts the pillory, admits his guilt, reveals the scarlet A carved in his chest and dies. Pearl kisses her father and, for the first time, cries, showing that she is at last human.

The book represents Hawthorne’s favorite themes: secret sin and the unpardonable sin of using others for one’s own purposes.

Some sample ideas from the novel: The introduction to The Scarlet Letter is an essay on Hawthorne’s employment at the Custom House. Of the Custom-House officers: “…voices between speech and a snore….” “The Custom-House officers spent a good deal of time, also, asleep in their accustomed corners, with their chairs tilted back against the wall, awaking, however, once or twice in a forenoon, to bore one another with the several thousandth repetition of old sea stories, and moldy jokes, that had grown to be passwords and countersigns among them.” “The Custom-House officers spoke with far more interest and unction of their morning’s breakfast or yesterday’s, today’s, or tomorrow’s dinner, than of the shipwreck of forty or fifty years ago, and all the world’s wonders which they had witnessed with their youthful eyes.” “The chief tragic event of the old man’s life, so far as I could judge, was his mishap with a certain goose, which lived and died some twenty or forty years ago; a goose of most promising figure, but which, at table, proved so inveterately tough that the carving knife would make no impression on its carcass; and it could only be divided with an axe and a handsaw.” “…to make the dinner-hour the nucleus of the day, and to spend the rest of it, as an old dog spends it, asleep in the sunshine or the shade….”

“Thus she will be a living sermon against sin, until the ignominious letter be engraved upon her tombstone.” Chillingworth to Hester: “I—a man of thought—the book worm of great libraries—a man already in decay, having given my best years to feed the hungry dream of knowledge—what had I to do with youth and beauty like thine own!” “She shuddered to believe, yet could not help believing, that it [the scarlet letter] gave her a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts.” “The mother felt like one who has evoked a spirit, but by some irregularity in the process of conjuration, has failed to win the master-word that should control this new and incomprehensible intelligence.” “She saw the children of the settlement, on the grassy margin of the street, or at the domestic thresholds, disporting themselves in such grim fashion as the Puritanic nurture would permit; playing at going to church, perchance, or at scourging Quakers, or taking scalps in a sham fight with the Indians; or scaring one another with freaks of imitative witchcraft.”

“A man burdened with a secret should especially avoid the intimacy of his physician.” Dimmesdale: “…it must needs be better for the sufferer to be free to show his pain, as this poor woman Hester is, than to cover it all up in his heart.” Chillingworth: “A bodily disease, which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.” “Calm, gentle, passionless as he appeared, there was yet, we fear, a quiet depth of malice, hitherto latent, but active now, in this unfortunate old man [Chillingworth] which led him to imagine a more intimate revenge than any mortal had ever wreaked upon an enemy.” “He [Dimmesdale] longed to speak out, from his pulpit, at the full height of his voice, and tell the people what he was…I, your pastor, whom you so reverence and trust, am utterly a pollution and a lie.”

Quote: “Such helpfulness was found in her—so much power to do, and power to sympathize—that many people refused to interpret the scarlet A by its original signification but…said that it meant Able.”

Quote: “She had climbed her way…to a higher point [while] the old man, on the other hand, had brought himself nearer to her level, or perhaps below it, by the revenge he had stooped for.”

Quote: “This unhappy man [Chillingworth] had made the very principle of his life to consist in the pursuit and systematic exercise of revenge, and when, by its completest triumph and consummation, that evil principle was left with no further material to support it.”

Quote: “…people brought all their sorrows and perplexities, and besought her counsel, as one who had herself gone through a mighty trouble.”