The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850 ★★★★

Hester's Enduring Legacy

When a widely-celebrated novel has been around a long time, it gets harder to be objective about it. Say you like it, and you feel like a conformist. Say you don’t, and you’re a crank.

The Scarlet Letter is undoubtedly great, but after 170 years, is it still any good? Does its iron code of morality strike one now as authentic or dated? Is its celebrated symbolism subtle or strained?

For me at least, the book holds up, both on its own merits and how it blazed a path for our national literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne wasn’t the Father of the American Novel (like him or not, James Fenimore Cooper has that title), but more than anyone else, Hawthorne made the American novel matter to the world at large.

So much of that reputation rests with this, only Hawthorne’s second of five published novels. As if a synopsis is needed, it tells the story of Hester Prynne, an unwed mother in Puritan Boston in the middle of the 17^th century. Not a happy place to be.

Puritan justice in action. In the novel, Hester is not exactly required to stand in a pillory like this one, but rather beside it on a scaffold as the good people of Boston gather to witness her shame. Image from https://www.northwindprints.com/american-history/puritan-prisoner-pillory-new-england-5877813.html.

After spending an afternoon standing on a scaffold, she returns to her community forced to wear an embroidered letter “A” on her breast, all red to make the point she is indeed a scarlet woman. The man who impregnated her – unknown to all but her – looks on, wracked with guilt. A mysterious stranger to the community who goes by the name Chillingworth visits Hester and tries to get her to give her lover up:

“Between thee and me, the scale hangs fairly balanced. But, Hester, the man lives who has wronged us both! Who is he?”

“Ask me not!” replied Hester Prynne, looking firmly into his face. “That thou shalt never know!”

Chillingworth urges Hester to confess the name of her child's father in an early illustration that captures his mysteriously malevolent authority. “Even if I imagine a scheme of vengeance, what could I do better for my object than let thee live...so that this burning shame may still blaze upon thy bosom?” he tells her. Image from https://subplotter.com/analysis/scarlet-letter/chillingworths-malevolence/.

The Scarlet Letter is a book of its time, full of sweeping feelings and tattered nobility. Yet its gentle questioning of social codes and of religious conformity will connect with present-day readers. You may not care so much about the characters (at least I don’t), but the story itself is multilayered and completely involving from beginning to end.

Well, maybe not the beginning, actually. I admit to being perplexed by the actual beginning, not something I remembered from my first reading of The Scarlet Letter back in college decades ago. I totally forgot – or perhaps my kindly professor suggested I skip over – what forms more than a fifth of the entire novel, an introductory essay by Hawthorne about his time running a government custom house in Salem.

Hawthorne writes at length and at times amusingly about his career as a largely useless public servant, but man oh man does it veer off. He gets in choice barbs about his colleagues – “Neither the front nor the back entrance of the Custom House opens on the road to Paradise” – but one is hardly prepared for this lengthy lampoon when picking it up.

Ironically, according to a preface Hawthorne penned for a second edition of The Scarlet Letter, it was the Custom House essay that set people off:

It could hardly have been more violent, indeed, had he burned down the Custom House, and quenched its last smoking ember in the blood of a certain venerable personage against whom he is supposed to cherish a particular malevolence.

The U. S. Custom House in Salem, Massachusetts as it exists today. In his introduction to The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne claims to have found records about Hester as well as the tattered remnants of the title object she wore: “I have allowed myself...nearly or altogether as much license as if the facts had been entirely of my own invention.” Image from http://www.hawthorneinsalem.org/Architecture/CustomHouse/Introduction.html.

As to how the pre-Civil-War American public reacted to the scandalous nature of the main bill of fare, the short answer is they loved it. A huge popular success from its first publication, The Scarlet Letter made mass-produced novels commercially viable and scored an immediate cultural impact. Moby-Dick, published the very next year, was dedicated to Hawthorne; esteemed English writers of the time like George Eliot gave it props, too. Hawthorne has proven the rare American who travels well.

When you study Hawthorne as I did back in college, you quickly learn about the differences between two literary devices Hawthorne employed, allegory and metaphor. Allegory dates back to John Bunyan if not Aesop and uses a physical object to impart a moral lesson. Symbolism, its more modernist cousin, uses objects to represent more ambiguous ideas.

What makes Hawthorne so interesting was the way he mixed them up, creating moral stories with ambiguity that sometimes barely jostles the reader and at other times practically spills off the page.

The title item itself serves as both. As an allegory, it sends up the hidebound Puritan moral code as too fixed and punitive; as symbol, well, Hawthorne keeps shifting its meaning, beginning as a simple emblem of sin but emerging in the eyes of Hester as well as many members of her community as a strange badge of honor over time.

It even is said to impart upon Hester a kind of second sense:

Walking to and fro with those lonely footsteps in the little world with which she was outwardly connected, it now and then appeared to Hester – if altogether fancy, it was nevertheless too potent to be resisted – she felt or fancied, then, that the scarlet letter had endowed her with a new sense. She shuddered to believe, yet could not help believing, that it gave her a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sins in other hearts.

Lillian Gish starred in a 1926 MGM adaptation of The Scarlet Letter, billed by wags at the time as "a real A picture." Hollywood has kept coming back to it many times since, though a definitive version has yet to be made. Image from https://www.wesa.fm/post/american-icons-scarlet-letter#stream.

Hawthorne did similar things in some of his most celebrated tales, like “The Minister’s Black Veil,” where a sable cloth worn over the title character’s face takes on different meanings for different people. The Scarlet Letter serves as a showcase for Hawthorne’s mastery of these two literary devices, as well as an acute psychological sensitivity to the motives of various players.

Hester’s former lover is so wracked with guilt that he imagines accusation in the looks of his brethren. Hawthorne makes us really like him – one of the author’s less-remarked-upon great feats here – despite his silence at Hester’s persecution. At one point, he undergoes a kind of mental breakdown where he longs to take aside some trusting soul and speak “a germ of evil that would be sure to blossom darkly soon…”

Hester herself struggles with the fact she is so rooted in Boston despite its wholesale contempt for her. Hawthorne’s explanation will ring true today with many survivors of trauma and abuse:

But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, almost ghostlike, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime; and still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it. Her sin, her ignominy, were the roots which she had struck into the soil.

You can see two different streams of American literature converging in the two main stories, highbrow Henry James in Hester’s complex personal struggle to find her own way and care for her daughter Pearl; Gothic Edgar Allen Poe in the twisted relationship between the two main male characters, where guilt and vengeance combine to create a macabre situation with self-flagellation and sly wicked complots.

Though quite different in many respects, reminders of Boston's Puritan past can still be found in the city today. Hawthorne presents in The Scarlet Letter a withering view of its effect: “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 soul as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.” Image from https://brewminate.com/the-puritans-of-massachusetts-a-theocracy-by-any-other-name/.

There is an overall morbidity to The Scarlet Letter that may weigh more heavily on some readers; I do find it slow myself but as a writer am continually impressed at the way Hawthorne communicates often-tangled ideas with such attenuated, beguiling simplicity.

Take how he approaches the problem of piety as practiced in an imperfect life:

It was his genuine impulse to adore the truth, and to reckon all things shadowlike, and utterly devoid of weight or value, that had not its divine essence as the life within their life. Then, what was he? – a substance? – or the dimmest of all shadows?

The novel is a kind of slow-burning potboiler that wends its way to a denouement any composer of the day would have envied. According to one mid-20^th-century authority on Hawthorne, Mark Van Doren, Hawthorne was so personally overtaken by the conclusion of The Scarlet Letter that the normally stolid man found himself staggered after wrapping it up.

It’s certainly a climax to remember, the one part of the book movie adaptations strain to recapture, though it shoots up rather abruptly and then peters out into a brief if still ambiguous afterword.

Author Nathaniel Hawthorne late in life. The Scarlet Letter was one of three great novels he published during a three-year period between government postings in Salem, Massachusetts and Liverpool, England. What more could he have written had his old college buddy President Franklin Pierce left him alone! Image from https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2011/11/4228/.

A symbol to engage modern readers more than even the Scarlet Letter is the way Hawthorne uses his youngest main character, Hester’s daughter Pearl. Sometimes she is described as an “elfish spirit;” at other times as “demon offspring.” Is she Hester’s solace, or just part of her torment?

The child could not be made amenable to rules. In giving her existence, a great law had been broken, and the result was a being whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in disorder; or with an order peculiar to themselves, amidst which the point of variety and arrangement was difficult or impossible to be discovered.

I admit to admiring The Scarlet Letter more than actually loving it. Hawthorne’s shorter works strike me as often more inventive and certainly easier to follow. Except for that windy preface about the Custom House, the novel lacks needed humor. I do wish Hawthorne had done more to build up the secondary characters like the witchy Anne Hibbins or the pious pillar of the community Rev. Wilson.

What we get amounts to two one-act plays that converge spectacularly if somewhat predictably, with an ending that does come off forced and strident, if true to itself. Reading it, though, one feels a sense of reckoning with a nation’s unquiet past as well as an author with things to say we still can have a lot of fun pondering and arguing about.