In describing the first scene in The Scarlet Letter, it is striking how drab and dreary Hawthorne’s descriptions are. He uses words like, “sad-colored garments” and describes structures as, “heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes” which gives the reader the impression of a strict and unwavering society with the stark and confined clothing to match. Not only is he setting up the plot, but he’s also using imagery to portray a mood and way of life of the puritans, and reinforcing this notion with the mention that the new residence of the colony have, “allot{ed} a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery; and another portion as the site of a prison.” A very telling description which the reader can interpret only as a stark warning that the puritans meant business when it came to punishing a sinner.
However, the rosebush presenting maybe a considerable irony…that nature could forgive and be lenient where the puritans could not….stands outside the “beetle-browed and gloomy front” of the jail. Like the rose, faith is a delicate notion, and when nurtured can blossom into a beautiful and enriching part of a person’s life, but also like the rose, it must be guarded by skepticism, much like a thorn’s protection, in order to survive the harsh realities of existence in the new colony. The rosebush offers one final taste of the beauty of nature and represents the last vision of freedom a prisoner must have seen before entering the jail. It exists as a bittersweet reminder of the perilous difference between freedom and reckless abandon of the law.
The deformed man that arrives with the Indian to the market of the puritans is described as, “a person who had so cultivated his mental part that it could not fail to mould the physical to itself, and become manifest by unmistakable tokens….shoulders rose higher than the other…thin visage, and the slight deformity of the figure”. He is presented as the skeptical yet knowing outsider that arrives in the plot just as the reader is about to discover some information via the intruder in the market.
Dimmesdale is described as a youthful yet dark and, “a person of very striking aspect, with a white, lofty, and impending brow, large, brown, melancholy eyes, and a mouth which, unless when he forcibly compressed it, was apt to be tremulous, expressing both nervous sensibility and a vast power of self restraint”. He is described as being a scholarly and intelligent preacher with a gift of prophecy and speech which lead the townspeople to feel as if they’d been spoken to by an angel. He seems to be the weaker of the two men, which one presumes the outsider, given the knowing look between him and the accused, could possibly be the missing husband that chooses to stay anonymous. Dimmesdale is obviously trying to hide his own apprehension at being discovered by the crowd of people if he attempts to get Hester to “confess” what they have done together.Chillingworth, now back to a civilization he had forsaken in an attempt to gain knowledge, at once remembers the kinship and sense of belonging he had long since forgotten while aloof on his journeys. Since he came back, and Hester being the first thing he sees, he is reminded all too quickly of his lack of a home and sense of belonging. Now he knows, that if Hester chooses to reveal his identity, he is faced with a social standard of behavior, and cannot fully enter the community anew to build a new life for himself. He realizes that once revealed, he would be given a certain identity to be somewhat pitied in the community, and would thusly feel shamed and embarrassed himself, and does not want this role.
Pearl is described as a very charming and arresting little beauty adorned in the finest tissues that her mother could afford and fitted with the finest of tailoring. Her mother Hester dedicated all that was decorative and lavish in her beautiful little girl who often pranced around like a tiny princess. Driven by her own impulses, Pearl was hard to control by her mother, and seems unwilling to admit sorrow or fall victim to tears.
It seems Pearl is in the story to serve the purpose of reflection and to also manifest the strictness and almost suffocating rigid rules of the puritan society merely by being so free and ‘spiritual’. Since Pearl has not grown up within the confines of that society, she is unaware of the shame and guilt impressed upon its members in an effort to restrain them and control their hedonistic natures. She is free and willful to do what she wishes as she plays with her dolls and sticks in her mother’s small yard by the house. It is this contrast of little Pearl to all the other children shunning her, that makes the sin of Hester that much more understandable and the puritan’s logic that much more unfair.
Governor Bellingham is dressed in the drab and dreary puritan attire. His clothing is reminiscent of the entire culture’s oppressive and diminutive nature towards expression and any form of creativity. They rejected lavish attire and any personal acknowledgement which may lead to a sense of pride or vanity. Both men assault the reader with their arrogance and presumed superiority to Hester as they threaten to remove her precious Pearl from her possession, and quantify this threat with the idea that Hester herself could not fully instruct in the religious teachings since she herself had “fallen”. However Hester replies that since she has fallen, that she is a better teacher and can impart more wisdom on her young daughter than any other. Hester, in not portraying this society, chooses to let her child follow her own impulses, and dresses her in beautifully colored robes and dresses with the most ornate of stitching. She allows her beautiful daughter to follow her whims and dance about undisciplined, and therefore giving her more of a sense of identity and strong-willed nature since no one has told young Pearl who or what to be. Hester breaks the mold of the strict and overbearingly discipline obsessed culture surrounding puritan society as she lets her daughter decide for herself what she wishes to occupy her time. She rejects the patriarchy and the notion that her little Pearl be confined and broken down in the puritan way of life, and chooses intelligently to raise her daughter on her own untouched by those ridiculously austere rules placed upon her own childhood and adult life.
Chillingworth cleverly opens up this particular dialogue to investigate Dimmesdale’s reaction by saying that the dark leafy plant he found was a telltale sign of the character of the man from which it was picked. He insinuates that the man had an evil or dark secret that he kept, and was finally ousted by the local flora. Dimmesdale’s first reaction is one of incredulous disbelief since he is a minister and believes that only God can truly know a man’s heart and secrets. He says, “there can be, if I forbode aright, no power, short of the Devine mercy, to disclose, whether by uttered words, or by type or emblem, the secrets hat may be buried within a human heart….Nor have I so red or interpreted Holy Writ, as to understand that the disclosure of human thoughts and deeds, then to be made, is intended as a part of the retribution” to emphasize that, though confession to human souls may be comforting, that ultimately it is the divine confession that matters most.
He also implies later, after refusing to divulge more than what he has already about his condition, that doctors cannot treat what ails the non-physical heart of a human man. His reaction to Chillingworth prying for a confession saying that, “lay open to him the wound r trouble in your soul”, almost screams out his sinful deed in the mind of the scheming doctor. He realizes that with such a passionate response a man can only be guilty of passionately responding in a previously sinful way that the seedy doctor suspects in the first place.
I believe the significance of Dimmesdale mounting the scaffold and later beseeching Hester and Pearl to join him is his form of quiet repentance and admittance that he sinned. Dimmesdale is a very anxious man, and he is letting his secret contaminate his identity. He is feeling like there is no way he can confess that he’s been biblical with Hester and still remain a minister in the eyes of his congregation, but he’s also feeling the weight of his secret and the hypocrisy of the role he plays in the community. As is evident when a parishioner of the church returns his gloves with the ironic words, “a pure hand needs no glove to cover it”.
Pearl asks twice because the minister does not answer her immediately, and because she is a mischievous child who wishes to get a reaction out of the minister. I think she secretly knows or may somehow intimate that Dimmesdale and her mother Hester are somehow connected, and that this request, getting the reaction it does, is amusing to her.
I feel as though Chillingworth has ultimately been the true violator of the human heart, considering he has knowingly entered a situation in which both the two sinners, Dimmesdale and Hester, are living their own version of their penance, while he chooses to enter their drama and create havoc. He knowingly entered the situation with the minister strictly to cause him harm, and disguised himself ironically as the good doctor so as to completely manifest his double identity, while Hester and the minister did not cause anyone any harm, yet still felt the cruel judgment of the puritan strict moral code. Chillingworth’s hypocrisy is tenfold that of the minister, considering the minister hides his sin at least as a means to preserve the faith of his congregation, and his responsibility to them overrides his own selfish need to confess in order to relieve the burden of sin. His role in the town and the church is more valuable than his own personal identity, because he has a church to maintain, and he holds that responsibility dearly. Unlike Chillingworth, who would go after his information despite the cost to the victim or community, Dimmesdale feels remorse and it at least ultimately human in his regret.
Dimmesdale feels a responsibility to his congregation, and in some sense feels this responsibility tying himself to them is his penance in a way. He has been broken down for 7 years by keeping this secret and leading a double life, and he argues that he does not have the strength to continue in any place but the one providence has placed him in.
Hester removes the scarlet letter and her cap which confines her hair, and in a sense her femininity, as she speaks with Dimmesdale during their secret meeting in the woods. She is there revealed and openly talking with the man she has committed “adultery” with, when she wishes to introduce the product of their sin. Pearl is asked by her mother to come meet the minister because he loves her mother and he shall love her too, but she refuses until her mother puts back on the adornments of her shame. The scarlet letter and cap, once replaced upon the burdened and sorrow filled woman, entreat the child to respond, and join her mother in meeting the minister. However his previous experiences with children seem to hold true when Pearl grimaces and has to be forced to meet Dimmesdale by her mother Hester.
Pearl’s very nature, being fickle and fanciful, seem to reflect that of the nature around her. She is very active and not bound by any moral code the puritans had created and enforced upon their young parishioners, so she leaps about and makes as much noise as she wishes. Her opinion of anyone around her is influenced purely by her own impulses and have nothing to do with any secondary belief system like the puritan faith. For that she is simpler, and closer to nature, for not judging based on moral or intellectual comparisons, but only going on initial impressions.
I think its risky in any work to declare a final and definite outcome, but to really influence and impact the reader, an open outcome that makes a person think is really the purpose of some pieces. To tie up a story with a storybook ending seems somewhat childish and can deteriorate from the overall philosophical questions the book or story is trying to generate. By offering up some characteristically good ending, the whole debate over what is moral and what is ridiculous could get lost in the story. I think leaving this opening for debate about the letter A on Dimmesdale’s chest leads into a great argument about the male responsibility in infidelity of most cultures. It poses the question of whether he would have ever faced such judgment as Hester even if he was ousted, and since it is not known specifically whether it was imprinted or not, the mind of the reader begins to wonder and question all sorts of related questions concerning the manifestation or lack-there-of his sin.
The uncertainty of the scarlet letter A in the sky, I think, poses the question and ultimate reflection of individual self conscientiousness. The interpretation of the sin, is left open to the reader and the audience rather than the townspeople, who attribute some angelical meaning to the letter, rather unlike Dimmesdale who self consciously attributes it to the telling of his own sins. It also shows how Dimmesdale is immersed in his wrongdoing and lets it overtake anything he supposes about his life, rather than just assuming it was a coincidence. His thinking it as the scarlet letter A for adultery makes it all the more obvious that his sin is always on his mind, and takes precedence before any normal occurrence; it also shows the reader how anxious the minister has become.
I think leaving something in a mystery leaves the mind open to more questions about other things in the story. If events are finite and definitely one thing or the other, they lose their ability to inspire other questions and possibilities in the mind. For example, in Cinderella, if the whereabouts of the missing glass slipper were left inconclusive, the finding and giving back of the shoe to Cinderella by the prince might have seemed guided more by fate than by chance, and happened to be a more romantic ‘fairytale’. In this case, however, the mystery is concerning adultery and its effects on the human heart. These effects, it seems, are left open and up for debate amongst the many readers….perhaps to reflect in one’s very nature the ideals and moral constrains of this story in an effort to preserve a higher moral question. What is truly a confession? What is penance? And I think most of all, what is Sin? Leaving this question among the other uncertainties presented opens up an internal dialogue that would not have been present if the facts were laid out so plainly. Though Dimmesdale may or may not have had the imprinting of the scarlet letter A on his physical body, the readers and the writer both knew where it had been marked the most: his spiritual heart.
Works Cited
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
