Scarlet Letter Cartea + Putina Critica PDF
Scarlet Letter Cartea + Putina Critica PDF
Scarlet Letter Cartea + Putina Critica PDF
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
The Scarlet Letter
Complete, Authoritative Text with
Biographical Background and Critical History plus
Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives
with Introductions and Bibliographies
EDITED BY
Ross C Murfin
Southern Methodist University
Macmillan Education
For Bedford/St. Martin's
Publisher: Charles H. Christensen
Associate Publisher: Joan E. Feinberg
Managing Editor: Elizabeth M. Schaaf
DeTJelopmental Editor: Stephen A. Scipione
Production Editor: Lori Chong
Copyeditor: Kathryn Blatt
Text Design: Sandra Rigney, The Book Department
Cover Design: Richard Emery Design, Inc.
Cover Art: Quilt, fans patterns. Amish, artist unknown, initialed
"P.M." Indiana. 1931. Cotton, 83 x 73114 inches. Collection of the
Museum of American Folk Art, New York; Gift of David Pot-
tinger. 1980.37.86
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 89-63918
Copyright© 1991 by Bedford Books ofSt. Martin's Press
Acknowledgments
The text of The Sc~Jrlet Letter, Volume I of the Centenary Edition of the Works of
Nathaniel Hawthorne, is copyright© 1962 by the Ohio State University Press. All rights
reserved. It is an approved text of the Center for Editions of American Authors and the
Modern Language Association.
Acknowledgments IJnd coi!JI:ights IJre continued IJt the biJck of the book on p~Jge 371, which
constitutes IJn extension ofthe copyright p~Jge.
Preface
Acknowledgments
I am greatly indebted to all of the contributors to this volume.
Joanne Feit Diehl, David Leverenz, Michael Ragussis, and Sacvan
Bercovitch revised their published essays with remarkable sensitivity to
the capabilities and needs of student readers. Shari Benstock, whose
enthusiasm for rereading Hawthorne regularly rekindled my own, de-
vised an original essay that seems likely to lead feminist studies of
Hawthorne into the 1990s even as it leads students into feminist theory.
I would also like to thank Johanna M. Smith, without whose help the
introduction to feminist criticism and accompanying bibliography
would have been less than comprehensive; Frank Palmieri, who sub-
stantially improved my introduction to the new historicism; and Peter
Bellis, who shared not only his knowledge of Hawthorne, but also
numerous library volumes.
William E. Cain, John Limon, and Charles N. Watson served as
readers for Bedford Books and provided very helpful suggestions for
final revisions. Of the people at Bedford, I would like to thank Charles
H. Christensen, Joan Feinberg, Elizabeth Schaaf, Ellen Kuhl, Lori
Chong, Kathryn Blatt, and, in particular, the indefatigable Steve
Scipione.
Finally, I would like to express my appreciation to two wonderful
assistants without whom this book could not have been completed:
Elaine Koch, of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of
PREFACE Vll
Miami, and Suzanne Klekotka, of the provost's office. They have been
ready with wit and wisdom-as well as assistance-at times when there
simply weren't enough hours in the day.
Ross C Murfin
Southern Methodist University
Contents
Preface v
PART ONE
The Complete Text
Introduction: The Biographical and Historical Background 3
The Scarlet Letter 21
Preface to the Second Edition 21
The Custom-House: Introductory to "The Scarlet Letter'' 22
PART1WO
A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism
with a fever and died, in Surinam in South America, far from the Salem
where he had rarely lived - and from the wife and children he had
hardly known.
Nina Baym succinctly characterizes a man, a marriage that was
hardly a marriage, and, consequently, a young mother's predicament:
"He left Elizabeth a widow at the age of twenty-eight, with children
aged six and four and an infant of a few months. In seven years of
married life he had spent little more than seven months in Salem, and
had been absent from home at the births of all his children" (Baym 9). It
is little wonder that Elizabeth, given what we know about her in-laws,
returned to her own family, the Mannings, shortly after learning of her
husband's death.
The Mannings were prosperous, middle-class people who had
established and developed a stagecoach line connecting Marblehead,
Newbury, and Boston. The family was a large and seemingly affection-
ate one; certainly, we know that Nathaniel and his two sisters were
doted on, especially by their numerous unmarried aunts and uncles.
Thanks to the Mannings, young Nathaniel received a solid educa-
tion. When he seriously injured his foot while playing ball, the head of
his school in Salem- the famous lexicographer, J. E. Worcester-
continued to provide the injured student with his lessons at home. This
long period of confinement proved critically important to the develop-
ment of Hawthorne as a writer; while recuperating, he read not only
allegories like Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Bunyan's The PilgrimJs
Progress but also plays by Shakespeare, historical novels by Sir Walter
Scott, and popular Gothic romances. Allegorical, dramatic, historical,
and supernatural, or Gothic, elements can be found in abundance
throughout The Scarlet Letter.
When he was about thirteen years old, Hawthorne was to receive
an education different from the kind available from schoolmasters and
books. His mother took an opportunity to move herself and her two
children out of the busy family compound in Salem and into a house
adjacent to the one where her brother Richard lived, near Sebago Lake
in Raymond, Maine. Although Hawthorne was only in Raymond
sporadically over the next two years and consistently for two years after
that, his time there was as important to his development as the period of
convalescence in Salem.
In rural Maine, Hawthorne developed a deep appreciation of
nature. He became enamored of hunting and fishing, of walking and
skating, of paths leading deep into forests. Because of this experience,
BIOGRAPHICAL AND HISfORICAL BACKGROUND 5
that the letters were highly imaginative and even literary in character -
that they greatly exaggerated, in other words, the gloom and depression
the writer felt.
After all, Hawthorne was writing Gothic fiction during these years
back at home, as well as reading histories, especially of New England.
Along with Fanshawe (1828), a novel with strong Gothic elements that
he published anonymously and tried to suppress, Hawthorne wrote
tales for magazines using pen names such as "Oberon," "Ashley Allan
Royce," or ''The Reverend A. A. Royce." He set many of these stories
and sketches in the historical past that he found so fascinating. Litera-
ture, he once explained, "is a plant which thrives best in spots where
blood has been spilt long ago."
Eventually, Hawthorne began publishing sketches and stories in
his own name, some of them powerful works that were to be collected in
a successful volume entitled Twice-Told Tales. Henry Wadsworth Long-
fellow, a former Bowdoin classmate whose reputation as a writer had
developed more quickly than Hawthorne's, wrote a favorable review
imploring Hawthorne to "tell us more." Even good press, though,
failed to make writing profitable as an occupation, so Hawthorne
decided, after becoming secretly engaged to Sophia in 1838, to accept a
political appointment in 1839 as Measurer of Coal and Salt in the
Boston Custom-House.
Hawthorne wrote relatively little during the years he spent in the
dusty hulls of ships. For that reason and others he eventually resigned
and moved, on New Year's Day, 1841, to Brook Farm, an experimental
Utopian community. Technically an Institute of Agriculture and Educa-
tion, Brook Farm was in fact designed as a haven for intellectuals. The
short-range goal of its founder, George Ripley, was to provide its
residents with a place to think and write while they worked only to
supply life's basic necessities. But the ultimate philosophical goal of the
place was that of most, if not all, Utopian communities: the regenera-
tion of society.
Hawthorne had moved to Brook Farm thinking that, after a few
years of living, working, and writing, he would marry Sophia and have
her join him there. Unfortunately, the Farm proved a disappointment.
Hawthorne rather quickly decided it was no place for Sophia. He didn't
care for the work and found himself suddenly unable to write. Haw-
thorne was also less than impressed with the idealists who lived and
visited at the Farm. From the Brook Farm days on, he was skeptical of
people who believe that all social ills are ultimately curable. In his later
Life ofFranklin Pierce, he wrote that "there is no instance, in all history,
BIOGRAPHICAL AND HISfORICAL BACKGROUND 7
of the hwnan will and intellect having perfected any great moral reform
by methods which it adapted to that end" ( 113-14).
In "The Custom-House," his preface to The Scarlet Letter, he refers
to the "impracticable schemes" of "the dreamy brethren of Brook
Farm" (38). And in the novel that follows, an essentially skeptical
attitude toward the possibility of moral or social perfectibility is every-
where implicit. Puritan society, for all its ·efforts, has been unable to
prevent the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale from "sinning." The most
good is done by his partner, Hester, who finally lives alone at the edge
of the city and accomplishes what she does slowly, painfully, partly by
talking, but mainly by listening, to the people who "brought all their
sorrows and perplexities" to her, "as one who had herself gone through
a mighty trouble"(200-01).
Hawthorne married in 1842, the year after his sojourn at Brook
Farm. His new residence was the Old Manse in Concord, where he and
Sophia were to live for several years. Originally a parsonage, the Old
Manse had been home to several writers before Hawthorne. The late
Dr. Ezra Ripley had written over 3000 sermons in the house, and more
recently Ralph Waldo Emerson had composed "Nature" there, an essay
that had helped galvanize the American Transcendental movement.
In general, Hawthorne remained unconvinced by the views of the
Transcendentalists, whose writings were regularly published by Marga-
ret Fuller, first editor of The Dial, a Transcendentalist organ. Their
vision was far too hopeful, even idealistic, to satisfY a skeptic holding an
essentially tragic view of the hwnan condition. But, perhaps because
Sophia and her sister were sympathetic to the movement, Hawthorne
was cordial with his Transcendentalist neighbors when they called at his
house to visit. He was especially friendly with Emerson and Thoreau,
with whom he took long walks and conversed.
The years at the Old Manse were productive ones for Hawthorne:
he published Grandfather's Chair, a child's history of New England; a
second edition of Twice-Told Tales; and a new volwne of stories, entitled
Mosses from an Old Manse, that was favorably reviewed by Herman
Melville. And these were pleasant domestic years for Hawthorne as
well: he and Sophia were happy together and their happiness was
compounded, in 1843, by the birth of their first child, Una. But,
pleasant and productive as the times were, they certainly were not
prosperous; the family became so poor, in fact, that at one point in 1844
Sophia and Una had to go and live with the Peabodys while Hawthorne
returned, briefly, to live with his mother- just to enable him to pay the
bills.
8 BIOGRAPHICAL AND HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
told that the source, or historical prototype, for Hester Prynne was
neither a Quaker woman harshly dealt with by William Hathorne nor a
woman prosecuted as a witch by his son John. We are told, rather, that
the source for Hester Prynne was Hester Prynne herself. Hawthorne
writes that "one idle and rainy day," while he was "poking and burrow-
ing into the heaped-up rubbish in the corner" of the ·salem Custom-
House, where he served as Surveyor, he came upon "a small package,
carefully done up in a piece of ancient yellow parchment'' (41) contain-
ing the papers of a long-dead predecessor, an "ancient Surveyor'' named
Jonathan Pue.
But the object that most drew my attention, in the mysterious
package, was a certain affair of fine red cloth, much worn and
faded. There were traces about it of gold embroidery, which,
however, was greatly frayed and defaced.... This rag of scarlet
cloth, - for time, and wear, and a sacrilegious moth, had reduced
it to little other than a rag, - on careful examination, assumed the
shape of a letter. It was the capital letter A. By an accurate measure-
ment, each limb proved to be precisely three inches and a quarter in
length. (42-43)
Shortly after discovering the letter, Hawthorne claims, he learned the
story behind the letter by reading the papers of Surveyor Pue.
In these "foolscap sheets, containing many particulars respecting
the life and conversation of one Hester Prynne" (43), Hawthorne
claims that he
found the record of [the] doings and sufferings of this singular
woman, for most of which the reader is referred to the story
entitled "THE ScARLET LETTER"; and it should be borne carefully
in mind, that the main facts of that story are authorized and
authenticated by the document of Mr. Surveyor Pue. The original
papers, together with the scarlet letter itself, - a most curious
relic, - are still in my possession, and shall be freely exhibited to
whomsoever ... may desire a sight of them. (43-44)
Much of what Hawthorne has to tell us in ''The Custom-House" is
undeniably true. ''The election of General Taylor to the Presidency"
(49), like Hawthorne's subsequent dismissal from his position as Sur-
veyor, is historical fact. Even Hawthorne's depiction of a fellow-
Custom-House worker, the "permanent Inspector'' (32) who "pos-
sessed no higher attribute" than the "ability to recollect the good
dinners" he had enjoyed (33), must have seemed realistic to Haw-
thorne's contemporaries. Indeed, it prompted a cry of foul from the
12 BIOGRAPHICAL AND HISI'ORICAL BACKGROUND
editor of the Salem Register, who wrote that the "chapter'' about the
''venerable gendeman" whose "chief crime seems to be that he loves a
good dinner" managed to "obliterate ... whatever sympathy was felt
for Hawthorne's removal from office."
But the business about finding the "package, carefully done up in
... ancient yellow parchment" is altogether a different story. It is, we
may assume, just that: a fictional story with the semblance of biographi-
cal and historical truth. Hawthorne's mid-nineteenth-century audience
was a practical one not entirely accustomed to the "imaginings" of a
"romance-writer," yet even among these early readers there must have
been those who saw through Hawthorne's account of finding the scarlet
letter and the story of the "real" Hester Prynne. In ''The Custom-
House," Hawthorne describes the half-real, half-unreal world of a
familiar room lit by moonlight: "the floor of our familiar room," he
points out, "become[ s] a neutral territory, somewhere between the real
world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet,
and each imbue itself with the nature of the other'' (46). The story of
finding Surveyor Pue's package is a kind of frame story that brings
about that meeting, bridging the gap between fact and fiction by
imbuing a biographical introduction with a touch of fantasy - and the
fiction that follows with the air of fact.
This is not to say that Hawthorne entirely made up the idea of a
woman sentenced to wear a scarlet letter, only that he didn't find such a
letter in the Custom-House where he worked nor did he come upon any
historical account of a real woman named Hester Prynne. Instead, what
he may well have discovered, either while working at the Custom-
House or earlier, in the solitary decade following his graduation from
college, was Joseph B. Felt's 1827 volume The Annals ofSalem. There he
would have read that, in 1694, a law was passed requiring adulterers to
wear a two-inch-high capital A, colored to stand out against the back-
ground of the wearer's clothes.
As Charles Boewe and Murray G. Murphey point out in their essay
"Hester Prynne in History'' (1960), Hawthorne may also have read the
story of Goodwife Mendame of Duxbury in old historical annals of the
region (Goodwife Mendame was found guilty of adultery, whipped,
and forced "to weare a badge with the capital letters AD cut in the doth
upon her left sleeve"). Finally, he may even have come across the
following entry in the records of the Salem Quarterly Court for Novem-
ber 1688: "Hester Craford, for fornication with John Wedg, as she
confessed, was ordered to be severely whipped and that security be
BIOGRAPHICAL AND HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 13
given to save the town from the charge of keeping the child" (Boewe
and Murphey, 202-03). There would seem to be, then, no end of
sources for Hester Prynne in the annals of the period of Hawthorne's
first (and second) ancestor.
Among those historical models not yet discussed and deserving of
particular attention is the famous seventeenth-century antinomian Anne
Hutchinson. Antinomians rejected the Puritan concept of religion as
the observance of institutionalized precepts; rather than stressing God's
will as something taught and enforced by a church, they believed that
God reveals Himself through the inner experience of the individual.
Instead of believing that good actions prove the doer to be predestined
for salvation, antinomians argued that faith alone is necessary. Anne
Hutchinson argued that she did not need Puritan elders to teach her
true from false and right from wrong, because divine guidance and
inspiration could be attained through intuition and faith. Nor did she
accept the authority of the Puritan elders. As Michael Colacurcio puts it
in his ground-breaking article, "Footsteps of Ann Hutchinson" (1972),
her "proclamation - variously worded at various times ... - that 'the
chosen of man' are not necessarily 'the sealed of heaven,' " brought
about "a state of near civil war in Boston" ( 47l).
In the opening scene of The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne describes,
next to the prison door from which Hester Prynne steps with her three-
month-old baby, "a wild rose-bush" contrasting sharply with the "bee-
tle-browed and gloomy front'' of the prison and the rusty "ponderous
iron-work" of its door. "Whether it had merely survived out of the stern
old wilderness, ... or whether ... it had sprung up under the footsteps
of the sainted Ann Hutchinson, as she entered the prison-door, - we
shall not take upon us to determine" (54), the narrator adds. What
Hawthorne has determined through these remarks about the rose bush
and the imprisoned (but saintly) Anne Hutchinson is that we regard
Anne Hutchinson and Hester Prynne in the same light.
Hester's "crime" against society is sexual, not theological as was
Mrs. Hutchinson's. And yet, on a deeper level, the two women are
much the same. In her thinking, Hester, like Anne Hutchinson, ques-
tions the authority and desirability of her Puritan society, wondering at
one point whether "the whole system of society'' ( 134) shouldn't be
torn down and rebuilt, and deciding at another that "in Heaven's own
time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole
relation between man and woman on a surer ground" (201). And, of
course, by her one antisocial act, Hester, like Anne Hutchinson, has
14 BIOGRAPHICAL AND HISI'ORICAL BACKGROUND
disregarded, and implicitly denied the authority of, the Puritan moral
law. ''The world's law was no law for her mind," we read of Hester
(133). What the narrator gives us in those nine words is a short
definition of antinomianism.
Using essays Hawthorne himself wrote about Anne Hutchinson's
life and times, Colacurcio draws still more parallels between the literary
character and the historical figure. He points out, for instance, that
although Hutchinson's transgression was not sexual, it was often spo-
ken of in such terms: her influence was seen as "seductive," her ideas as
illegitimate children and even monstrous births. Colacurcio also sug-
gests an interesting link between Hester's secret accomplice, Arthur
Dimmesdale, and John Cotton, the great Boston minister and scholar.
As Hawthorne himself points out in his own historical sketches, Cotton
ultimately sat in judgment of Anne Hutchinson, even though she, who
had been his parishioner both in England and in New England, always
believed him to be a partner in, and to some extent even a source for, her
alleged heresies. (And yet "Cotton alone, Hawthorne reports, is except-
ed from her final denunciations.") Cotton was historically the theologi-
cal partner ofJohn Wilson; together those two are known to have urged
public confessions not unlike the one Wilson and Dimmesdale try to pry
from Hester Prynne. "Like Ann Hutchinson," Colacurcio observes,
"Hester Prynne is an extraordinary woman who falls afoul of a theo-
cratic and male-dominated society; and the problems which cause
them to be singled out for exemplary punishment both begin in a
special sort of relationship with a pastor who is one of the acknowl-
edged intellectual and spiritual leaders of that society'' (461).
who are not central characters in his story. It is also Snow's History that
Hawthorne usually relies on when there is any doubt about the facts.
Snow is the only historian Hawthorne could have read who says that the
Boston jailer of the period was named Brackett; every other historian
mentions a jailer named Parker. Hawthorne, however, follows Snow's
lead, referring, in Chapter 4 of The Scarlet Letter, to "Master Brackett,
the jailer'' (69).
Even some of the bizarre events in the novel are grounded in
Snow's History. The great letter A that appears in the sky on the night of
John Winthrop's death is based loosely on Snow's account of the night
after John Cotton died, a night when "Strange and alarming signs
appeared in the heavens." As for the more ordinary details of Haw-
thorne's story, many are even more closely based on the History.
Perhaps the most impressive example Ryskamp gives of Haw-
thorne's attention to historical detail and reliance on Snow is the
comparison he makes between Snow's description of a great, early
Boston house and Hawthorne's description of Governor Bellingham's
mansion, to which, in the seventh chapter, Hester takes a pair of gloves
she has fringed and embroidered. To indicate ''what was considered
elegance of architecture ... a century and a half ago," Snow refers to a
''wooden building," the outside "covered with plastering'' in which the
"broken glass" of "common junk bottles" had been used to "make a
hard surface on the mortar .... This surface was also variegated with
ornamental squares, diamonds, and flowers-de-luce" (Ryskamp
264-65). And how does Hawthorne describe the Governor's house? As
a "large wooden house, ... the walls being overspread with a kind of
stucco, in which fragments of broken glass were plentifully inter-
mixed .... It was further decorated with strange and seemingly cabalis-
tic figures and diagrams" (91).
What is most interesting about Ryskamp's article, though, is that,
in addition to showing how often Hawthorne tells the historian's
version of the truth in writing The Scarlet Letter, it also recounts how
often Hawthorne distorts the truth as represented by Snow, Cotton
Mather, and others. Governor Winthrop actually died in March 1649;
Hawthorne's novel says he died in May. Governor Bellingham would
not have been governor at the novel's opening - not, that is, if seven
years were to pass between Hester's day and Dimmesdale's night on the
scaffold, as the novel indicates. Mistress Ann Hibbins, the self-styled
witch of the novel, is a historical figure Hawthorne would have read
about in Snow. (She was condemned and executed for witchcraft in
1655.) But she was not, according to Snow, Governor Bellingham's
16 BIOGRAPHICAL AND HISfORICAL BACKGROUND
In the pages that follow, you will find interpretations ofThe Scarlet
Letter written since Baym wrote "Nathaniel Hawthorne and His
Mother," Colacurcio wrote "Footsteps of Ann Hutchinson," Rys-
kamp wrote ''The New England Sources of The Scarlet Letter," and
Reynolds wrote "The Scarlet Letter and Revolutions Abroad."
Some of these essayists go further than Reynolds in suggesting that
The Scarlet Letter was a reflection by Hawthorne on the history of his
own day. In his new-historicist reading of the novel, Sacvan Bercovitch
argues that Hawthorne was warning against not only the dangers of the
European revolutions but also of the developing feminist revolution
and the radicalism of the abolitionists.
Other critics whose work is found in the pages ahead would have it
that, when we read The Scarlet Letter, our own historical period and its
concerns become implicated as well, turning the text into one in which
we end up reading about our own times as well as those of Hawthorne
and Hester, of Polk and the Puritans.
But before that composite of critical material comes the text itself, a
complicated mix of biography and history, of seventeenth- and nine-
teenth-century history, and, most important, of history and the imagi-
nation that brings it to life. It is to that text that you should now turn.
WORKS CITED
Baym, Nina. "Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Mother: A Biographical
Speculation." American Literature 54 (1982): l-27.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND HISTORICAL BACKGROUND I9
PREFACE
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE
prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of ourself, but
still keep the inmost Me behind its veil. To this extent and within these
limits, an author, methinks, may be autobiographical, without violating
either the reader's rights or his own.
It will be seen, likewise, that this Custom-House sketch has a
certain propriety, of a kind always recognized in literature, as explaining
how a large portion of the following pages came into my possession,
and as offering proofs of the authenticity of a narrative therein con-
tained. This, in fact, - a desire to put myself in my true position as
editor, or very little more, of the most prolix among the tales that make
up my volume,- this, and no other, is my true reason for assuming a
personal relation with the public. In accomplishing the main purpose, it
has appeared allowable, by a few extra touches, to give a faint represen-
tation of a mode of life not heretofore described, together with some of
the characters that move in it, among whom the author happened to
make one.
western side of the Old Manse. But now, should you go thither to seek
him, you would inquire in vain for the Loco-foco Surveyor. The besom
of reform has swept him out of office; and a worthier successor wears
his dignity and pockets his emoluments.
This old town of Salem - my native place, though I have dwelt
much away from it, both in boyhood and maturer years - possesses, or
did possess, a hold on my affections, the force of which I have never
realized during my seasons of actual residence here. Indeed, so far as its
physical aspect is concerned, with its flat, unvaried surface, covered
chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of which pretend to architec-
tural beauty,- its irregularity, which is neither picturesque nor quaint,
but only tame, - its long and lazy street, lounging wearisomely
through the whole extent of the peninsula, wjth Gallows Hill and New
Guinea at one end, and a view of the alms-house at the other, - such
being the features of my native town, it would be quite as reasonable to
form a sentimental attachment to a disarranged checkerboard. And yet,
though invariably happiest elsewhere, there is within me a feeling for
old Salem, which, in lack of a better phrase, I must be content to call
affection. The sentiment is probably assignable to the deep and aged
roots which my family has struck into the soil. It is now nearly two
centuries and a quarter since the original Briton, the earliest emigrant of
my name, made his appearance in the wild and forest-bordered settle-
ment, which has since become a city. And here his descendants have
been born and died, and have mingled their earthy substance with the
soil; until no small portion of it must necessarily be akin to the mortal
frame wherewith, for a little while, I walk the streets. In part, therefore,
the attachment which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust
for dust. Few of my countrymen can know what it is; nor, as frequent
transplantation is perhaps better for the stock, need they consider it
desirable to know.
But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality. The figure of that
first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky gran-
deur, was present to my boyish imagination, as far back as I can
remember. It still haunts me, and induces a sort of home-feeling with
the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the present phase of the
town. I seem to have a stronger claim to a residence here on account of
this grave, bearded, sable-cloaked, and steeple-crowned progenitor,-
who came so early, with his Bible and his sword, and trode the unworn
street with such a stately port, and made so large a figure, as a man of
war and peace, - a stronger claim than for myself, whose name is
THE CUSfOM-HOUSE 27
ly,- but yet returned, like the bad half-penny; or as if Salem were for
me the inevitable centre of the universe. So, one fine morning, I
ascended the flight of granite steps, with the President's commission in
my pocket, and was introduced to the corps of gentlemen who were to
aid me in my weighty responsibility, as chief executive officer of the
Custom-House.
I doubt greatly- or rather, I do not doubt at all- whether any
public functionary of the United States, either in the civil or military
line, has ever had such a patriarchal body of veterans under his orders as
myself. The whereabouts of the Oldest Inhabitant was at once settled,
when I looked at them. For upwards of twenty years before this epoch,
the independent position of the Collector had kept the Salem Custom-
House out of the whirlpool of political vicissitude, which makes the
tenure of office generally so fragile. A soldier,- New England's most
distinguished soldier, - he stood firmly on the pedestal of his gallant
services; and, himself secure in the wise liberality of the successive
administrations through which he had held office, he had been the
safety of his subordinates in many an hour of danger and heart-quake.
General Miller was radically conservative; a man over whose kindly
nature habit had no slight influence; attaching himself strongly to
familiar faces, and with difficulty moved to change, even when change
might have brought unquestionable improvement. Thus, on taking
charge of my department, I found few but aged men. They were ancient
sea-captains, for the most part, who, after being tost on every sea, and
standing up sturdily against life's tempestuous blast, had finally drifted
into this quiet nook; where, with little to disturb them, except the
periodical terrors of a Presidential election, they one and all acquired a
new lease of existence. Though by no means less liable than their fellow-
men to age and infirmity, they had evidently some talisman or other that
kept death at bay. Two or three of their number, as I was assured, being
gouty and rheumatic, or perhaps bed-ridden, never dreamed of making
their appearance at the Custom-House, during a large part of the year;
but, after a torpid winter, would creep out into the warm sunshine of
May or June, go lazily about what they termed duty, and, at their own
leisure and convenience, betake themselves to bed again. I must plead
guilty to the charge of abbreviating the official breath of more than one
of these venerable servants of the republic. They were allowed, on my
representation, to rest from their arduous labors, and soon after-
wards - as if their sole principle oflife had been zeal for their country's
service; as I verily believe it was - withdrew to a better world. It is a
pious consolation to me, that, through my interference, a sufficient
30 THE SCARLET LETTER
space was allowed them for repentance of the evil and corrupt practices,
into which, as a matter of course, every Custom-House officer must be
supposed to fall. Neither the front nor the back entrance of the Custom-
House opens on the road to Paradise.
The greater part of my officers were Whigs. It was well for their
venerable brotherhood, that the new Surveyor was not a politician, and,
though a faithful Democrat in principle, neither received nor held his
office with any reference to political services. Had it been otherwise, -
had an active politician been put into this influential post, to assume the
easy task of making head against a Whig Collector, whose infirmities
withheld him from the personal administration of his office, - hardly a
man of the old corps would have drawn the breath of official life, within
a month after the exterminating angel had come up the Custom-House
steps. According to the received code in such matters, it would have
been nothing short of duty, in a politician, to bring every one of those
white heads under the axe of the guillotine. It was plain enough to
discern, that the old fellows dreaded some such discourtesy at my hands.
It pained, and at the same time amused me, to behold the terrors that
attended my advent; to see a furrowed cheek, weather-beaten by half a
century of storm, tum ashy pale at the glance of so harmless an
individual as myself; to detect, as one or another addressed me, the
tremor of a voice, which, in long-past days, had been wont to bellow
through a speaking-trumpet, hoarsely enough to frighten Boreas him-
self to silence. They knew, these excellent old persons, that, by all
established rule, - and, as regarded some of them, weighed by their
own lack of efficiency for business, - they ought to have given place to
younger men, more orthodox in politics, and altogether fitter than
themselves to serve our common Uncle. I knew it too, but could never
quite find in my heart to act upon the knowledge. Much and deservedly
to my own discredit, therefore, and considerably to the detriment of my
official conscience, they continued, during my incumbency, to creep
about the wharves, and loiter up and down the Custom-House steps.
They spent a good deal of time, also, asleep in their accustomed comers,
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 mouldy jokes, that had grown to be
pass-words and countersigns among them.
The discovery was soon made, I imagine, that the new Surveyor
had no great harm in him. So, with lightsome hearts, and the happy
consciousness of being usefully employed, - in their own behalf, at
least, if not for our beloved country,- these good old gentlemen went
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE 31
sou1s, who had gathered nothing worth preservation from their varied
experience of life. They seemed to have flung away all the golden
grain of practical wisdom, which they had enjoyed so many opportu-
nities of harvesting, and most carefully to have stored their memories
with the husks. They spoke with far more interest and unction of their
morning's breakfast, or yesterday's, to-day's, or to-morrow'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 father of the Custom-House- the patriarch, not only of this
little squad of officials, but, I am bold to say, of the respectable body of
tide-waiters all over the United States- was a certain permanent In-
spector. He might tru1y be termed a legitimate son of the revenue
system, dyed in the wool, or rather, born in the purple; since his sire, a
Revolutionary colonel, and formerly collector of the port, had created
an office for him, and appointed him to fill it, at a period of the early
ages which few living men can now remember. This Inspector, when I
first knew him, was a man of fourscore years, or thereabouts, and
certainly one of the most wonderful specimens of winter-green that you
wou1d be likely to discover in a lifetime's search. With his florid cheek,
his compact figure, smartly arrayed in a bright-buttoned blue coat, his
brisk and vigorous step, and his hale and hearty aspect, altogether, he
seemed - not young, indeed - but a kind of new contrivance of
Mother Nature in the shape of man, whom age and infirmity had no
business to touch. His voice and laugh, which perpetually reechoed
through the Custom-House, had nothing of the tremulous quaver and
cackle of an old man's utterance; they came strutting out of his lungs,
like the crow of a cock, or the blast of a clarion. Looking at him merely
as an animal, - and there was very little else to look at, - he was a
most satisfactory object, from the thorough healthfulness and whole-
someness of his system, and his capacity, at that extreme age, to enjoy
all, or nearly all, the delights which he had ever aimed at, or conceived
of. The careless security of his life in the Custom-House, on a regu1ar
income, and with but slight and infrequent apprehensions of removal,
had no doubt contributed to make time pass lightly over him. The
original and more potent causes, however, lay in the rare perfection of
his animal nature, the moderate proportion of intellect, and the very
trifling admixture of moral and spiritual ingredients; these latter quali-
ties, indeed, being in barely enough measure to keep the old gentleman
from walking on all-fours. He possessed no power of thought, no depth
of feeling, no troublesome sensibilities; nothing, in short, but a few
commonplace instincts, which, aided by the cheerful temper that grew
THE CUSfOM-HOUSE 33
inevitably out of his physical well-being, did duty very respectably, and
to general acceptance, in lieu of a heart. He had been the husband of
three wives, all long since dead; the father of twenty children, most of
whom, at every age of childhood or maturity, had likewise returned to
dust. Here, one would suppose, might have been sorrow enough to
imbue the sunniest. disposition, through and through, with a sable
tinge. Not so with our old Inspector! One brief sigh sufficed to carry off
the entire burden of these dismal reminiscences. The next moment, he
was as ready for sport as any unbreeched infant; far readier than the
Collector's junior clerk, who, at nineteen years, was much the elder and
graver man of the two.
I used to watch and study this patriarchal personage with, I think,
livelier curiosity than any other form of humanity there presented to my
notice. He was, in truth, a rare phenomenon; so perfect in one point of
view; so shallow, so delusive, so impalpable, such an absolute nonentity,
in every other. My conclusion was that he had no soul, no heart, no
mind; nothing, as I have already said, but instincts; and yet, withal, so
cunningly had the few materials of his character been put together, that
there was no painful perception of deficiency, but, on my part, an entire
contentment with what I found in him. It might be difficult -
and it was so- to conceive how he should exist hereafter, so earthy and
sensuous did he seem; but surely his existence here, admitting that it
was to terminate with his last breath, had been not unkindly given; with
no higher moral responsibilities than the beasts of the field, but with a
larger scope of enjoyment than theirs, and with all their blessed immu-
nity from the dreariness and duskiness of age.
One point, in which he had vastly the advantage over his four-
footed brethren, was his ability to recollect the good dinners which it
had made no small portion of the happiness of his life to eat. His
gourmandism was a highly agreeable trait; and to hear him talk of roast-
meat was as appetizing as a pickle or an oyster. As he possessed no
higher attribute, and neither sacrificed nor vitiated any spiritual endow-
ment by devoting all his energies and ingenuities to subserve the delight
and profit of his maw, it always pleased and satisfied me to hear him
expatiate on fish, poultry, and butcher's meat, and the most eligible
methods of preparing them for the table. His reminiscences of good
cheer, however ancient the date of the actual banquet, seemed to bring
the savor of pig or turkey under one's very nostrils. There were flavors
on his palate, that had lingered there not less than sixty or seventy years,
and were still apparently as fresh as that of the muttonchop which he
had just devoured for his breakfast. I have heard him smack his lips over
THE SCARLET LETTER
dinners, every guest at which, except himself, had long been food for
worms. It was marvellous to observe how the ghosts of bygone meals
were continually rising up before him; not in anger or retribution, but
as if grateful for his former appreciation, and seeking to reduplicate an
endless series of enjoyment, at once shadowy and sensual. A tenderloin
of beef, a hind-quarter of veal, a spare-rib of pork, a particular chicken,
or a remarkably praiseworthy turkey, which had perhaps adorned his
board in the days of the elder Adams, would be remembered; while all
the subsequent experience of our race,. and all the events that brightened
or darkened his individual career, had gone over him with as little
permanent effect as the passing breeze. 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 handsaw.
But it is time to quit this sketch; on which, however, I should be
glad to dwell at considerably more length, because, of all men whom I
have ever known, this individual was fittest to be a Custom-House
officer. Most persons, owing to causes which I may not have space to
hint at, suffer moral detriment from this peculiar mode of life. The old
Inspector was incapable of it, and, were he to continue in office to the
end of time, would be just as good as he was then, and sit down to
dinner with just as good an appetite.
There is one likeness, without which my gallery of Custom-House
portraits would be strangely incomplete; but which my comparatively
few opportunities for observation enable me to sketch only in the merest
outline. It is that of the Collector, our gallant old General, who, after his
brilliant military service, subsequently to which he had ruled over a wild
Western territory, had come hither, twenty years before, to spend the
decline of his varied and honorable life. The brave soldier had already
numbered, nearly or quite, his threescore years and ten, and was pursu-
ing the remainder of his earthly march, burdened with infirmities which
even the martial music of his own spirit-stirring recollections could do
little towards lightening. The step was palsied now, that had been
foremost in the charge. It was only with the assistance of a servant, and
by leaning his hand heavily on the iron balustrade, that he could slowly
and painfully ascend the Custom-House steps, and, with a toilsome
progress across the floor, attain his customary chair beside the fireplace.
There he used to sit, gazing with a somewhat dim serenity of aspect at
the figures that came and went; amid the rustle of papers, the adminis-
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE 35
tering of oaths, the discussion of business, and the casual talk of the
office; all which sounds and circumstances seemed but indistinctly to
impress his senses, and hardly to make their way into his inner sphere of
contemplation. His countenance, in this repose, was mild and kindly. If
his notice was sought, an expression of courtesy and interest gleamed
out upon his features; proving that there was light within him, and that
it was only the outward medium of the intellectual lamp that obstructed
the rays in their passage. The closer you penetrated to the substance of
his mind, the sounder it appeared. When no longer called upon to
speak, or listen, either of which operations cost him an evident effort,
his face would briefly subside into its former not uncheerful quietude. It
was not painful to behold this look; for, though dim, it had not the
imbecility of decaying age. The framework of his nature, originally
strong and massive, was not yet crumbled into ruin.
To observe and define his character, however, under such disad-
vantages, was as difficult a task as to trace out and build up anew, in
imagination, an old fortress, like Ticonderoga, from a view of its gray
and broken ruins. Here and there, perchance, the walls may remain
almost complete; but elsewhere may be only a shapeless mound, cum-
brous with its very strength, and overgrown, through long years of
peace and neglect, with grass and alien weeds.
Nevertheless, looking at the old warrior with affection,- for,
slight as was the communication between us, my feeling towards him,
like that of all bipeds and quadrupeds who knew him, might not
improperly be termed so, - I could discern the main points of his
portrait. It was marked with the noble and heroic qualities which
showed it to be not by a mere accident, but of good right, that he had
won a distinguished name. His spirit could never, I conceive, have been
characterized by an uneasy activity; it must, at any period of his life,
have required an impulse to set him in motion; but, once stirred up,
with obstacles to overcome, and an adequate object to be attained, it
was not in the man to give out or fail. The heat that had formerly
pervaded his nature, and which was not yet extinct, was never of the
kind that flashes and flickers in a blaze, but, rather, a deep, red glow, as
of iron in a furnace. Weight, solidity, firmness; this was the expression
of his repose, even in such decay as had crept untimely over him, at the
period of which I speak. But I could imagine, even then, that, under
some excitement which should go deeply into his consciousness, -
roused by a trumpet-peal, loud enough to awaken all of his energies that
were not dead, but only slumbering, - he was yet capable of flinging
off his infirmities like a sick man's gown, dropping the staff of age to
THE SCARLET LETTER
they must perforce seek elsewhere the dexterity which is not in them.
Thus, by an inevitable necessity, as a magnet attracts steel-filings, so did
our man of business draw to himself the difficulties which everybody
met with. With an easy condescension, and kind forbearance towards
our stupidity,- which, to his order of mind, must have seemed little
short of crime, - would he forthwith, by the merest touch of his finger,
make the incomprehensible as clear as daylight. The merchants valued
him not less than we, his esoteric friends. His integrity was perfect; it
was a law of nature with him, rather than a choice or a principle; nor can
it be otherwise than the main condition of an intellect so remarkably
clear and accurate as his, to be honest and regular in the administration
of affairs. A stain on his conscience, as to any thing that came within the
range of his vocation, would trouble such a man very much in the same
way, though to a far greater degree, than an error in the balance of an
account, or an ink-blot on the fair page of a book of record. Here, in a
word, - and it is a rare instance in my life, - I had met with a person
thoroughly adapted to the situation which he held.
Such were some of the people with whom I now found myself
connected. I took it in good part at the hands of Providence, that I was
thrown into a position so little akin to my past habits; and set myself
seriously to gather from it whatever profit was to be had. After my
fellowship of toil and impracticable schemes, with the dreamy brethren
of Brook Farm; after living for three years within the subtile influence of
an intellect like Emerson's; after those wild, free days on the Assabeth,
indulging fantastic speculations beside our fire of fallen boughs, with
Ellery Channing; after talking with Thoreau about pine-trees and In-
dian relics, in his hermitage at Walden; after growing fastidious by
sympathy with the classic refinement of Hillard's culture; after becom-
ing imbued with poetic sentiment at Longfellow's hearth-stone; - it
was time, at length, that I should exercise other faculties of my nature,
and nourish myself with food for which I had hitherto had little
appetite. Even the old Inspector was desirable, as a change of diet, to a
man who had known Alcott. I looked upon it as an evidence, in some
measure, of a system naturally well balanced, and lacking no essential
part of a thorough organization, that, with such associates to remember,
I could mingle at once with men of altogether different qualities, and
never murmur at the change.
Literature, its exertions and objects, were now of little moment in
my regard. I cared not, at this period, for books; they were apart from
me. Nature, - except it were human nature, - the nature that is devel-
oped in earth and sky, was, in one sense, hidden from me; and all the
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE 39
Derby,- old Billy Gray,- old Simon Forrester,- and many another
magnate in his day; whose powdered head, however, was scarcely in the
tomb, before his mountain-pile of wealth began to dwindle. The
founders of the greater part of the families which now compose the
aristocracy of Salem might here be traced, from the petty and ob-
scure beginnings of their traffic, at periods generally much posterior to
the Revolution, upward to what their children look upon as long-
established rank.
Prior to the Revolution, there is a dearth of records; the earlier
documents and archives of the Custom-House having, probably, been
carried off to Halifax, when all the King's officials accompanied the
British army in its flight from Boston. It has often been a matter of
regret with me; for, going back, perhaps, to the days of the Protector-
ate, those papers must have contained many references to forgotten or
remembered men, and to antique customs, which would have affected
me with the same pleasure as when I used to pick up Indian arrow-heads
in the field near the Old Manse.
But, one idle and rainy day, it was my fortune to make a discovery
of some little interest. Poking and burrowing into the heaped-up
rubbish in the corner; unfolding one and another document, and
reading the names of vessels that had long ago foundered at sea or rotted
at the wharves, and those of merchants, never heard of now on 'Change,
nor very readily decipherable on their mossy tombstones; glancing at
such matters with the saddened, weary, half-reluctant interest which we
bestow on the corpse of dead activity,- and exerting my fancy, slug-
gish with little use, to raise up from these dry bones an image of the old
town's brighter aspect, when India was a new region, and only Salem
knew the way thither,- I chanced to lay my hand on a small package,
carefully done up in a piece of ancient yellow parchment. This envelope
had the air of an official record of some period long past, when clerks
engrossed their stiff and formal chirography on more substantial materi-
als than at present. There was something about it that quickened an
instinctive curiosity, and made me undo the faded red tape, that tied up
the package, with the sense that a treasure would here be brought to
light. Unbending the rigid folds of the parchment cover, I found it to be
a commission, under the hand and seal of Governor Shirley, in favor of
one Jonathan Pue, as Surveyor of his Majesty's Customs for the port of
Salem, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. I remembered to have read
(probably in Felt's Annals) a notice of the decease of Mr. Surveyor Pue,
about fourscore years ago; and likewise, in a newspaper of recent times,
an account of the digging up of his remains in the little grave-yard of St.
42 THE SCARLET LETTER
entrance, and back again. Great were the weariness and annoyance of
the old Inspector and the Weighers and Gaugers, whose slumbers were
disturbed by the unmercifully lengthened tramp of my passing and
returning footsteps. Remembering their own former habits, they used
to say that the Surveyor was walking the quarter-deck. They probably
fancied that my sole object - and, indeed, the sole object for which a
sane man could ever put himself into voluntary motion- was, to get an
appetite for dinner. And to say the truth, an appetite, sharpened by the
east-wind that generally blew along the passage, was the only valuable
result of so much indefatigable exercise. So little adapted is the atmo-
sphere of a Custom-House to the delicate harvest of fancy and sensibil-
ity, that, had I remained there through ten Presidencies yet to come, I
doubt whether the tale of ''The Scarlet Letter'' would ever have been
brought before the public eye. My imagination was a tarnished mirror.
It would not reflect, or only with miserable dimness, the figures with
which I did my best to people it. The characters of the narrative would
not be warmed and rendered malleable, by any heat that I could kindle
at my intellectual forge. They would take neither the glow of passion
nor the tenderness of sentiment, but retained all the rigidity of dead
corpses, and stared me in the face with a fixed and ghastly grin of
contemptuous defiance. ''What have you to do with us?" that expression
seemed to say. ''The little power you might once have possessed over the
tribe of unrealities is gone! You have bartered it for a pittance of the
public gold. Go, then, and earn your wages!" In short, the almost torpid
creatures of my own fancy twitted me with imbecility, and not without
fair occasion.
It was not merely during the three hours and a half which Uncle
Sam claimed as his share of my daily life, that this wretched numbness
held possession of me. It went with me on my sea-shore walks and
rambles into the country, whenever- which was seldom and reluc-
tantly- I bestirred myself to seek that invigorating charm of Nature,
which used to give me such freshness and activity of thought, the
moment that I stepped across the threshold of the Old Manse. The same
torpor, as regarded the capacity for intellectual effort, accompanied me
home, and weighed upon me in the chamber which I most absurdly
termed my study. Nor did it quit me, when, late at night, I sat in the
deserted parlour, lighted only by the glimmering coal-fire and the
moon, striving to picture forth imaginary scenes, which, the next day,
might flow out on the brightening page in many-hued description.
If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it might
well be deemed a hopeless case. Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling so
THE SCARLET LETTER
white upon the carpet, and showing all its figures so distinctly,-
making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a morning or
noontide visibility, - is a medium the most suitable for a romance-
writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests. There is the little
domestic scenery of the well-known apartment; the chairs, with each its
separate individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a work-basket, a
volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the book-case; the
picture on the wall; - all these details, so completely seen, are so
spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem to lose their actual
substance, and become things of intellect. Nothing is too small or too
trifling to undergo this change, and acquire dignity thereby. A child's
shoe; the doll, seated in her little wicker carriage; the hobby-horse;-
whatever, in a word, has been used or played with, during the day, is
now invested with a quality of strangeness and remoteness, though still
almost as vividly present as by daylight. Thus, therefore, the floor of our
familiar room has become a neutral territory, somewhere between the
real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may
meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other. Ghosts might
enter here, without affrighting us. It would be too much in keeping
with the scene to excite surprise, were we to look about us and discover
a form, beloved, but gone hence, now sitting quietly in a streak of this
magic moonshine, with an aspect that would make us doubt whether it
had returned from afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside.
The somewhat dim coal-fire has an essential influence in producing
the effect which I would describe. It throws its unobtrusive tinge
throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness upon the walls and ceiling,
and a reflected gleam from the polish of the furniture. This warmer light
mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the moonbeams, and com-
municates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of human tenderness to
the forms which fancy summons up. It converts them from snow-
images into men and women. Glancing at the looking-glass, we be-
hold - deep within its haunted verge - the smouldering glow of the
half-extinguished anthracite, the white moonbeams on the floor, and a
repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove
farther from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative. Then, at such an
hour, and with this scene before him, if a man, sitting all alone, cannot
dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try
to write romances.
But, for myself, during the whole of my Custom-House experi-
ence, moonlight and sunshine, and the glow of firelight, were just alike
in my regard; and neither of them was of one whit more avail than the
THE CUSI'OM-HOUSE 47
ever touches it should look well to himself, or he may find the bargain
to go hard against him, involving, if not his sow, yet many of its bet-
ter attributes; its sturdy force, its courage and constancy, its truth, its
self-reliance, and all that gives the emphasis to manly character.
Here was a fine prospect in the distance! Not that the Surveyor
brought the lesson home to himself, or admitted that he could be so
utterly undone, either by continuance in office, or ejectment. Yet my
reflections were not the most comfortable. I began to grow melancholy
and restless; continually prying into my mind, to discover which of its
poor properties were gone, and what degree of detriment had already
accrued to the remainder. I endeavoured to calculate how much longer I
could stay in the Custom-House, and yet go forth a man. To confess the
truth, it was my greatest apprehension, - as it would never be a
measure of policy to tum out so quiet an individual as myself, and it
being hardly in the nature of a public officer to resign, - it was my chief
trouble, therefore, that I was likely to grow gray and decrepit in the
Surveyorship, and become much such another animal as the old Inspec-
tor. Might it not, in the tedious lapse of official life that lay before me,
finally be with me as it was with this venerable friend, - 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? A dreary look-
forward this, for a man who felt it to be the best definition of happiness
to live throughout the whole range of his faculties and sensibilities! But,
all this while, I was giving myself very unnecessary alarm. Providence
had meditated better things for me than I could possibly imagine for
myself.
A remarkable event of the third year of my Surveyorship - to
adopt the tone of "P.P."- was the election of General Taylor to the
Presidency. It is essential, in order to form a complete estimate of the
advantages of official life, to view the incumbent at the in-coming of a
hostile administration. His position is then one of the most singularly
irksome, and, in every contingency, disagreeable, that a wretched mortal
can possibly occupy; with seldom an alternative of good, on either
hand, although what presents itself to him as the worst event may very
probably be the best. But it is a strange experience, to a man of pride and
sensibility, to know that his interests are within the control of individ-
uals who neither love nor understand him, and by whom, since one or
the other must needs happen, he would rather be injured than obliged.
Strange, too, for one who has kept his calmness throughout the contest,
to observe the bloodthirstiness that is developed in the hour of triumph,
50 THE SCARLET LETTER
and to be conscious that he is himself among its objects! There are few
uglier traits of human nature than this tendency - which I now wit-
nessed in men no worse than their neighbours - to grow cruel, merely
because they possessed the power of inflicting harm. If the guillotine, as
applied to office-holders, were a literal fact, instead of one of the most
apt of metaphors, it is my sincere belief, that the active members of the
victorious party were sufficiently excited to have chopped off all our
heads, and have thanked Heaven for the opportunity! It appears to
me - who have been a calm and curious observer, as well in victory as
defeat - that this fierce and bitter spirit of malice and revenge has never
distinguished the many triumphs of my own party as it now did that of
the Whigs. The Democrats take the offices, as a general rule, because
they need them, and because the practice of many years has made it the
law of political warfare, which, unless a different system be proclaimed,
it were weakness and cowardice to murmur at. But the long habit of
victory has made them generous. They know how to spare, when they
see occasion; and when they strike, the axe may be sharp, indeed, but its
edge is seldom poisoned with ill-will; nor is it their custom ignomin-
iously to kick the head which they have just struck off.
In short, unpleasant as was my predicament, at best, I saw much
reason to congratulate myself that I was on the losing side, rather than
the triumphant one. If, heretofore, I had been none of the warmest of
partisans, I began now, at this season of peril and adversity, to be pretty
acutely sensible with which party my predilections lay; nor was it
without something like regret and shame, that, according to a reason-
able calculation of chances, I saw my own prospect of retaining office to
be better than those of my Democratic brethren. But who can see an
inch into futurity, beyond his nose? My own head was the first that fell!
The moment when a man's head drops off is seldom or never, I am
inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life. Nevertheless,
like the greater part of our misfortunes, even so serious a contingency
brings its remedy and consolation with it, if the sufferer will but make
the best, rather than the worst, of the accident which has befallen him.
In my particular case, the consolatory topics were close at hand, and,
indeed, had suggested themselves to my meditations a considerable time
before it was requisite to use them. In view of my previous weariness of
office, and vague thoughts of resignation, my fortune somewhat resem-
bled that of a person who should entertain an idea of committing
suicide, and, altogether beyond his hopes, meet with the good hap to be
murdered. In the Custom-House, as before in the Old Manse, I had
THE CUSfOM-HOUSE 51
spent three years; a term long enough to rest a weary brain; long
enough to break off old intellectual habits, and make room for new
ones; long enough, and too long, to have lived in an unnatural state,
doing what was really of no advantage nor delight to any human being,
and withholding myself from toil that would, at least, have stilled an
unquiet impulse in me. Then, moreover, as regarded his unceremonious
ejectment, the late Surveyor was not altogether ill-pleased to be recog-
nized by the Whigs as an enemy; since his inactivity in political af-
fairs, - his tendency to roam, at will, in that broad and quiet field
where all mankind may meet, rather than confine himself to those
narrow paths where brethren of the same household must diverge from
one another, -had sometimes made it questionable with his brother
Democrats whether he was a friend. Now, after he had won the crown
of martyrdom, (though with no longer a head to wear it on,) the point
might be looked upon as settled. Finally, little heroic as he was, it
seemed more decorous to be overthrown in the downfall of the party
with which he had been content to stand, than to remain a forlorn
survivor, when so many worthier men were falling; and, at last, after
subsisting for four years on the mercy of a hostile administration, to be
compelled then to define his position anew, and claim the yet more
humiliating mercy of a friendly one.
Meanwhile, the press had taken up my affair, and kept me, for a
week or two, careering through the public prints, in my decapitated
state, like Irving's Headless Horseman; ghastly and grim, and longing
to be buried, as a politically dead man ought. So much for my figurative
self. The real human being, all this time, with his head safely on his
shoulders, had brought himself to the comfortable conclusion, that
every thing was for the best; and, making an investment in ink, paper,
and steel-pens, had opened his long-disused writing-desk, and was again
a literary man.
Now it was, that the lucubrations of my ancient predecessor, Mr.
Surveyor Pue, came into play. Rusty through long idleness, some little
space was requisite before my intellectual machinery could be brought
to work upon the tale, with an effect in any degree satisfactory. Even
yet, though my thoughts were ultimately much absorbed in the task, it
wears, to my eye, a stern and sombre aspect; too much ungladdened by
genial sunshine; too little relieved by the tender and familiar influences
which soften almost every scene of nature and real life, and, undoubt-
edly, should soften every picture of them. This uncaptivating effect is
perhaps due to the period of hardly accomplished revolution, and still
52 THE SCARLET LETTER
forefathers - there has never been, for me, the genial atmosphere
which a literary man requires, in order to ripen the best harvest of his
mind. I shall do better amongst other faces; and these familiar ones, it
need hardly be said, will do just as well without me.
It may be, however,- 0, transporting and triumphant thought!
- that the great-grandchildren of the present race may sometimes think
kindly of the scribbler of bygone days, when the antiquary of days to
come, among the sites memorable in the town's history, shall point out
the locality ofTHE ToWN-PUMP!
I. The Prison-Door
A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments and gray,
steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods,
and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the
door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron
spikes.
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
soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In
accordance with this nile, it may safely be assumed that the forefathers
of Boston had built the first prison-house, somewhere in the vicinity of
Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-
ground, on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which
subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulChres in
the old church-yard of King's Chapel. Certain it is, that, some fifteen or
twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was
already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which
gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust
on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than
any thing else in the new world. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed
never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and
between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much
overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-peru, and such unsightly
vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that
had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But, on
54- THE SCARLET LETTER
one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild
rose-bush, covered, in this month ofJune, with its delicate gems, which
might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the
prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth
to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be
kind to him.
This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history;
but whether it had merely survived out of the stem old wilderness, so
long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshad-
owed it, - or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had
sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson, as she
entered the prison-door, - we shall not take upon us to determine.
Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now
about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do other-
wise than pluck one of its flowers and present it to the reader. It may
serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be
found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human
frailty and sorrow.
either case, there was very much the same solemnity of demeanour on
the part of the spectators; as befitted a people amongst whom religion
and law were almost identical, and in whose character both were so
thoroughly interfused, that the mildest and the severest acts of public
discipline were alike made venerable and awful. Meagre, indeed, and
cold, was the sympathy that a transgressor might look for, from such
bystanders at the scaffold. On the other hand, a penalty which, in our
days, would infer a degree of mocking infamy and ridicule, might then
be invested with almost as stem a dignity as the punishment of death
itsel£
It was a circumstance to be noted, on the summer morning when
our story begins its course, that the women, of whom there were several
in the crowd, appeared to take a peculiar interest in whatever penal
infliction might be expected to ensue. The age had not so much
refinement, that any sense of impropriety restrained the wearers of
petticoat and farthingale from stepping forth into the public ways, and
wedging their not unsubstantial persons, if occasion were, into the
throng nearest to the scaffold at an execution. Morally, as well as
materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old
English birth and breeding, than in their fair descendants, separated
from them by a series of six or seven generations; for, throughout that
chain of ancestry, every successive mother has transmitted to her child a
fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical
frame, if not a character of less force and solidity, than her own. The
women, who were now standing about the prison-door, stood within
less than half a century of the period when the man-like Elizabeth had
been the not altogether unsuitable representative of the sex. They were
her countrywomen; and the beef and ale of their native land, with a
moral diet not a whit more refined, entered largely into their composi-
tion. The bright morning sun, therefore, shone on broad shoulders and
well-developed busts, and on round and ruddy cheeks, that had ripened
in the far-off island, and had hardly yet grown paler or thinner in the
atmosphere of New England. There was, moreover, a boldness and
rotundity of speech among these matrons, as most of them seemed to
be, that would startle us at the present day, whether in respect to its
purport or its volume of tone.
"Goodwives," said a hard-featured dame of fifty, "I'll tell yea piece
of my mind. It would be greatly for the public behoof, if we women,
being of mature age and church-members in good repute, should have
the handling of such malefactresses as this Hester Prynne. What think
THE SCARLET LETTER
ye, gossips? If the hussy stood up for judgment before us five, that are
now here in a knot together, would she come off with such a sentence as
the worshipful magistrates have awarded? Marry, I trow not!"
"People say," said another, "that the Reverend Master Dimmes-
dale, her godly pastor, takes it very grievously to heart that such a
scandal should have come upon his congregation."
''The magistrates are God-fearing gentlemen, but merciful over-
much, - that is a truth," added a third autumnal matron. "At the very
least, they should have put the brand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne's
forehead. Madam Hester would have winced at that, I warrant me. But
she, - the naughty baggage, - little will she care what they put upon
the bodice of her gown! Why, look you, she may cover it with a brooch,
or such like heathenish adornment, and so walk the streets as brave as
ever!"
"Ah, but," interposed, more softly, a young wife, holding a child by
the hand, "let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be always
in her heart."
''What do we talk of marks and brands, whether on the bodice of
her gown, or the flesh of her forehead?" cried another female, the ugliest
as well as the most pitiless of these self-constituted judges. "This woman
has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die. 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!"
"Mercy on us, goodwife," exclaimed a man in the crowd, "is there
no virtue in woman, save what springs from a wholesome fear of the
gallows? That is the hardest word yet! Hush, now, gossips; for the lock
is turning in the prison-door, and here comes Mistress Prynne herself."
The door of the jail being flung open from within, there appeared,
in the first place, like a black shadow emerging into the sunshine, the
grim and grisly presence of the town-beadle, with a sword by his side
and his staff of office in his hand. This personage prefigured and
represented in his aspect the whole dismal severity of the Puritanic code
of law, which it was his business to administer in its final and closest
application to the offender. Stretching forth the official staff in his left
hand, he laid his right upon the shoulder of a young woman, whom he
thus drew forward; until, on the threshold of the prison-door, she
repelled him, by an action marked with natural dignity and force of
character, and stepped into the open air, as if by her own free-will. She
bore in her arms a child, a baby of some three months old, who winked
and turned aside its little face from the too vivid light of day; because its
THE MARKET-PLACE 57
upon her bosom. It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the
ordinary relations with humanity, and inclosing her in a sphere by
herself.
"She hath good skill at her needle, that's certain," remarked one of
the female spectators; "but did ever a woman, before this brazen hussy,
contrive such a way of showing it! Why, gossips, what is it but to laugh
in the faces of our godly magistrates, and make a pride out of what they,
worthy gentlemen, meant for a punishment?"
"It were well," muttered the most iron-visaged of the old dames, "if
we stripped Madam Hester's rich gown off her dainty shoulders; and as
for the red letter, which she hath stitched so curiously, I'll bestow a rag
of mine own rheumatic flannel, to make a titter one!"
"0, peace, neighbours, peace!" whispered their youngest compan-
ion. "Do not let her hear you! Not a stitch in that embroidered letter,
but she has felt it in her heart."
The grim beadle now made a gesture with his staff.
"Make way, good people, make way, in the King's name," cried he.
"Open a passage; and, I promise ye, Mistress Prynne shall be set where
man, woman, and child may have a fair sight of her brave apparel,
from this time till an hour past meridian. A blessing on the righteous
Colony of the Massachusetts, where iniquity is dragged out into the
sunshine! Come along, Madam Hester, and show your scarlet letter in
the market-place!"
A lane was forthwith opened through the crowd of spectators.
Preceded by the beadle, and attended by an irregular procession of
stern-browed men and unkindly-visaged women, Hester Prynne set
forth towards the place appointed for her punishment. A crowd of eager
and curious schoolboys, understanding little of the matter in hand,
except that it gave them a half-holiday, ran before her progress, turning
their heads continually to stare into her face, and at the winking baby in
her arms, and at the ignominious letter on her breast. It was no great
distance, in those days, from the prison-door to the market-place.
Measured by the prisoner's experience, however, it might be reckoned a
journey of some length; for, haughty as her demeanour was, she
perchance underwent an agony from every footstep of those that
thronged to see her, as if her heart had been flung into the street for
them all to spurn and trample upon. In our nature, however, there is a
provision, alike marvellous and merciful, that the sufferer should never
know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly
by the pang that rankles after it. With almost a serene deportment,
THE MARKET-PLACE 59
therefore, Hester Prynne passed through this portion of her ordeal, and
came to a sort of scaffold, at the western extremity of the market-place.
It stood nearly beneath the eaves of Boston's earliest church, and
appeared to be a fixture there.
In fact, this scaffold constituted a portion of a penal machine,
which now, for two or three generations past, has been merely historical
and traditionary among us, but was held, in the old time, to be as
effectual an agent in the promotion of good citizenship, as ever was the
guillotine among the terrorists of France. It was, in short, the platform
of the pillory; and above it rose the framework of that instrument of
discipline, so fashioned as to confine the human head in its tight grasp,
and thus hold it up to the public gaze. The very ideal of ignominy was
embodied and made manifest in this contrivance of wood and iron.
There can be no outrage, methinks, against our common nature, -
whatever be the delinquencies of the individual, - no outrage more
flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his face for shame; as it was the
essence of this punishment to do. In Hester Prynne's instance, however,
as not unfrequently in other cases, her sentence bore, that she should
stand a certain time upon the platform, but without undergoing that
gripe about the neck and confinement of the head, the proneness to
which was the most devilish characteristic of this ugly engine. Knowing
well her part, she ascended a flight of wooden steps, and was thus
displayed to the surrounding multitude, at about the height of a man's
shoulders above the street.
Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might
have seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien,
and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image
of Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious painters have vied with
one another to represent; something which should remind him, indeed,
but only by contrast, of that sacred image of sinless motherhood, whose
infant was to redeem the world. Here, there was the taint of deepest sin
in the most sacred quality of human life, working such effect, that the
world was only the darker for this woman's beauty, and the more lost
for the infant that she had borne.
The scene was not without a mixture of awe, such as must always
invest the spectacle of guilt and shame in a fellow-creature, before
society shall have grown corrupt enough to smile, instead of shudder-
ing, at it. The witnesses of Hester Prynne's disgrace had not yet passed
beyond their simplicity. They were stem enough to look upon her
death, had that been the sentence, without a murmur at its severity, but
60 THE SCARLET LETTER
had none of the heartlessness of another social state, which would find
only a theme for jest in an exhibition like the present. Even had there
been a disposition to tum the matter into ridicule, it must have been
repressed and overpowered by the solemn presence of men no less
dignified than the Governor, and several of his counsellors, a judge, a
general, and the ministers of the town; all of whom sat or stood in a
balcony of the meeting-house, looking down upon the platform. When
such personages could constitute a part of the spectacle, without risking
the majesty or reverence of rank and office, it was safely to be inferred
that the infliction of a legal sentence would have an earnest and effectual
meaning. Accordingly, the crowd was sombre and grave. The unhappy
culprit sustained herself as best a woman might, under the heavy weight
of a thousand unrelenting eyes, all fastened upon her, and concentred at
her bosom. It was almost intolerable to be borne. Of an impulsive and
passionate nature, she had fortified herself to encounter the stings and
venomous stabs of public contumely, wreaking itself in every variety of
insult; but there was a quality so much more terrible in the solemn
mood of the popular mind, that she longed rather to behold all those
rigid countenances contorted with scornful merriment, and herself the
object. Had a roar of laughter burst from the multitude, - each man,
each woman, each little shrill-voiced child, contributing their individual
parts, - Hester Prynne might have repaid them all with a bitter and
disdainful smile. But, under the leaden infliction which it was her doom
to endure, she felt, at moments, as if she must needs shriek out with the
full power of her lungs, and cast herself from the scaffold down upon
the ground, or else go mad at once.
Yet there were intervals when the whole scene, in which she was
the most conspicuous object, seemed to vanish from her eyes, or, at
least, glimmered indistinctly before them, like a mass of imperfectly
shaped and spectral images. Her mind, and especially her memory, was
preternaturally active, and kept bringing up other scenes than this
roughly hewn street of a little town, on the edge of the Western
wilderness; other faces than were lowering upon her from beneath the
brims of those steeple-crowned hats. Reminiscences, the most trifling
and immaterial, passages of infancy and school-days, sports, childish
quarrels, and the little domestic traits of her maiden years, came swarm-
ing back upon her, intermingled with recollections of whatever was
gravest in her subsequent life; one picture precisely as vivid as another;
as if all were of similar importance, or all alike a play. Possibly, it was an
instinctive device ofher spirit, to relieve itself, by the exhibition of these
THE MARKET-PLACE 61
"I pray you, good Sir," said he, ''who is this woman?- and
wherefore is she here set up to public shame?"
"You must needs be a stranger in this region, friend," answered the
townsman, looking curiously at the questioner and his savage compan-
ion; "else you would surely have heard of Mistress Hester Prynne, and
her evil doings. She hath raised a great scandal, I promise you, in godly
Master Dimmesdale's church."
"You say truly," replied the other. "I am a stranger, and have been a
wanderer, sorely against my will. I have met with grievous mishaps by
sea and land, and have been long held in bonds among the heathen-folk,
to the southward; and am now brought hither by this Indian, to be
redeemed out of my captivity. Will it please you, therefore, to tell me of
Hester Prynne's, - have I her name rightly? - of this woman's of-
fences, and what has brought her to yonder scaffold?"
''Truly, friend, and methinks it must gladden your heart, after your
troubles and sojourn in the wilderness," said the townsman, "to find
yourself, at length, in a land where iniquity is searched out, and pun-
ished in the sight of rulers and people; as here in our godly New
England. Yonder woman, Sir, you must know, was the wife of a certain
learned man, English by birth, but who had long dwelt in Amsterdam,
whence, some good time agone, he was minded to cross over and cast in
his lot with us of the Massachusetts. To this purpose, he sent his wife
before him, remaining himself to look after some necessary affairs.
Marry, good Sir, in some two years, or less, that the woman has been a
dweller here in Boston, no tidings have come of this learned gentleman,
Master Prynne; and his young wife, look you, being left to her own
misguidance - - - "
"Ah! - aha! - I conceive you," said the stranger, with a bitter
smile. "So learned a man as you speak of should have learned this too in
his books. And who, by your favor, Sir, may be the father of yonder
babe - it is some three or four months old, I should judge - which
Mistress Prynne is holding in her arms?"
"Of a truth, friend, that matter remaineth a riddle; and the Daniel
who shall expound it is yet a-wanting," answered the townsman.
"Madam Hester absolutely refuseth to speak, and the magistrates have
laid their heads together in vain. Peradventure the guilty one stands
looking on at this sad spectacle, unknown of man, and forgetting that
God sees him."
"The learned man," observed the stranger, with another smile,
"should come himself to look into the mystery."
"It behooves him well, if he be still in life," responded the town~
THE SCARLET LETTER
godly youth, that he should deal with you, here in the face of Heaven,
and before these wise and upright rulers, and in hearing of all the
people, as touching the vileness and blackness of your sin. Knowing
your natural temper better than I, he could the better judge what
arguments to use, whether of tenderness or terror, such as might prevail
over your hardness and obstinacy; insomuch that you should no longer
hide the name of him who tempted you to this grievous fall. But he
opposes to me, (with a young man's oversoftness, albeit wise beyond his
years,) that it were wronging the very nature of woman to force her to
lay open her heart's secrets in such broad daylight, and in presence of so
great a multitude. Truly, as I sought to convince him, the shame lay in
the commission of the sin, and not in the showing of it forth. What say
you to it, once again, brother Dimmesdale? Must it be thou or I that
shall deal with this poor sinner's soul?"
There was a murmur among the dignified and reverend occupants
of the balcony; and Governor Bellingham gave expression to its pur-
port, speaking in an authoritative voice, although tempered with respect
towards the youthful clergyman whom he addressed.
"Good Master Dimmesdale," said he, "the responsibility of this
woman's soul lies greatly with you. It behooves you, therefore, to exhort
her to repentance, and to confession, as a proof and consequence thereof."
The directness of this appeal drew the eyes of the whole crowd
upon the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale; a young clergyman, who had
come from one of the great English universities, bringing all the learn-
ing of the age into our wild forestland. His eloquence and religious
fervor had already given the earnest of high eminence in his profession.
He was 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, express-
ing both nervous sensibility and a vast power of self-restraint. Notwith-
standing his high native gifts and scholar-like attainments, there was an
air about this young minister, - an apprehensive, a startled, a half-
frightened look, - as of a being who felt himself quite astray and at a
loss in the pathway of human existence, and could only be at ease in
some seclusion of his own. Therefore, so far as his duties would permit,
he trade in the shadowy by-paths, and thus kept himself simple and
childlike; coming forth, when occasion was, with a freshness, and
fragrance, and dewy purity of thought, which, as many people said,
affected them like the speech of an angel.
Such was the young man whom the Reverend Mr. Wilson and the
THE RECOGNITION
cried the Reverend Mr. Wilson, more harshly than before. "That little
babe hath been gifted with a voice, to second and confirm the counsel
which thou hast heard. Speak out the name! That, and thy repentance,
may avail to take the scarlet letter off thy breast."
"Never!" replied Hester Prynne, looking, not at Mr. Wilson, but
into the deep and troubled eyes of the younger clergyman. "It is too
deeply branded. Ye cannot take it off. And would that I might endure
his agony, as well as mine!"
"Speak, woman!" said another voice, coldly and sternly, proceed-
ing from the crowd about the scaffold. "Speak; and give your child a
father!"
"I will not speak!" answered Hester, turning pale as death, but
responding to this voice, which she too surely recognized. "And my
child must seek a heavenly Father; she shall never know an earthly one!"
"She will not speak!" murmured Mr. Dimmesdale, who, leaning
over the balcony, with his hand upon his heart, had awaited the result of
his appeal. He now drew back, with a long respiration. "Wondrous
strength and generosity of a woman's heart! She will not speak!"
Discerning the impracticable state of the poor culprit's mind, the
elder clergyman, who had carefully prepared himself for the occasion,
addressed to the multitude a discourse on sin, in all its branches, but
with continual reference to the ignominious letter. So forcibly did he
dwell upon this symbol, for the hour or more during which his periods
were rolling over the people's heads, that it assumed new terrors in their
imagination, and seemed to derive its scarlet hue from the flames of the
infernal pit. Hester Prynne, meanwhile, kept her place upon the pedestal
of shame, with glazed eyes, and an air of weary indifference. She had
borne, that morning, all that nature could endure; and as her tempera-
ment was not of the order that escapes from too intense suffering by a
swoon, her spirit could only shelter itself beneath a stony crust of
insensibility, while the faculties of animal life remained entire. In this
state, the voice of the preacher thundered remorselessly, but unavail-
ingly, upon her ears. The infant, during the latter portion of her ordeal,
pierced the air with its wailings and screams; she strove to hush it,
mechanically, but seemed scarcely to sympathize with its trouble. With
the same hard demeanour, she was led back to prison, and vanished
from the public gaze within its iron-clamped portal. It was whispered,
by those who peered after her, that the scarlet letter threw a lurid gleam
along the dark passage-way of the interior.
THE INTERVIEW
him face to face with the woman, whose absorbed notice of him, in the
crowd, had intimated so close a relation between himself and her. His
first care was given to the child; whose cries, indeed, as she lay writhing
on the trundle-bed, made it of peremptory necessity to postpone all
other business to the task of soothing her. He examined the infant
carefully, and then proceeded to unclasp a Ieathem case, which he took
from beneath his dress. It appeared to contain certain medical prepara-
tions, one of which he mingled with a cup of water.
"My old studies in alchemy," observed he, "and my sojourn, for
above a year past, among a people well versed in the kindly properties of
simples, have made a better physician of me than many that claim the
medical degree. Here, woman! The child is yours,- she is none of
mine, - neither will she recognize my voice or aspect as a father's.
Administer this draught, therefore, with thine own hand."
Hester repelled the offered medicine, at the same time gazing with
strongly marked apprehension into his face.
''Wouldst thou avenge thyself on the innocent babe?" whispered
she.
"Foolish woman!" responded the physician, half coldly, half sooth-
ingly. ''What should ail me to harm this misbegotten and miserable
babe? The medicine is potent for good; and were it my child, - yea,
mine own, as well as thine!- I could do no better for it."
As she still hesitated, being, in fact, in no reasonable state of mind,
he took the infant in his arms, and himself administered the draught. It
soon proved its efficacy, and redeemed the leech's pledge. The moans of
the little patient subsided; its convulsive tossings gradually ceased; and
in a few moments, as is the custom of young children after relief from
pain, it sank into a profound and dewy slumber. The physician, as he
had a fair right to be termed, next bestowed his attention on the mother.
With calm and intent scrutiny, he felt her pulse, looked into her eyes, -
a gaze that made her heart shrink and shudder, because so familiar, and
yet so strange and cold,- and, finally, satisfied with his investigation,
proceeded to mingle another draught.
"I know not Lethe or Nepenthe," remarked he; "but I have learned
many new secrets in the wilderness, and here is one of them, - a recipe
that an Indian taught me, in requital of some lessons of my own, that
were as old as Paracelsus. Drink it! It may be less soothing than a sinless
conscience. That I cannot give thee. But it will calm the swell and
heaving of thy passion, like oil thrown on the waves of a tempestuous
sea."
THE INfERVIEW 71
Hester Prynne clasped her hands over her heart, dreading lest he should
read the secret there at once.
''Thou wilt not reveal his name? Not the less he is mine," resumed
he, with a look of confidence, as if destiny were at one with him. "He
bears no letter of infamy wrought into his garment, as thou dost; but I
shall read it on his heart. Yet fear not for him! Think not that I shall
interfere with Heaven's own method of retribution, or, to my own loss,
betray him to the gripe of human law. Neither do thou imagine that I
shall contrive aught against his life; no, nor against his fame, if, as I
judge, he be a man of fair repute. Let him live! Let him hide himself in
outward honor, if he may! Not the less he shall be mine!"
''Thy acts are like mercy," said Hester, bewildered and appalled.
"But thy words interpret thee as a terror!"
"One thing, thou that wast my wife, I would enjoin upon thee,"
continued the scholar. "Thou hast kept the secret of thy paramour.
Keep, likewise, mine! There are none in this land that know me. Breathe
not, to any human soul, that thou didst ever call me husband! Here, on
this wild outskirt of the earth, I shall pitch my tent; for, elsewhere a
wanderer, and isolated from human interests, I find here a woman, a
man, a child, amongst whom and myself there exist the closest liga-
ments. No matter whether of love or hate; no matter whether of right or
wrong! Thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me. My home is
where thou art, and where he is. But betray me not!"
''Wherefore dost thou desire it?" inquired Hester, shrinking, she
hardly knew why, from this secret bond. ''Why not announce thyself
openly, and cast me off at once?"
"It may be," he replied, "because I will not encounter the dishonor
that besmirches the husband of a faithless woman. It may be for other
reasons. Enough, it is my purpose to live and die unknown. Let,
therefore, thy husband be to the world as one already dead, and of
whom no tidings shall ever come. Recognize me not, by word, by sign,
by look! Breathe not the secret, above all, to the man thou wottest of.
Shouldst thou fail me in this, beware! His fame, his position, his life,
will be in my hands. Beware!"
"I will keep thy secret, as I have his," said Hester.
"Swear it!" rejoined he.
And she took the oath.
"And now, Mistress Prynne," said old Roger Chillingworth, as he
was hereafter to be named, "I leave thee alone; alone with thy infant,
and the scarlet letter! How is it, Hester? Doth thy sentence bind thee to
THE SCARLET LETTER
wear the token in thy sleep? Art thou not afraid of nightmares and
hideous dreams?"
"Why dost thou smile so at me?" inquired Hester, troubled at the
expression of his eyes. "Art thou like the Black Man that haunts the
forest round about us? Hast thou enticed me into a bond that will prove
the ruin of my soul?"
"Not thy soul," he answered, with another smile. "No, not thine!"
in compositions of this kind, did not fail to extend its influence over our
stern progenitors, who had cast behind them so many fashions which it
might seem harder to dispense with. Public ceremonies, such as ordina-
tions, the installation of magistrates, and all that could give majesty to
the forms in which a new government manifested itself to the people,
were, as a matter of policy, marked by a stately and well-conducted
ceremonial, and a sombre, but yet a studied magnificence. Deep ruffs,
painfully wrought bands, and gorgeously embroidered gloves, were all
deemed necessary to the official state of men assuming the reins of
power; and were readily allowed to individuals dignified by rank or
wealth, even while sumptuary laws forbade these and similar extrava-
gances to the plebeian order. In the array of funerals, too, - whether
for the apparel of the dead body, or to typify, by manifold emblematic
devices of sable cloth and snowy lawn, the sorrow of the survivors, -
there was a frequent and characteristic demand for such labor as Hester
Prynne could supply. Baby-linen- for babies then wore robes of
state - afforded still another possibility of toil and emolument.
By degrees, nor very slowly, her handiwork became what would
now be termed the fashion. Whether from commiseration for a woman
of so miserable a destiny; or from the morbid curiosity that gives a
fictitious value even to common or worthless things; or by whatever
other intangible circumstance was then, as now, sufficient to bestow, on
some persons, what others might seek in vain; or because Hester really
filled a gap which must otherwise have remained vacant; it is certain that
she had ready and fairly requited employment for as many hours as she
saw fit to occupy with her needle. Vanity, it may be, chose to mortify
itself, by putting on, for ceremonials of pomp and state, the garments
that had been wrought by her sinful hands. Her needle-work was seen
on the ruff of the Governor; military men wore it on their scarfs, and the
minister on his band; it decked the baby's little cap; it was shut up, to be
mildewed and moulder away, in the coffins of the dead. But it is not
recorded that, in a single instance, her skill was called in aid to embroi-
der the white veil which was to cover the pure blushes of a bride. The
exception indicated the ever relendess vigor with which society frowned
upon her sin.
Hester sought not to acquire any thing beyond a subsistence, of the
plainest and most ascetic description, for herself, and a simple abun-
dance for her child. Her own dress was of the coarsest materials and the
most sombre hue; with only that one ornament, - the scarlet letter, -
which it was her doom to wear. The child's attire, on the other hand,
was distinguished by a fanciful, or, we might rather say, a fantastic
THE SCARLET LETTER
ingenuity, which served, indeed, to heighten the airy charm that early
began to develop itself in the little girl, but which appeared to have also
a deeper meaning. We may speak further of it hereafter. Except for that
small expenditure in the decoration of her infant, Hester bestowed all
her superfluous means in charity, on wretches less miserable than
herself, and who not unfrequently insulted the hand that fed them.
Much of the time, which she might readily have applied to the better
efforts of her art, she employed in making coarse garments for the poor.
It is probable that there was an idea of penance in this mode of
occupation, and that she offered up a real sacrifice of enjoyment, in
devoting so many hours to such rude handiwork. She had in her nature
a rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic, - a taste for the gorgeously
beautiful, which, save in the exquisite productions of her needle, found
nothing else, in all the possibilities of her life, to exercise itself upon.
Women derive a pleasure, incomprehensible to the other sex, from the
delicate toil of the needle. To Hester Prynne it might have been a mode
of expressing, and therefore soothing, the passion of her life. Like all
other joys, she rejected it as sin. This morbid meddling of conscience
with an immaterial matter betokened, it is to be feared, no genuine and
stedfast penitence, but something doubtful, something that might be
deeply wrong, beneath.
In this manner, Hester Prynne came to have a part to perform in
the world. With her native energy of character, and rare capacity, it
could not entirely cast her off, although it had set a mark upon her, more
intolerable to a woman's heart than that which branded the brow of
Cain. In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing
that made her feel as if she belonged to it. Every gesture, every word,
and even the silence of those with whom she came in contact, implied,
and often expressed, that she was banished, and as much alone as if she
inhabited another sphere, or communicated with the common nature
by other organs and senses than the rest of human kind. She stood apart
from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the
familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt; no more
smile with the household joy, nor mourn with the kindred sorrow; or,
should it succeed in manifesting its forbidden sympathy, awakening
only terror and horrible repugnance. These emotions, in fact, and its
bitterest scorn besides, seemed to be the sole portion that she retained in
the universal heart. It was not an age of delicacy; and her position,
although she understood it well, and was in little danger of forgetting it,
was often brought before her vivid self-perception, like a new anguish,
HESTER AT HER NEEDLE 79
by the rudest touch upon the tenderest spot. The poor, as we have
already said, whom she sought out to be the objects of her bounty, often
reviled the hand that was stretched forth to succor them. Dames of
elevated rank, likewise, whose doors she entered in the way of her
occupation, were accustomed to distil drops of bitterness into her heart;
sometimes through that alchemy of quiet malice, by which women can
concoct a subtile poison from ordinary trifles; and sometimes, also, by a
coarser expression, that fell upon the sufferer's defenceless breast like a
rough blow upon an ulcerated wound. Hester had schooled herself long
and well; she never responded to these attacks, save by a flush of
crimson that rose irrepressibly over her pale cheek, and again subsided
into the depths of her bosom. She was patient, - a martyr, indeed, -
but she forbore to pray for her enemies; lest, in spite of her forgiving
aspirations, the words of the blessing should stubbornly twist them-
selves into a curse.
Continually, and in a thousand other ways, did she feel the innu-
merable throbs of anguish that had been so cunningly contrived for her
by the undying, the ever-active sentence of the Puritan tribunal. Clergy-
men paused in the street to address words of exhortation, that brought a
crowd, with its mingled grin and frown, around the poor, sinful
woman. If she entered a church, trusting to share the Sabbath smile of
the Universal Father, it was often her mishap to find herself the text of
the discourse. She grew to have a dread of children; for they had
imbibed from their parents a vague idea of something horrible in this
dreary woman, gliding silently through the town, with never any
companion but one only child. Therefore, first allowing her to pass,
they pursued her at a distance with shrill cries, and the utterance of a
word that had no distinct purport to their own minds, but was none the
less terrible to her, as proceeding from lips that babbled it unconscious-
ly. It seemed to argue so wide a diffusion of her shame, that all nature
knew of it; it could have caused her no deeper pang, had the leaves of
the trees whispered the dark story among themselves, - had the sum-
mer breeze murmured about it, - had the wintry blast shrieked it
aloud! Another peculiar torture was felt in the gaze of a new eye. When
strangers looked curiously at the scarlet letter,- and none ever failed to
do so, - they branded it afresh into Hester's soul; so that, oftentimes,
she could scarcely refrain, yet always did refrain, from covering the
symbol with her hand. But then, again, an accustomed eye had likewise
its own anguish to inflict. Its cool stare of familiarity was intolerable.
From first to last, in short, Hester Prynne had always this dreadful
80 THE SCARLET LETTER
agony in feeling a human eye upon the token; the spot never grew
callous; it seemed, on the contrary, to grow more sensitive with daily
torture.
But sometimes, once in many days, or perchance in many months,
she felt an eye - a human eye - upon the ignominious brand, that
seemed to give a momentary relief, as if half of her agony were shared.
The next instant, back it all rushed again, with still a deeper throb of
pain; for, in that brief interval, she had sinned anew. Had Hester sinned
alone?
Her imagination was somewhat affected, and, had she been of a
softer moral and intellectual fibre, would have been still more so, by the
strange and solitary anguish of her life. 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 sin in other hearts. She was terror-stricken by
the revelations that were thus made. What were they? Could they be
other than the insidious whispers of the bad angel, who would fain have
persuaded the struggling woman, as yet only half his victim, that the
outward guise of purity was but a lie, and that, if truth were everywhere
to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom besides
Hester Prynne's? Or, must she receive those intimations- so obscure,
yet so distinct - as truth? In all her miserable experience, there was
nothing else so awful and so loathsome as this sense. It perplexed, as
well as shocked her, by the irreverent inopportuneness of the occasions
that brought it into vivid action. Sometimes, the red infamy upon her
breast would give a sympathetic throb, as she passed near a venerable
minister or magistrate, the model of piety and justice, to whom that age
of antique reverence looked up, as to a mortal man in fellowship with
angels. "What evil thing is at hand?" would Hester say to herself. Lifting
her reluctant eyes, there would be nothing human within the scope of
view, save the form of this earthly saint! Again, a mystic sisterhood
would contumaciously assert itself, as she met the sanctified frown of
some matron, who, according to the rumor of all tongues, had kept cold
snow within her bosom throughout life. That unsunned snow in the
matron's bosom, and the burning shame on Hester Prynne's, -
what had the two in common? Or, once more, the electric thrill would
give her warning, - "Behold, Hester, here is a companion!" - and,
looking up, she would detect the eyes of a young maiden glancing at the
PEARL 81
scarlet letter, shyly and aside, and quickly averted, with a faint, chill
crimson in her cheeks; as if her purity were somewhat sullied by that
momentary glance. 0 Fiend, whose talisman was that fatal symbol,
wouldst thou leave nothing, whether in youth or age, for this poor
sinner to revere? - Such loss of faith is ever one of the saddest results of
sin. Be it accepted as a proof that all was not corrupt in this poor victim
of her own frailty, and man's hard law, that Hester Prynne yet struggled
to believe that no fellow-mortal was guilty like herself.
The vulgar, who, in those dreary old times, were always contribut-
ing a grotesque horror to what interested their imaginations, had a story
about the scarlet letter which we might readily work up into a terrific
legend. They averred, that the symbol was not mere scarlet cloth, tinged
in an earthly dye-pot, but was red-hot with infernal fire, and could be
seen glowing all alight, whenever Hester Prynne walked abroad in the
night-time. And we must needs say, it seared Hester's bosom so deeply,
that perhaps there was more truth in the rumor than our modem
incredulity may be inclined to admit.
VI. Pearl
We have as yet hardly spoken of the infant; that little creature,
whose innocent life had sprung, by the inscrutable decree of Provi-
dence, a lovely and immortal flower, out of the rank luxuriance of a
guilty passion. How strange it see):lled to the sad woman, as she watched
the growth, and the beauty that became every day more brilliant, and
the intelligence that threw its quivering sunshine over the tiny features
of this child! Her Pearl! - For so had Hester called her; not as a name
expressive of her aspect, which had nothing of the calm, white, unim-
passioned lustre that would be indicated by the comparison. But she
named the infant "Pearl," as being of great price, - purchased with all
she had, - her mother's only treasure! How strange, indeed! Man had
marked this woman's sin by a scarlet letter, which had such potent and
disastrous efficacy that no human sympathy could reach her, save it were
sinful like herself. God, as a direct consequence of the sin which man
thus punished, had given her a lovely child, whose place was on that
same dishonored bosom, to connect her parent for ever with the race
and descent of mortals, and to be finally a blessed soul in heaven! Yet
these thoughts affected Hester Prynne less with hope than apprehen-
sion. She knew that her deed had been evil; she could have no faith,
therefore, that its result would be for good. Day after day, she looked
fearfully into the child's expanding nature; ever dreading to detect some
82 THE SCARLET LETTER
dark and wild peculiarity, that should correspond with the guiltiness to
which she owed her being.
Certainly, there was no physical defect. By its perfect shape, its
vigor, and its natural dexterity in the use of all its untried limbs, the
infant was worthy to have been brought forth in Eden; worthy to have
been left there, to be the plaything of the angels, after the world's first
parents were driven out. The child had a native grace which does not
invariably coexist with faultless beauty; its attire, however simple, al-
ways impressed the beholder as if it were the very garb that precisely
became it best. But little Pearl was not clad in rustic weeds. Her mother,
with a morbid purpose that may be better understood hereafter, had
bought the richest tissues that could be procured, and allowed her
imaginative faculty its full play in the arrangement and decoration of the
dresses which the child wore, before the public eye. So magnificent was
the small figure, when thus arrayed, and such was the splendor of Pearl's
own proper beauty, shining through the gorgeous robes which might
have extinguished a paler loveliness, that there was an absolute circle of
radiance around her, on the darksome cottage-floor. And yet a russet
gown, torn and soiled with the child's rude play, made a picture of her
just as perfect. Pearl's aspect was imbued with a spell of infinite variety;
in this one child there were many children, comprehending the full
scope between the wild-flower prettiness of a peasant-baby, and the
pomp, in little, of an infant princess. Throughout all, however, there
was a trait of passion, a certain depth of hue, which she never lost; and
if, in any of her changes, she had grown fainter or paler, she would have
ceased to be herself; - it would have been no longer Pearl!
This outward mutability indicated, and did not more than fairly
express, the various properties of her inner life. Her nature appeared to
possess depth, too, as well as variety; but - or else Hester's fears
deceived her - it lacked reference and adaptation to the world into
which she was born. 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. Hester could only account for the child's character - and
even then, most vaguely and imperfectly - by recalling what she herself
had been, during that momentous period while Pearl was imbibing her
soul from the spiritual world, and her bodily frame from its material of
earth. The mother's impassioned state had been the medium through
which were transmitted to the unborn infant the rays of its moral life;
PEARL
and, however white and clear originally, they had taken the deep stains
of crimson and gold, the fiery lustre, the black shadow, and the untem-
pered light, of the intervening substance. Above all, the warfare of
Hester's spirit, at that epoch, was perpetuated in Pearl. She could
recognize her wild, desperate, defiant mood, the flightiness of her
temper, and even some of the very cloud-shapes of gloom and despon-
dency that had brooded in her heart. They were now illuminated by the
morning radiance of a young child's disposition, but, later in the day of
earthly existence, might be prolific of the storm and whirlwind.
The discipline of the family, in those days, was of a far more rigid
kind than now. The frown, the harsh rebuke, the frequent application of
the rod, enjoined by Scriptural authority, were used, not merely in the
way of punishment for actual offences, but as a wholesome regimen for
the growth and promotion of all childish virtues. Hester Prynne, never-
theless, the lonely mother of this one child, ran little risk of erring on the
side of undue severity. Mindful, however, of her own errors and
misfortunes, she early sought to impose a tender, but strict, control over
the infant immortality that was committed to her charge. But the task
was beyond her skill. After testing both smiles and frowns, and proving
that neither mode of treatment possessed any calculable influence,
Hester was ultimately compelled to stand aside, and permit the child to
be swayed by her own impulses. Physical compulsion or restraint was
effectual, of course, while it lasted. As to any other kind of discipline,
whether addressed to her mind or heart, little Pearl might or might not
be within its reach, in accordance with the caprice that ruled the
moment. Her mother, while Pearl was yet an infant, grew acquainted
with a certain peculiar look, that warned her when it would be labor
thrown away to insist, persuade, or plead. It was a look so intelligent,
yet inexplicable, so perverse, sometimes so malicious, but generally
accompanied by a wild flow of spirits, that Hester could not help
questioning, at such moments, whether Pearl was a human child. She
seemed rather an airy sprite, which, after playing its fantastic sports for a
little while upon the cottage-floor, would flit away with a mocking
smile. Whenever that look appeared in her wild, bright, deeply black
eyes, it invested her with a strange remoteness and intangibility; it was
as if she were hovering in the air and might vanish, like a glimmering
light that comes we know not whence, and goes we know not whither.
Beholding it, Hester was constrained to rush towards the child, - to
pursue the little elf in the flight which she invariably began, - to snatch
her to her bosom, with a close pressure and earnest kisses, - not so
much from overflowing love, as to assure herself that Pearl was flesh and
THE SCARLET LETTER
blood, and not utterly delusive. But Pearl's laugh, when she was caught,
though full of merriment and music, made her mother more doubtful
than before.
Heart-smitten at this bewildering and batHing spell, that so often
came between herself and her sole treasure, whom she had bought so
dear, and who was all her world, Hester sometimes burst into passion-
ate tears. Then, perhaps, - for there was no foreseeing how it might
affect her, ~ Pearl would frown, and clench her little fist, and harden
her small features into a stem, unsympathizing look of discontent. Not
seldom, she would laugh anew, and louder than before, like a thing
incapable and unintelligent of human sorrow. Or- but this more
rarely happened - she would be convulsed with a rage of grief, and sob
out her love for her mother, in broken words, and seem intent on
proving that she had a heart, by breaking it. Yet Hester was hardly safe
in confiding herself to that gusty tenderness; it passed, as suddenly as it
came. Brooding over all these matters, 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. Her only real comfort was when the
child lay in the placidity of sleep. Then she was sure of her, and tasted
hours of quiet, sad, delicious happiness; until - perhaps with that
perverse expression glimmering from beneath her opening lids - little
Pearl awoke!
How soon- with what strange rapidity, indeed!- did Pearl
arrive at an age that was capable of social intercourse, beyond the
mother's ever-ready smile and nonsense-words! And then what a happi-
ness would it have been, could Hester Prynne have heard her clear, bird-
like voice mingling with the uproar of other childish voices, and have
distinguished and unravelled her own darling's tones, amid all the
entangled outcry of a group of sportive children! But this could never
be. Pearl was a born outcast of the infantile world. An imp of evil,
emblem and product of sin, she had no right among christened infants.
Nothing was more remarkable than the instinct, as it seemed, with
which the child comprehended her loneliness; the destiny that had
drawn an inviolable circle round about her; the whole peculiarity, in
short, of her position in respect to other children. Never, since her
release from prison, had Hester met the public gaze without her. In all
her walks about the town, Pearl, too, was there; first as the babe in arms,
and afterwards as the little girl, small companion ofher mother, holding
a forefinger with her whole grasp, and tripping along at the rate of three
or four footsteps to one of Hester's. She saw the children of the
PEARL 85
variety of forms into which she threw her intellect, with no continuity,
indeed, but darting up and dancing, always in a state of preternatural
activity,- soon sinking down, as if exhausted by so rapid and feverish a
tide oflife,- and succeeded by other shapes of a similar wild energy. It
was like nothing so much as the phantasmagoric play of the northern
lights. In the mere exercise of the fancy, however, and the sportiveness
of a growing mind, there might be little more than was observable in
other children of bright faculties; except as Pearl, in the dearth of human
playmates, was thrown more upon the visionary throng which she
created. The singularity lay in the hostile feelings with which the child
regarded all these offspring of her own heart and mind. She never
created a friend, but seemed always to be sowing broadcast the dragon's
teeth, whence sprung a harvest of armed enemies, against whom she
rushed to battle. It was inexpressibly sad - then what depth of sorrow
to a mother, who felt in her own heart the cause!- to observe, in one
so young, this constant recognition of an adverse world, and so fierce a
training of the energies that were to make good her cause, in the contest
that must ensue.
Gazing at Pearl, Hester Prynne often dropped her work upon her
knees, and cried out, with an agony which she would fain have hidden,
but which made utterance for itself, betwixt speech and a groan, - "0
Father in Heaven,- if Thou art still my Father,- what is this being
which I have brought into the world!" And Pearl, overhearing the
ejaculation, or aware, through some more subtile channel, of those
throbs of anguish, would turn her vivid and beautiful little face upon her
mother, smile with sprite-like intelligence, and resume her play.
One peculiarity of the child's deportment remains yet to be told.
The very first thing which she had noticed, in her life was - what? -
not the mother's smile, responding to it, as other babies do, by that
faint, embryo smile of the little mouth, remembered so doubtfully
afterwards, and with such fond discussion whether it were indeed a
smile. By no means! But that first object of which Pearl seemed to
become aware was - shall we say it? - the scarlet letter on Hester's
bosom! One day, as her mother stooped over the cradle, the infant's eyes
had been caught by the glimmering of the gold embroidery about the
letter; and, putting up her little hand, she grasped at it, smiling, not
doubtfully, but with a decided gleam that gave her face the look of a
much older child. Then, gasping for breath, did Hester Prynne clutch
the fatal token, instinctively endeavouring to tear it away; so infinite was
the torture inflicted by the intelligent touch of Pearl's baby-hand.
Again, as if her mother's agonized gesture were meant only to make
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sport for her, did little Pearl look into her eyes, and smile! From that
epoch, except when the child was asleep, Hester had never felt a
moment's safety; not a moment's calm enjoyment of her. Weeks, it is
true, would sometimes elapse, during which Pearl's gaze might never
once be fixed upon the scarlet letter; but then, again, it would come at
unawares, like the stroke of sudden death, and always with that peculiar
smile, and odd expression of the eyes.
Once, this freakish, elfish cast came into the child's eyes, while
Hester was looking at her own image in them, as mothers are fond of
doing; and, suddenly,- for women in solitude, and with troubled
hearts, are pestered with unaccountable delusions, - she fancied that
she beheld, not her own miniature portrait, but another face in the small
black mirror of Pearl's eye. It was a face, fiend-like, full of smiling
malice, yet bearing the semblance of features that she had known full
well, though seldom with a smile, and never with malice, in them. It was
as if an evil spirit possessed the child, and had just then peeped forth in
mockery. Many a time afterwards had Hester been tortured, though less
vividly, by the same illusion.
In the afternoon of a certain summer's day, after Pearl grew big
enough to run about, she amused herself with gathering handfuls of
wild-flowers, and flinging them, one by one, at her mother's bosom;
dancing up and down, like a little elf, whenever she hit the scarlet letter.
Hester's first motion had been to cover her bosom with her clasped
hands. But, whether from pride or resignation, or a feeling that her
penance might best be wrought out by this unutterable pain, she
resisted the impulse, and sat erect, pale as death, looking sadly into little
Pearl's wild eyes. Still came the battery of flowers, almost invariably
hitting the mark, and covering the mother's breast with hurts for which
she could find no balm in this world, nor knew how to seek it in
another. At last, her shot being all expended, the child stood still and
gazed at Hester, with that little, laughing image of a fiend peeping
out- or, whether it peeped or no, her mother so imagined it- from
the unsearchable abyss of her black eyes.
"Child, what art thou?" cried the mother.
"0, I am your little Pearl!" answered the child.
But, while she said it, Pearl laughed and began to dance up and
down, with the humorsome gesticulation of a little imp, whose next
freak might be to fly up the chimney.
"Art thou my child, in very truth?" asked Hester.
Nor did she put the question altogether idly, but, for the moment,
with a portion of genuine earnestness; for, such was Pearl's wonderful
88 THE SCARLET LETTER
intelligence, that her mother half doubted whether she were not ac-
quainted with the secret spell of her existence, and might not now reveal
herself.
"Yes; I am little Pearl!" repeated the child, continuing her antics.
''Thou art not my child! Thou art no Pearl of mine!" said the
mother, half playfully; for it was often the case that a sportive impulse
came over her, in the midst of her deepest suffering. ''Tell me, then,
what thou art, and who sent thee hither?"
''Tell me, mother!" said the child, seriously, coming up to Hester,
and pressing herself close to her knees. "Do thou tell me!"
''Thy Heavenly Father sent thee!" answered Hester Prynne.
But she said it with a hesitation that did not escape the acuteness of
the child. Whether moved only by her ordinary freakishness, or because
an evil spirit prompted her, she put up her small forefinger, and touched
the scarlet letter.
"He did not send me!" cried she, positively. "I have no Heavenly
Father!"
"Hush, Pearl, hush! Thou must not talk so!" answered the mother,
suppressing a groan. "He sent us all into this world. He sent even me,
thy mother. Then, much more, thee! Or, if not, thou strange and elfish
child, whence didst thou come?"
''Tell me! Tell me!" repeated Pearl, no longer seriously, but laugh-
ing, and capering about the floor. "It is thou that must tell me!"
But Hester could not resolve the query, being herself in a dismal
labyrinth of doubt. She remembered- betwixt a smile and a shud-
der - the talk of the neighbouring townspeople; who, seeking vainly
elsewhere for the child's paternity, and observing some of her odd
attributes, had given out that poor little Pearl was a demon offspring;
such as, ever since old Catholic times, had occasionally been seen on
earth, through the agency of their mothers' sin, and to promote some
foul and wicked purpose. Luther, according to the scandal of his
monkish enemies, was a brat of that hellish breed; nor was Pearl the only
child to whom this inauspicious origin was assigned, among the New
England Puritans.
ruler to descend a step or two from the highest rank, he still held an
honorable and influential place among the colonial magistracy.
Another and far more important reason than the delivery of a pair
of embroidered gloves impelled Hester, at this time, to seek an interview
with a personage of so much power and activity in the affairs of the
settlement. It had reached her ears, that there was a design on the part of
some of the leading inhabitants, cherishing the more rigid order of
principles in religion and government, to deprive her of her child. On
the supposition that Pearl, as already hinted, was of demon origin, these
good people not unreasonably argued that a Christian interest in the
mother's soul required them to remove such a stumbling-block from her
path. If the child, on the other hand, were really capable of moral and
religious growth, and possessed the elements of ultimate salvation, then,
surely, it would enjoy all the fairer prospect of these advantages by being
transferred to wiser and better guardianship than Hester Prynne's.
Among those who promoted the design, Governor Bellingham was said
to be one of the most busy. It may appear singular, and, indeed, not a
little ludicrous, that an affair of this kind, which, in later days, would
have been referred to no higher jurisdiction than that of the selectmen of
the town, should then have been a question publicly discussed, and on
which statesmen of eminence took sides. At that epoch of pristine
simplicity, however, matters of even slighter public interest, and of far
less intrinsic weight than the welfare of Hester and her child, were
strangely mixed up with the deliberations oflegislators and acts of state.
The period was hardly, if at all, earlier than that of our story, when a
dispute concerning the right of property in a pig, not only caused a
fierce and bitter contest in the legislative body of the colony, but
resulted in an important modification of the framework itself of the
legislature.
Full of concern, therefore, - but so conscious of her own right,
that it seemed scarcely an unequal match between the public, on the one
side, and a lonely woman, backed by the sympathies of nature, on the
other, - Hester Prynne set forth from her solitary cottage. Little Pearl,
of course, was her companion. She was now of an age to run lightly
along by her mother's side, and, constantly in motion from morn till
sunset, could have accomplished a much longer journey than that before
her. Often, nevertheless, more from caprice than necessity, she demand-
ed to be taken up in arms, but was soon as imperious to be set down
again, and frisked onward before Hester on the grassy pathway, with
many a harmless trip and tumble. We have spoken of Pearl's rich and
luxuriant beauty; a beauty that shone with deep and vivid tints; a bright
90 THE SCARLET LETTER
complexion, eyes possessing intensity both of depth and glow, and hair
already of a deep, glossy brown, and which, in after years, would be
nearly akin to black. There was fire in her and throughout her; she
seemed the unpremeditated offshoot of a passionate moment. Her
mother, in contriving the child's garb, had allowed the gorgeous ten-
dencies of her imagination their full play; arraying her in a crimson
velvet tunic, of a peculiar cut, abundantly embroidered with fantasies
and flourishes of gold thread. So much strength of coloring, which must
have given a wan and pallid aspect to cheeks of a fainter bloom, was
admirably adapted to Pearl's beauty, and made her the very brightest
little jet of flame that ever danced upon the earth.
But it was a remarkable attribute of this garb, and, indeed, of the
child's whole appearance, that it irresistibly and inevitably reminded the
beholder of the token which Hester Prynne was doomed to wear upon
her bosom. It was the scarlet letter in another form; the scarlet letter
endowed with life! The mother herself- as if the red ignominy were so
deeply scorched into her brain, that all her conceptions assumed its
form - had carefully wrought out the similitude; lavishing many hours
of morbid ingenuity, to create an analogy between the object of her
affection, and the emblem of her guilt and torture. But, in truth, Pearl
was the one, as well as the other; and only in consequence of that
identity had Hester contrived so perfectly to represent the scarlet letter
in her appearance.
As the two wayfarers came within the precincts of the town, the
children of the Puritans looked up from their play, - or what passed
for play with those sombre little urchins, - and spake gravely one to
another:-
"Behold, verily, there is the woman of the scarlet letter; and, of a
truth, moreover, there is the likeness of the scarlet letter running along
by her side! Come, therefore, and let us fling mud at them!"
But Pearl, who was a dauntless child, after frowning, stamping her
f~t, and shaking her little hand with a variety of threatening gestures,
suddenly made a rush at the knot of her enemies, and put them all to
flight. She resembled, in her fierce pursuit of them, an infant pesti-
lence, - the scarlet fever, or some such half-fledged angel of judg-
ment, - whose mission was to punish the sins of the rising generation.
She screamed and shouted, too, with a terrific volume of sound, which
doubtless caused the hearts of the fugitives to quake within them. The
victory accomplished, Pearl returned quietly to her mother, and looked
up smiling into her face.
THE GOVERNOR'S HALL 91
greaves, with a pair of gaundets and a sword hanging beneath; all, and
especially the helmet and breastplate, so highly burnished as to glow
with white radiance, and scatter an illumination everywhere about upon
the floor. This bright panoply was not meant for mere idle show, but
had been worn by the Governor on many a solemn muster and training
field, and had glittered, moreover, at the head of a regiment in the
Pequod war. For, though bred a lawyer, and accustomed to speak of
Bacon, Coke, Noye, and Finch, as his professional associates, the
exigencies of this new country had transformed Governor Bellingham
into a soldier, as well as a statesman and ruler.
Little Pearl- who was as gready pleased with the gleaming ar-
mour as she had been with the glittering frontispiece of the house -
spent some time looking into the polished mirror of the breastplate.
"Mother," cried she, "I see you here. Look! Look!"
Hester looked, by way of humoring the child; and she saw that,
owing to the peculiar effect of this convex mirror, the scarlet letter was
represented in exaggerated and gigantic proportions, so as to be gready
the most prominent feature of her appearance. In truth, she seemed
absolutely hidden behind it. Pearl pointed upward, also, at a similar
picture in the headpiece; smiling at her mother, with the elfish intelli-
gence that was so familiar an expression on her small physiognomy.
That look of naughty merriment was likewise reflected in the mirror,
with so much breadth and intensity of effect, that it made Hester Prynne
feel as if it could not be the image of her own child, but of an imp who
was seeking to mould itself into Pearl's shape.
"Come along, Pearl!" said she, drawing her away. "Come and look
into this fair garden. It may be, we shall see flowers there; more
beautiful ones than we find in the woods."
Pearl, accordingly, ran to the bow-window, at the farther end of
the hall, and looked along the vista of a garden-walk, carpeted with
closely shaven grass, and bordered with some rude and immature
attempt at shrubbery. But the proprietor appeared already to have
relinquished, as hopeless, the effort to perpetuate on this side of the
Adantic, in a hard soil and amid the close struggle for subsistence, the
native English taste for ornamental gardening. Cabbages grew in plain
sight; and a pumpkin vine, rooted at some distance, had run across the
intervening space, and deposited one of its gigantic products direcdy
beneath the hall-window; as if to warn the Governor that this great
lump of vegetable gold was as rich an ornament as New England earth
would offer him. There were a few rose-bushes, however, and a num-
ber of apple-trees, probably the descendants of those planted by the
94 THE SCARLET LEITER
Reverend Mr. Blackstone, the first settler of the peninsula; that half
mythological personage who rides through our early annals, seated on
the back of a bull.
Pearl, seeing the rose-bushes, began to cry for a red rose, and
would not be pacified.
"Hush, child, hush!" said her mother earnestly. "Do not cry, dear
little Pearl! I hear voices in the garden. The Governor is coming, and
gentlemen along with him!"
In fact, adown the vista of the garden-avenue, a number of persons
were seen approaching towards the house. Pearl, in utter scorn of her
mother's attempt to quiet her, gave an eldritch scream, and then became
silent; not from any notion of obedience, but because the quick and
mobile curiosity of her disposition was excited by the appearance of
these new personages.
benevolence of his private life had won him wanner affection than was
accorded to any of his professional contemporaries.
Behind the Governor and Mr. Wilson came two other guests; one,
the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, whom the reader may remember, as
having taken a brief and reluctant part in the scene of Hester Prynne's
disgrace; and, in close companionship with him, old Roger Chilling-
worth, a person of great skill in physic, who, for two or three years past,
had been settled in the town. It was understood that this learned man
was the physician as well as friend of the young minister, whose health
had severely suffered, of late, by his too unreserved self-sacrifice to the
labors and duties of the pastoral relation.
The Governor, in advance of his visitors, ascended one or two
steps, and, throwing open the leaves of the great hall window, found
himself close to little Pearl. The shadow of the curtain fell on Hester
Prynne, and partially concealed her.
''What have we here?" said Governor Bellingham, looking with
surprise at the scarlet little figure before him. "I profess, I have never
seen the like, since my days of vanity, in old King James's time, when I
was wont to esteem it a high favor to be admitted to a court mask! There
used to be a swann of these small apparitions, in holiday-time; and we
called them children of the Lord of Misrule. But how gat such a guest
into my hall?"
"Ay, indeed!" cried good old Mr. Wilson. ''What little bird of
scarlet plumage may this be? Methinks I have seen just such figures,
when the sun has been shining through a richly painted window, and
tracing out the golden and crimson images across the floor. But that was
in the old land. Prithee, young one, who art thou, and what has ailed thy
mother to bedizen thee in this strange fashion? Art thou a Christian
child, - ha? Dost know thy catechism? Or art thou one of those
naughty elfs or fairies, whom we thought to have left behind us, with
other relics of Papistry, in merry old England?"
"I am mother's child," answered the scarlet vision, "and my name is
Pearl!"
"Pearl?- Ruby, rather!- or Coral!- or Red Rose, at the very
least, judging from thy hue!" responded the old minister, putting forth
his hand in a vain attempt to pat little Pearl on the cheek. "But where is
this mother of thine? Ah! I see," he added; and, turning to Governor
Bellingham, whispered, - ''This is the selfsame child of whom we have
held speech together; and behold here the unhappy woman, Hester
Prynne, her mother!"
· "Sayest thou so?" cried the Governor. "Nay, we might have judged
THE SCARLET LETTER
that such a child's mother must needs be a scarlet woman, and a worthy
type of her of Babylon! But she comes at a good time; and we will look
into this matter forthwith."
Governor Bellingham stepped through the window into the hall,
followed by his three guests.
"Hester Prynne," said he, fixing his naturally stem regard on the
wearer of the scarlet letter, "there hath been much question concerning
thee, oflate. The point hath been weightily discussed, whether we, that
are of authority and influence, do well discharge our consciences by
trusting an immortal soul, such as there is in yonder child, to the
guidance of one who hath stumbled and fallen, amid the pitfalls of this
world. Speak thou, the child's own mother! Were it not, thinkest thou,
for thy little one's temporal and eternal welfare, that she be taken out of
thy charge, and clad soberly, and disciplined strictly, and instructed in
the truths of heaven and earth? What canst thou do for the child, in this
kind?"
"I can teach my little Pearl what I have learned from this!" an-
swered Hester Prynne, laying her finger on the red token.
"Woman, it is thy badge of shame!" replied the stem magistrate. "It
is because of the stain which that letter indicates, that we would transfer
thy child to other hands."
"Nevertheless," said the mother calmly, though growing more
pale, "this badge hath taught me, - it daily teaches me, - it is teaching
me at this moment, - lessons whereof my child may be the wiser and
better, albeit they can profit nothing to myself."
''We will judge warily," said Bellingham, "and look well what we
are about to do. Good Master Wilson, I pray you, examine this Pearl, -
since that is her name, - and see whether she hath had such Christian
nUrtUre as befits a child of her age."
The old minister seated himself in an arm-chair, and made an effort
to draw Pearl betwixt his knees. But the child, unaccustomed to the
touch or familiarity of any but her mother, escaped through the open
window and stood on the upper step, looking like a wild, tropical bird,
of rich plumage, ready to take flight into the upper air. Mr. Wilson, not
a little astonished at this outbreak, - for he was a grandfatherly sort of
personage, and usually a vast favorite with children, - essayed, howev-
er, to proceed with the examination.
"Pearl," said he, with great solemnity, "thou must take heed to
instruction, that so, in due season, thou mayest wear in thy bosom the
pearl of great price. Canst thou tell me, my child, who made thee?"
Now Pearl knew well enough who made her; for Hester Prynne,
THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISfER 97
the daughter of a pious home, very soon after her talk with the child
about her Heavenly Father, had begun to inform her of those truths
which the human spirit, at whatever stage of immaturity, imbibes with
such eager interest. Pearl, therefore, so large were the attainments of her
three years' lifetime, could have borne a fair examination in the New
England Primer, or the first column of the Westminster Catechism,
although unacquainted with the outward form of either of those cele-
brated works. But that perversity, which all children have more or less
of, and of which little Pearl had a tenfold portion, now, at the most
inopportune moment, took thorough possession of her, and closed her
lips, or impelled her to speak words amiss. After putting her finger in
her mouth, with many ungracious refusals to answer good Mr. Wilson's
question, the child finally announced that she had not been made at all,
but had been plucked by her mother off the bush of wild roses, that
grew by the prison-door.
This fantasy was probably suggested by the near proximity of the
Governor's red roses, as Pearl stood outside of the window; together
with her recollection of the prison rose-bush, which she had passed in
coming hither.
Old Roger Chillingworth, with a smile on his face, whispered
something in the young clergyman's ear. Hester Prynne looked at the
man of skill, and even then, with her fate hanging in the balance, was
startled to perceive what a change had come over his features, - how
much uglier they were, - how his dark complexion seemed to have
grown duskier, and his figure more misshapen, - since the days when
she had familiarly known him. She met his eyes for an instant, but was
immediately constrained to give all her attention to the scene now going
forward.
''This is awful!" cried the Governor, slowly recovering from the
astonishment into which Pearl's response had thrown him. "Here is a
child of three years old, and she cannot tell who made her! Without
question, she is equally in the dark as to her soul, its present depravity,
and future destiny! Methinks, gentlemen, we need inquire no further."
Hester caught hold of Pearl, and drew her forcibly into her arms,
confronting the old Puritan magistrate with almost a fierce expression.
Alone in the world, cast off by it, and with this sole treasure to keep her
heart alive, she felt that she possessed indefeasible rights against the
world, and was ready to defend them to the death.
"God gave me the child!" cried she. "He gave her, in requital of all
things else, which ye had taken from me. She is my happiness!- she is
my torture, none the less! Pearl keeps me here in life! Pearl punishes me
98 THE SCARLET LETTER
too! See ye not, she is the scarlet letter, only capable of being loved, and
so endowed with a million-fold the power of retribution for my sin? Ye
shall not take her! I will die first!"
"My poor woman," said the not unkind old minister, "the child
shall be well cared for!- far better than thou canst do it."
"God gave her into my keeping," repeated Hester Prynne, raising
her voice almost to a shriek. "I will not give her up!"- And here, by a
sudden impulse, she turned to the young clergyman, Mr. Dimmesdale,
at whom, up to this moment, she had seemed hardly so much as once to
direct her eyes.- "Speak thou for me!" cried she. "Thou wast my
pastor, and hadst charge of my soul, and knowest me better than these
men can. I will not lose the child! Speak for me! Thou knowest, -for
thou hast sympathies which these men lack! - thou knowest what is in
my heart, and what are a mother's rights, and how much the stronger
they are, when that mother has but her child and the scarlet letter! Look
thou to it! I will not lose the child! Look to it!"
At this wild and singular appeal, which indicated that Hester
Prynne's situation had provoked her to little less than madness, the
young minister at once carne forward, pale, and holding his hand over
his heart, as was his custom whenever his peculiarly nervous tempera-
ment was thrown into agitation. He looked now more careworn and
emaciated than as we described him at the scene of Hester's public
ignominy; and whether it were his failing health, or whatever the cause
might be, his large dark eyes had a world of pain in their troubled and
melancholy depth.
''There is truth in what she says," began the minister, with a voice
sweet, tremulous, but powerful, insomuch that the hall reechoed, and
the hollow armour rang with it, - "truth in what Hester says, and in
the feeling which inspires her! God gave her the child, and gave her, too,
an instinctive knowledgeof its nature and requirements, - both seem-
ingly so peculiar, - which no other mortal being can possess. And,
moreover, is there not a quality of awful sacredness in the relation
between this mother and this child?"
"Ay!- how is that, good Master Dimmesdale?" interrupted the
Governor. "Make that plain, I pray you!"
"It must be even so," resumed the minister. "For, if we deem it
otherwise, do we not thereby say that the Heavenly Father, the Creator
of all flesh, hath lightly recognized a deed of sin, and made of no
account the distinction between unhallowed lust and holy love? This
child of its father's guilt and its mother's shame hath come from the
hand of God, to work in many ways upon her heart, who pleads so
THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISfER 99
earnestly, and with such bitterness of spirit, the right to keep her. It was
meant for a blessing; for the one blessing of her life! It was meant,
doubtless, as the mother herself hath told us, for a retribution too; a
torture, to be felt at many an unthought of moment; a pang, a sting, an
ever-recurring agony, in the midst of a troubled joy! Hath she not
expressed this thought in the garb of the poor child, so forcibly remind-
ing us of that red symbol which sears her bosom?"
''Well said, again!" cried good Mr. Wilson. "I feared the woman
had no better thought than to make a mountebank of her child!"
"0, not so! - not so!" continued Mr. Dimmesdale. "She recog-
nizes, believe me, the solemn miracle which God hath wrought, in the
existence of that child. And may she feel, too, - what, methinks, is the
very truth, - that this boon was meant, above all things else, to keep
the mother's soul alive, and to preserve her from blacker depths of sin
into which Satan might else have sought to plunge her! Therefore it is
good for this poor, sinful woman that she hath an infant immortality, a
being capable of eternal joy or sorrow, confided to her care,- to be
trained up by her to righteousness,- to remind her, at every moment,
of her fall, - but yet to teach her, as it were by the Creator's sacred
pledge, that, if she bring the child to heaven, the child also will bring its
parent thither! Herein is the sinful mother happier than the sinful
father. For Hester Prynne's sake, then, and no less for the poor child's
sake, let us leave them as Providence hath seen fit to place them!"
"You speak, my friend, with a strange earnestness," said old Roger
Chillingworth, smiling at him.
"And there is weighty import in what my young brother hath
spoken," added the Reverend Mr. Wilson. "What say you, worshipful
Master Bellingham? Hath he not pleaded well for the poor woman?"
"Indeed hath he," answered the magistrate, "and hath adduced
such arguments, that we will even leave the matter as it now stands; so
long, at least, as there shall be no further scandal in the woman. Care
must be had, nevertheless, to put the child to due and stated examina-
tion in the catechism at thy hands or Master Dimmesdale's. Moreover,
at a proper season, the tithing-men must take heed that she go both to
school and to meeting."
The young minister, on ceasing to speak, had withdrawn a few
steps from the group, and stood with his face partially concealed in the
heavy folds of the window-curtain; while the shadow of his figure,
which the sunlight cast upon the floor, was tremulous with the vehe-
mence of his appeal. Pearl, that wild and flighty little elf, stole softly
towards him, and, taking his hand in the grasp of both her own, laid her
100 THE SCARLET LETTER
cheek against it; a caress so tender, and withal so unobtrusive, that her
mother, who was looking on, asked herself,- "Is that my Pearl?" Yet
she knew that there was love in the child's heart, although it mostly
revealed itself in passion, and hardly twice in her lifetime had been
softened by such gentleness as now. The minister,- for, save the long-
sought regards of woman, nothing is sweeter than these marks of
childish preference, accorded spontaneously by a spiritual instinct, and
therefore seeming to imply in us something truly worthy to be loved, -
the minister looked round, laid his hand on the child's head, hesitated an
instant, and then kissed her brow. Little Pearl's unwonted mood of
sentiment lasted no longer; she laughed, and went capering down the
hall, so airily, that old Mr. Wilson raised a question whether even her
tiptoes touched the floor.
''The little baggage hath witchcraft in her, I profess," said he to Mr.
Dimmesdale. "She needs no old woman's broomstick to fly withal!"
"A strange child!" remarked old Roger Chillingworth. "It is easy to
see the mother's part in her. Would it be beyond a philosopher's
research, think ye, gentlemen, to analyze that child's nature, and, from
its make and mould, to give a shrewd guess at the father?"
"Nay; it would be sinful, in such a question, to follow the clew of
profane philosophy," said Mr. Wilson. "Better to fast and pray upon it;
and still better, it may be, to leave the mystery as we find it, UIJ.less
Providence reveal it of its own accord. Thereby, every good Christian
man hath a title to-show a father's kindness towards the poor; deserted
babe."
The affair being. so satisfactorily concluded, Hester Prynne, with
Pearl, departed from the house. As they descended the steps, it is
averred that the lattice of a chamber-window was thrown open, and
forth into the sunny day was thrust the face of Mistress Bibbins,
Governor Bellingham's bitter-tempered sister, and the same who, a few
years later, was executed as a witch.
"Hist, hist!" said she, while her ill-omened physiognomy seemed to
cast a shadow over the cheerful newness of the house. ''Wilt thou go
with us to-night? There will be a merry company in the forest; and I
wellnigh promised the Black Man that comely Hester Prynne should
make one."
"Make my excuse to him, so please you!" answered Hester, with a
triumphant smile. "I must tarry at home, and keep watch over my little
Pearl. Had they taken her from me, I would willingly have gone with
thee into the forest, and signed my name in the Black Man's book too,
and that with mine own blood!"
THE LEECH 101
''We shall have thee there anon!" said the witch-lady, frowning, as
she drew back her head.
But here- if we suppose this interview betwixt Mistress Bibbins
and Hester Prynne to be authentic, and not a parable - was already an
illustration of the young minister's argument against sundering the
relation of a fallen mother to the offspring of her frailty. Even thus early
had the child saved her from Satan's snare.
guest of the other, in his place of study and retirement. There was a
fascination for the minister in the company of the man of science, in
whom he recognized an intellectual cultivation of no moderate depth or
scope; together with a range and freedom of ideas, that he would have
vainly looked for among the members of his own profession. In truth,
he was startled, if not shocked, to find this attribute in the physician.
Mr. Dimmesdale was a true priest, a true religionist, with the reverential
sentiment largely developed, and an order of mind that impelled itself
powerfully along the track of a creed, and wore its passage continually
deeper with the lapse of time. In no state of society would he have been
what is called a man of liberal views; it would always be essential to his
peace to feel the pressure of a faith about him, supporting, while it
confined him within its iron framework. Not the less, however, though
with a tremulous enjoyment, did he feel the occasional relief of looking
at the universe through the medium of another kind of intellect than
those with which he habitually held converse. It was as if a window were
thrown open, admitting a freer atmosphere into the dose and stifled
study, where his life was wasting itself away, amid lamp-light, or
obstructed day-beams, and the musty fragrance, be it sensual or moral,
that exhales from books. But the air was too fresh and chill to be long
breathed, with comfort. So the minister, and the physician with him,
withdrew again within the limits of what their church defined as
orthodox.
Thus Roger Chillingworth scrutinized his patient carefully, both as
he saw him in his ordinary life, keeping an accustomed pathway in the
range of thoughts familiar to him, and as he appeared when thrown
amidst other moral scenery, the novelty of which might call out some-
thing new to the surface of his character. He deemed it essential, it
would seem, to know the man, before attempting to do him good.
Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the physical
frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these. In Arthur Dimmesdale,
thought and imagination were so active, and sensibility so intense, that
the bodily infirmity would be likely to have its groundwork there. So
Roger Chillingworth- the man of skill, the kind and friendly physi-
cian - strove to go deep into his patient's bosom, delving among his
principles, prying into his recollections, and probing every thing with a
cautious touch, like a treasure-seeker in a dark cavern. Few secrets can
escape an investigator, who has opportunity and license to undertake
such a quest, and skill to follow it up. A man burdened with a secret
should especially avoid the intimacy of his physician. If the latter possess
native sagacity, and a nameless something more, -let us call it intu-
106 THE SCARLET LETTER
The new abode of the two friends was with a pious widow, of good
social rank, who dwelt in a house covering pretty nearly the site on
which the venerable structure of King's Chapel has since been built. It
had the grave-yard, originally Isaac Johnson's home-field, on one side,
and so was well adapted to call up serious reflections, suited to their
respective employments, in both minister and man of physic. The
motherly care of the good widow assigned to Mr. Dimmesdale a front
apartment, with a sunny exposure, and heavy window-curtains to create
a noontide shadow, when desirable. The walls were hung round with
tapestry, said to be from the Gobelin looms, and, at all events, represent-
ing the Scriptural story of David and Bathsheba, and Nathan the
Prophet, in colors still unfaded, but which made the fair woman of the
scene almost as grimly picturesque as the woe-denouncing seer. Here,
the pale clergyman piled up his library, rich with parchment-bound
folios of the Fathers, and the lore of Rabbis, and monkish erudition, of
which the Protestant divines, even while they vilified and decried that
class of writers, were yet constrained often to avail themselves: On the
other side of the house, old Roger Chillingworth arranged his study and
laboratory; not such as a modem man of science would reckon even
tolerably complete, but provided with a distilling apparatus, and the
means of compounding drugs and chemicals, which the practised alche-
mist knew well how to tum to purpose. With such commodiousness of
situation, these two learned persons sat themselves down, each in his
own domain, yet familiarly passing from one apartment to the other,
and bestowing a mutual and not incurious inspection into one another's
business.
And the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale's best discerning friends, as
we have intimated, very reasonably imagined that the hand of Provi-
dence had done all this, for the purpose - besought in so many public,
and domestic, and secret prayers - of restoring the young minister to
health. But - it must now be said - another portion of the commu-
nity had latterly begun to take its own view of the relation betwixt Mr.
Dimmesdale and the mysterious old physician. When an uninstructed
multitude attempts to see with its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to be
deceived. When, however, it forms its judgment, as it usually does, on
the intuitions of its great and warm heart, the conclusions thus attained
are often so profound and so unerring, as to possess the character of
truths supernaturally revealed. The people, in the case of which we
speak, could justify its prejudice against Roger Chillingworth by no fact
or argument worthy of serious refutation. There was an aged handi-
craftsman, it is true, who had been a citizen of London at the period of
108 THE SCARLET LETTER
silence, till the child laughed aloud, and shouted,- "Come away,
mother! Come away, or yonder old Black Man will catch you! He hath
got hold of the minister already. Come away, mother, or he will catch
you! But he cannot catch little Pearl!"
So she drew her mother away, skipping, dancing, and frisking
fantastically among the hillocks of the dead people, like a creature that
had nothing in common with a bygone and buried generation, nor
owned herself akin to it. It was as if she had been made afresh, out of
new elements, and must perforce be permitted to live her own life, and
be a law unto herself, without her eccentricities being reckoned to her
for a crime.
''There goes a woman," resumed Roger Chillingworth, after a
pause, ''who, be her demerits what they may, hath none of that mystery
of hidden sinfulness which you deem so grievous to be borne. Is Hester
Prynne the less miserable, think you, for that scarlet letter on her
breast?"
"I do verily believe it," answered the clergyman. "Nevertheless, I
cannot answer for her. There was a look of pain in her face, which I
would gladly have been spared the sight of. But still, methinks, 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."
There was another pause; and the physician began anew to examine
and arrange the plants which he had gathered.
"You inquired of me, a little time agone," said he, at length, "my
judgment as touching your health."
"I did," answered the clergyman, "and would gladly learn it. Speak
frankly, I pray you, be it for life or death."
"Freely, then, and plainly," said the physician, still busy with his
plants, but keeping a wary eye on Mr. Dimmesdale, "the disorder is a
strange one; not so much in itself, nor as outwardly manifested, - in so
far, at least, as the symptoms have been laid open to my observation.
Looking daily at you, my good Sir, and watching the tokens of your
aspect, now for months gone by, I should deem you a man sore sick, it
may be, yet not so sick but that an instructed and watchful physician
might well hope to cure you. But - I know not what to say - the
disease is what I seem to know, yet know it not."
"You speak in riddles, learned Sir," said the pale minister, glancing
aside out of the window.
''Then, to speak more plainly," continued the physician, "and I
crave pardon, Sir,- should it seem to require pardon,- for this
needful plainness of my speech. Let me ask, - as your friend, - as one
114 THE SCARLET LETTER
gestures with which he threw up his arms towards the ceiling, and
stamped his foot upon the floor! Had a man seen old Roger Chilling-
worth, at that moment of his ecstasy, he would have had no need to ask
how Satan comports himself, when a precious human soul is lost to
heaven, and won into his kingdom.
But what distinguished the physician's ecstasy from Satan's was the
trait of wonder in it!
variety of the clerical species. There were others, again, true saintly
fathers, whose faculties had been elaborated by weary toil among their
books, and by patient thought, and etherealized, moreover, by spiritual
communications with the better world, into which their purity of life
had almost introduced these holy personages, with their garments of
mortality still clinging to them. All that they lacked was the gift that
descended upon the chosen disciples, at Pentecost, in tongues of flame;
symbolizing, it would seem, not the power of speech in foreign and
unknown languages, but that of addressing the whole human brother-
hood in the heart's native language. These fathers, otherwise so apostol-
ic, lacked Heaven's last and rarest attestation of their office, the Tongue
of Flame. They would have vainly sought - had they ever dreamed of
seeking - to express the highest truths through the humblest medium
of familiar words and images. Their voices came down, afar and indis-
tinctly, from the upper heights where they habitually dwelt.
Not improbably, it was to this latter class of men that Mr. Dimmes-
dale, by many of his traits of character, naturally belonged. To their high
mountain-peaks of faith and sanctity he would have climbed, had not
the tendency been thwarted by the burden, whatever it might be, of
crime or anguish, beneath which it was his doom to totter. It kept him
down, on a level with the lowest; him, the man of ethereal attributes,
whose voice the angels might else have listened to and answered! But
this very burden it was, that gave him sympathies so intimate with the
sinful brotherhood of mankind; so that his heart vibrated in unison with
theirs, and received their pain into itself, and sent its own throb of pain
through a thousand other hearts, in gushes of sad, persuasive eloquence.
Oftenest persuasive, but sometimes terrible! The people knew not the
power that moved them thus. They deemed the young clergyman a
miracle of holiness. They fancied him the mouth-piece of Heaven's
messages of wisdom, and rebuke, and love. In their eyes, the very
ground on which he trod was sanctified. The virgins of his church grew
pale around him, victims of a passion so imbued with religious senti-
ment that they imagined it to be all religion, and brought it openly, in
their white bosoms, as their most acceptable sacrifice before the altar.
The aged members of his flock, beholding Mr. Dimmesdale's frame so
feeble, while they were themselves so rugged in their infirmity, believed
that he would go heavenward before them, and enjoined it upon their
children, that their old bones should be buried close to their young
pastor's holy grave. And, all this time, perchance, when poor Mr.
Dimmesdale was thinking of his grave, he questioned with himself
THE INTERIOR OF A HEART 119
whether the grass would ever grow on it, because an accursed thing
must there be buried!
It is inconceivable, the agony with which this public veneration
tortured him! It was his genuine impulse to adore the truth, and to
reckon all things shadow-like, 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? He longed to
speak out, from his own pulpit, at the full height of his voice, and tell the
people what he was. "I, whom you behold in these black garments of the
priesthood, - I, who ascend the sacred desk, and turn my pale face
heavenward, taking upon myself to hold communion, in your behalf,
with the Most High Omniscience, - I, in whose daily life you discern
the sanctity of Enoch, - I, whose footsteps, as you suppose, leave a
gleam along my earthly track, whereby the pilgrims that shall come after
me may be guided to the regions of the blest, - I, who have laid the
hand of baptism upon your children, - I, who have breathed the
parting prayer over your dying friends, to whom the Amen sounded
faintly from a world which they had quitted,- I, your pastor, whom
you so reverence and trust, am utterly a pollution and a lie!"
More than once, Mr. Dimmesdale had gone into the pulpit, with a
purpose never to come down its steps, until he should have spoken
words like the above. More than once, he had cleared his throat, and
drawn in the long, deep, and tremulous breath, which, when sent forth
again, would come burdened with the black secret of his soul. More
than once - nay, more than a hundred times - he had actually spo-
ken! Spoken! But how? He had told his hearers that he was altogether
vile, a viler companion of the vilest, the worst of sinners, an abomina-
tion, a thing of unimaginable iniquity; and that the only wonder was,
that they did not see his wretched body shrivelled up before their eyes,
by the burning wrath of the Almighty! Could there be plainer speech
than this? Would not the people start up in their seats, by a simulta-
neous impulse, and tear him down out of the pulpit which he defiled?
Not so, indeed! They heard it all, and did but reverence him the more.
They little guessed what deadly purport lurked in those self-condemn-
ing words. ''The godly youth!" said they among themselves. ''The saint
on earth! Alas, if he discern such sinfulness in his own white soul, what
horrid spectacle would he behold in thine or mine!" The minister well
knew- subtle, but remorseful hypocrite that he was!- the light in
which his vague confession would be viewed. He had striven to put a
cheat upon himself by making the avowal of a guilty conscience, but had
120 THE SCARLET LETTER
gained only one other sin, and a self-acknowledged shame, without the
momentary relief of being self-deceived. He had spoken the very truth,
and transformed it into the veriest falsehood. And yet, by the constitu-
tion of his nature, he loved the truth, and loathed the lie, as few men
ever did. Therefore, above all things else, he loathed his miserable selfl
His inward trouble drove him to practices, more in accordance
with the old, corrupted faith of Rome, than with the better light of the
church in which he had been born and bred. In Mr. Dimmesdale's secret
closet, under lock and key, there was a bloody scourge. Oftentimes, this
Protestant and Puritan divine had plied it on his own shoulders;
laughing bitterly at himself the while, and smiting so much the more
pitilessly, because of that bitter laugh. It was his custom, too, as it has
been that of many other pious Puritans, to fast, - not, however, like
them, in order to purity the body and render it the fitter medium of
celestial illumination,- but rigorously, and until his knees trembled
beneath him, as an act of penance. He kept vigils, likewise, night after
night, sometimes in utter darkness; sometimes with a glimmering lamp;
and sometimes, viewing his own face in a looking-glass, by the most
powerful light which he could throw upon it. He thus typified the
constant introspection wherewith he tortured, but could not purity,
himself. In these lengthened vigils, his brain often reeled, and visions
seemed to flit before him; perhaps seen doubtfully, and by a faint light
of their own, in the remote dimness of the chamber, or more vividly,
and close beside him, within the looking-glass. Now it was a herd of
diabolic shapes, that grinned and mocked at the pale minister, and
beckoned him away with them; now a group of shining angels, who
flew upward heavily, as sorrow-laden, but grew more ethereal as they
rose. Now came the dead friends of his youth, and his white-bearded
father, with a saint-like frown, and his mother, turning her face away as
she passed by. Ghost of a mother,- thinnest fantasy of a mother,-
methinks she might yet have thrown a pitying glance towards her son!
And now, through the chamber which these spectral thoughts had made
so ghastly, glided Hester Prynne, leading along little Pearl, in her scarlet
garb, and pointing her forefinger, first, at the scarlet letter on her
bosom, and then at the clergyman's own breast.
None of these visions ever quite deluded him. At any moment, by
an effort of his will, he could discern substances through their misty lack
of substance, and convince himself that they were not solid in their
nature, like yonder table of carved oak, or that big, square, leathern-
bound and brazen-clasped volume of divinity. But, for all that, they
were, in one sense, the truest and most substantial things which the
THE MINISTER'S VIGIL 121
scourge. Why, then, had he come hither? Was it but the mockery of
penitence? A mockery, indeed, but in which his soul trifled with itselfl A
mockery at which angels blushed and wept, while fiends rejoiced, with
jeering laughter! He had been driven hither by the impulse of that
Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and whose own sister and
closely linked companion was that Cowardice which invariably drew
him back, with her tremulous gripe, just when the other impulse had
hurried him to the verge of a disclosure. Poor, miserable man! what
right had infirmity like his to burden itself with crime? Crime is for the
iron-nerved, who have their choice either to endure it, or, if it press too
hard, to exert their fierce and savage strength for a good purpose, and
fling it off at once! This feeble and most sensitive of spirits could do
neither, yet continually did one thing or another, which intertwined, in
the same inextricable knot, the agony of heaven-defying guilt and vain
repentance.
And thus, while standing on the scaffold, in this vain show of
expiation, Mr. Dimmesdale was overcome with a great horror of mind,
as if the universe were gazing at a scarlet token on his naked breast, right
over his heart. On that spot, in very truth, there was, and there had long
been, the gnawing and poisonous tooth of bodily pain. Without any
effort of his will, or power to restrain himself, he shrieked aloud; an
outcry that went pealing through the night, and was beaten back from
one house to another, and reverberated from the hills in the back-
ground; as if a company of devils, detecting so much misery and terror
in it, had made a plaything of the sound, and were bandying it to and
fro.
"It is done!" muttered the minister, covering his face with his
hands. ''The whole town will awake, and hurry forth, and find me here!"
But it was not so. The shriek had perhaps sounded with a far
greater power, to his own startled ears, than it actually possessed. The
town did not awake; or, if it did, the drowsy slumberers mistook the cry
either for something frightful in a dream, or for the noise of witches;
whose voices, at that period, were often heard to pass over the settle-
ments or lonely cottages, as they rode with Satan through the air. The
clergyman, therefore, hearing no symptoms of disturbance, uncovered
his eyes and looked about him. At one of the chamber-windows of
Governor Bellingham's mansion, which stood at some distance, on the
line of another street, he beheld the appearance of the old magistrate
himself, with a lamp in his hand, a white night-cap on his head, and a
long white gown enveloping his figure. He looked like a ghost, evoked
unseasonably from the grave. The cry had evidently startled him. At
THE MINISTER'S VIGIL 123
muffling his Geneva cloak about him with one arm, and holding the
lantern before his breast with the other, the minister could hardly
restrain himself from speaking.
"A good evening to you, venerable Father Wilson! Come up
hither, I pray you, and pass a pleasant hour with me!"
Good heavens! Had Mr. Dimmesdale actually spoken? For one
instant, he believed that these words had passed his lips. But they were
uttered only within his imagination. The venerable Father Wilson
continued to step slowly onward, looking carefully at the muddy path-
way before his feet, and never once turning his head towards the guilty
platform. When the light of the glimmering lantern had faded quite
away, the minister discovered, by the faintness which came over him,
that the last few moments had been a crisis of terrible anxiety; although
his mind had made an involuntary effort to relieve itself by a kind of
lurid playfulness.
Shortly afterwards, the like grisly sense of the humorous again stole
in among the solemn phantoms of his thought. He felt his limbs
growing stiff with the unaccustomed chilliness of the night, and doubt-
ed whether he should be able to descend the steps of the scaffold.
Morning would break, and find him there. The neighbourhood would
begin to rouse itself. The earliest riser, coming forth in the dim twilight,
would perceive a vaguely defined figure aloft on the place of shame;
and, half crazed betwixt alarm and curiosity, would go, knocking from
door to door, summoning all the people to behold the ghost- as he
needs must think it - of some defunct transgressor. A dusky tumult
would flap its wings from one house to another. Then - the morning
light still waxing stronger - old patriarchs would rise up in great haste,
each in his flannel gown, and matronly dames, without pausing to put
off their night-gear. The whole tribe of decorous personages, who had
never heretofore been seen with a single hair of their heads awry, would
start into public view, with the disorder of a nightmare in their aspects.
Old Governor Bellingham would come grimly forth, with his King
James's ruff fastened askew; and Mistress Bibbins, with some twigs of
the forest clinging to her skirts, and looking sourer than ever, as having
hardly got a wink of sleep after her night ride; and good Father Wilson,
too, after spending half the night at a death-bed, and liking ill to be
disturbed, thus early, out of his dreams about the glorified saints.
Hither, likewise, would come the elders and deacons of Mr. Dimmes-
dale's church, and the young virgins who so idolized their minister, and
had made a shrine for him in their white bosoms; which, now, by the
by, in their hurry and confusion, they would scantly have given them-
THE MINISTER'S VIGIL 125
selves time to cover with their kerchiefs. All people, in a word, would
come stumbling over their thresholds, and turning up their amazed and
horror-stricken visages around the scaffold. Whom would they discern
there, with the red eastern light upon his brow? Whom, but the
Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, half frozen to death, overwhelmed with
shame, and standing where Hester Prynne had stood!
Carried away by the grotesque horror of this picture, the minister,
unawares, and to his own infinite alarm, burst into a great peal of
laughter. It was immediately responded to by a light, airy, childish
laugh, in which, with a thrill of the heart, - but he knew not whether
of exquisite pain, or pleasure as acute, - he recognized the tones of
little Pearl.
"Pearl! Little Pearl!" cried he, after a moment's pause; then, sup-
pressing his voice,- "Hester! Hester Prynne! Are you there?"
"Yes, it is Hester Prynne!" she replied, in a tone of surprise; and the
minister heard her footsteps approaching from the sidewalk, along
which she had been passing.- "It is I, and my little Pearl."
''Whence come you, Hester?" asked the minister. ''What sent you
hither?"
"I have been watching at a death-bed," answered Hester Prynne; -
"at Governor Winthrop's death-bed, and have taken his measure for a
robe, and am now going homeward to my dwelling."
"Come up hither, Hester, thou and little Pearl," said the Reverend
Mr. Dimmesdale. "Ye have both been here before, but I was not with
you. Come up hither once again, and we will stand all three together!"
She silently ascended the steps, and stood on the platform, holding
little Pearl by the hand. The minister felt for the child's other hand, and
took it. The moment that he did so, there came what seemed a tumultu-
ous rush of new life, other life than his own, pouring like a torrent into
his heart, and hurrying through all his veins, as if the mother and the
child were communicating their vital warmth to his half-torpid system.
The three formed an electric chain.
"Minister!" whispered little Pearl.
''What wouldst thou say, child?" asked Mr. Dimmesdale.
''Wilt thou stand here with mother and me, to-morrow noontide?"
inquired Pearl.
"Nay; not so, my little Pearl!" answered the minister; for, with the
new energy of the moment, all the dread of public exposure, that had so
long been the anguish of his life, had returned upon him; and he was
already trembling at the conjunction in which- with a strange joy,
nevertheless - he now found himself. "Not so, my child. I shall,
126 THE SCARLET LETTER
indeed, stand with thy mother and thee one other day, but not
to-morrow!"
Pearl laughed, and attempted to pull away her hand. But the
minister held it fast.
"A moment longer, my child!" said he.
"But wilt thou promise," asked Pearl, "to take my hand, and
mother's hand, to-morrow noontide?"
"Not then, Pearl," said the minister, "but another time!"
"And what other time?" persisted the child.
"At the great judgment day!" whispered the minister,- and,
strangely enough, the sense that he was a professional teacher of the
truth impelled him to answer the child so. ''Then, and there, before the
judgment-seat, thy mother, and thou, and I, must stand together! But
the daylight of this world shall not see our meeting!"
Pearl laughed again.
But, before Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking, a light gleamed
far and wide over all the muffled sky. It was doubtless caused by one of
those meteors, which the night-watcher may so often observe burning
out to waste, in the vacant regions of the atmosphere. So powerful was
its radiance, that it thoroughly illuminated the dense medium of cloud
betwixt the sky and earth. The great vault brightened, like the dome of
an immense lamp. It showed the familiar scene of the street, with the
distinctness of mid-day, but also with the awfulness that is always
imparted to familiar objects by an unaccustomed light. The wooden
houses, with their jutting stories and quaint gable-peaks; the doorsteps
and thresholds, with the early grass springing up about them; the
garden-plots, black with freshly turned earth; the wheel-track, little
worn, and, even in the market-place, margined with green on either
side; - all were visible, but with a singularity of aspect that seemed to
give another moral interpretation to the things of this world than they
had ever borne before. And there stood the minister, with his hand over
his heart; and Hester Prynne, with the embroidered letter glimmering
on her bosom; and little Pearl, herself a symbol, and the connecting link
between those two. They stood in the noon of that strange and solemn
splendor, as if it were the light that is to reveal all secrets, and the
daybreak that shall unite all who belong to one another.
There was witchcraft in little Pearl's eyes; and her face, as she
glanced upward at the minister, wore that naughty smile which made its
expression frequently so elfish. She withdrew her hand from Mr.
Dimmesdale's, and pointed across the street. But he clasped both his
hands over his breast, and cast his eyes towards the zenith.
THE MINISTER'S VIGIL 127
at all other times, to hide the malevolence with which he looked upon
his victim. Certainly, if the meteor kindled up the sky, and disclosed the
earth, with an awfulness that admonished Hester Prynne and the clergy-
man of the day of judgment, then might Roger Chillingworth have
passed with them for the arch-fiend, standing there, with a smile and
scowl, to claim his own. So vivid was the expression, or so intense the
minister's perception of it, that it seemed still to remain painted on the
darkness, after the meteor had vanished, with an effect as if the street
and all things else were at once annihilated.
"Who is that man, Hester?" gasped Mr. Dimmesdale, overcome
with terror. "I shiver at him! Dost thou know the man? I hate him,
Hester!"
She remembered her oath, and was silent.
"I tell thee, my soul shivers at him," muttered the minister again.
''Who is he? Who is he? Canst thou do nothing for me? I have a
nameless horror of the man."
"Minister," said little Pearl, "I can tell thee who he is!"
"Quickly, then, child!" said the minister, bending his ear close to
her lips. "Quickly!- and as low as thou canst whisper."
Pearl mumbled something into his ear, that sounded, indeed, like
human language, but was only such gibberish as children may be heard
amusing themselves with, by the hour together. At all events, if it
involved any secret information in regard to old Roger Chillingworth, it
was in a tongue unknown to the erudite clergyman, and did but increase
the bewilderment of his mind. The elfish child then laughed aloud.
"Dost thou mock me now?" said the minister.
''Thou wast not bold!- thou wast not true!" answered the child.
''Thou wouldst not promise to take my hand, and mother's hand, to-
morrow noontide!"
''Worthy Sir," said the physician, who had now advanced to the
foot of the platform. "Pious Master Dimmesdale! can this be you? Well,
well, indeed! We men of study, whose heads are in our books, have need
to be straitly looked after! We dream in our waking moments, and walk
in our sleep. Come, good Sir, and my dear friend, I pray you, let me lead
you home!"
"How knewest thou that I was here?" asked the minister, fearfully.
''Verily, and in good faith," answered Roger Chillingworth, "I
knew nothing of the matter. I had spent the better part of the night at
the bedside of the worshipful Governor Winthrop, doing what my poor
skill might to give him ease. He going home to a better world, I,
likewise, was on my way homeward, when this strange light shone out.
ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER 129
Come with me, I beseech you, Reverend Sir; else you will be poorly able
to do Sabbath duty to-morrow. Aha! see now, how they trouble the
brain,- these books!- these books! You should study less, good Sir,
and take a little pastime; or these night-whimseys will grow upon you!"
"I will go home with you," said Mr. Dimmesdale.
With a chill despondency, like one awaking, all nerveless, from an
ugly dream, he yielded himself to the physician, and was led away.
The next day, however, being the Sabbath, he preached a discourse
which was held to be the richest and most powerful, and the most
replete with heavenly influences, that had ever proceeded from his lips.
Souls, it is said, more souls than one, were brought to the truth by the
efficacy of that sermon, and vowed within themselves to cherish a holy
gratitude towards Mr. Dimmesdale throughout the long hereafter. But,
as he came down the pulpit-steps, the gray-bearded sexton met him,
holding up a black glove, which the minister recognized as his own.
"It was found," said the sexton, "this morning, on the scaffold,
where evil-doers are set up to public shame. Satan dropped it there, I
take it, intending a scurrilous jest against your reverence. But, indeed,
he was blind and foolish, as he ever and always is. A pure hand needs no
glove to cover it!"
"Thank you, my good friend," said the minister gravely, but
startled at heart; for, so confused was his remembrance, that he had al-
most brought himself to look at the events of the past night as visionary.
"Yes, it seems to be my glove indeed!"
"And, since Satan saw fit to steal it, your reverence must needs
handle him without gloves, henceforward," remarked the old sexton,
grimly smiling. "But did your reverence hear of the portent that was
seen last night? A great red letter in the sky, - the letter A, - which we
interpret to stand for Angel. For, as our good Governor Winthrop was
made an angel this past night, it was doubtless held fit that there should
be some notice thereof!"
"No," answered the minister. "I had not heard of it."
breathe the common air, and earn daily bread for little Pearl and herself
by the faithful labor of her hands, - she was quick to acknowledge her
sisterhood with the race of man, whenever benefits were to be con-
ferred. None so ready as she to give of her little substance to every
demand of poverty; even though the bitter-hearted pauper threw back a
gibe in requital of the food brought regularly to his door, or the
garments wrought for him by the fingers that could have embroidered a
monarch's robe. None so self-devoted as Hester, when pestilence
stalked through the town. In all seasons of calamity, indeed, whether
general or of individuals, the outcast of society at once found her place.
She came, not as a guest, but as a rightful inmate, into the household
that was darkened by trouble; as if its gloomy twilight were a medium in
which she was entitled to hold intercourse with her fellow-creatures.
There glimmered the embroidered letter, with comfort in its unearthly
ray. Elsewhere the token of sin, it was the taper of the sick-chamber. It
had even thrown its gleam, in the sufferer's hard extremity, across the
verge of time. It had shown him where to set his foot, while the light of
earth was fast becoming dim, and ere the light of futurity could reach
him. In such emergencies, Hester's nature showed itself warm and rich;
a well-spring of human tenderness, unfailing to every real demand, and
inexhaustible by the largest. Her breast, with its badge of shame, was
but the softer pillow for the head that needed one. She was self-ordained
a Sister of Mercy; or, we may rather say, the world's heavy hand had so
ordained her, when neither the world nor she looked forward to this
result. The letter was the symbol of her calling. 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. They said that it meant Able; so strong was Hester
Prynne, with a woman's strength.
It was only the darkened house that could contain her. When
sunshine came again, she was not there. Her shadow had faded across
the threshold. The helpful inmate had departed, without one backward
glance to gather up the meed of gratitude, if any were in the hearts of
those whom she had served so zealously. Meeting them in the street, she
never raised her head to receive their greeting. If they were resolute to
accost her, she laid her finger on the scarlet letter, and passed on. This
might be pride, but was so like humility, that it produced all the
softening influence of the latter quality on the public mind. The public
is despotic in its temper; it is capable of denying common justice, when
too strenuously demanded as a right; but quite as frequently it awards
more than justice, when the appeal is made, as despots love to have it
132 THE SCARLET LETTER
never come to her from the spiritual world, it might have been far
otherwise. Then, she might have come down to us in history, hand in
hand with Ann Hutchinson, as the foundress of a religious sect. She
might, in one of her phases, have been a prophetess. She might, and not
improbably would, have suffered death from the stem tribunals of the
period, for attempting to undermine the foundations of the Puritan
establishment. But, in the education of her child, the mother's enthusi-
asm of thought had something to wreak itself upon. Providence, in the
person of this little girl, had assigned to Hester's charge the germ and
blossom of womanhood, to be cherished and developed amid a host of
difficulties. Every thing was against her. The world was hostile. The child's
own nature had something wrong in it, which continually betokened that
she had been born amiss, - the effiuence of her mother's lawless pas-
sion, - and often impelled Hester to ask, in bitterness of heart, whether
it were for ill or good that the poor little creature had been born at all.
Indeed, the same dark question often rose into her mind, with
reference to the whole race of womanhood. Was existence worth accept-
ing, even to the happiest among them? As concerned her own individual
existence, she had long ago decided in the negative, and dismissed the
point as settled. A tendency to speculation, though it may keep woman
quiet, as it does man, yet makes her sad. She discerns, it may be, such a
hopeless task before her. As a first step, the whole system of society is to
be tom down, and built up anew. Then, the very nature of the opposite
sex, or its long hereditary habit, which has become like nature, is to be
essentially modified, before woman can be allowed to assume what
seems a fair and suitable position. Finally, all other difficulties being
obviated, woman cannot take advantage of these preliminary reforms,
until she herself shall have undergone a still mightier change; in which,
perhaps, the ethereal essence, wherein she has her truest life, will be
found to have evaporated. A woman never overcomes these problems
by any exercise of thought. They are not to be solved, or only in one
way. If her heart chance to come uppermost, they vanish. Thus, Hester
Prynne, whose heart had lost its regular and healthy throb, wandered
without a clew in the dark labyrinth of mind; now turned aside by an
insurmountable precipice; now starting back from a deep chasm. There
was wild and ghastly scenery all around her, and a home and comfort
nowhere. At times, a fearful doubt strove to possess her soul, whether it
were not better to send Pearl at once to heaven, and go herself to such
futurity as Eternal Justice should provide.
The scarlet letter had not done its office.
Now, however, her interview with the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale,
HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN 135
on the night of his vigil, had given her a new theme of reflection, and
held up to her an object that appeared worthy of any exertion and
sacrifice for its attainment. She had witnessed the intense misery be-
neath which the minister struggled, or, to speak more accurately, had
ceased to struggle. She saw that he stood on the verge of lunacy, if he
had not already stepped across it. It was impossible to doubt, that,
whatever painful efficacy there might be in the secret sting of remorse, a
deadlier venom had been infused into it by the hand that proffered
relief. A secret enemy had been continually by his side, under the
semblance of a friend and helper, and had availed himself of the
opportunities thus afforded for tampering with the delicate springs of
Mr. Dimmesdale's nature. Hester could not but ask herself, whether
there had not originally been a defect of truth, courage, and loyalty, on
her own part, in allowing the minister to be thrown into a position
where so much evil was to be foreboded, and nothing auspicious to be
hoped. Her only justification lay in the fact, that she had been able to
discern no method of rescuing him from a blacker ruin than had
overwhelmed herself, except by acquiescing in Roger Chillingworth's
scheme of disguise. Under that impulse, she had made her choice, and
had chosen, as it now appeared, the more wretched alternative of the
two. She determined to redeem her error, so far as it might yet be
possible. Strengthened by years of hard and solemn trial, she felt herself
no longer so inadequate to cope with Roger Chillingworth as on that
night, abased by sin, and half maddened by the ignominy that was still
new, when they had talked together in the prison-chamber. She had
climbed her way, since then, to a higher point. The old man, on the
other hand, had brought himself nearer to her level, or perhaps below it,
by the revenge which he had stooped for.
In fine, Hester Prynne resolved to meet her former husband, and
do what might be in her power for the rescue of the victim on whom he
had so evidently set his gripe. The occasion was not long to seek. One
afternoon, walking with Pearl in a retired part of the peninsula, she
beheld the old physician, with a basket on one arm, and a staff in the
other hand, stooping along the ground, in quest of roots and herbs to
concoct his medicines withal.
and, making bare her small white feet, went pattering along the moist
margin of the sea. Here and there, she came to a full stop, and peeped
curiously into a pool, left by the retiring tide as a mirror for Pearl to see
her face in. Forth peeped at her, out of the pool, with dark, glistening
curls around her head, and an elf-smile in her eyes, the image of a little
maid, whom Pearl, having no other playmate, invited to take her hand
and run a race with her. But the visionary little maid, on her part,
beckoned likewise, as if to say, - ''This is a better place! Come thou
into the pool!" And Pearl, stepping in, mid-leg deep, beheld her own
white feet at the bottom; while, out of a still lower depth, came the
gleam of a kind of fragmentary smile, floating to and fro in the agitated
water.
Meanwhile, her mother had accosted the physician.
"I would speak a word with you," said she, - "a word that con-
cerns us much."
"Aha! And is it Mistress Hester that has a word for old Roger
Chillingworth?" answered he, raising himself from his stooping pos-
ture. ''With all my heart! Why, Mistress, I hear good tidings of you on
all hands! No longer ago than yester-eve, a magistrate, a wise and godly
man, was discoursing of your affairs, Mistress Hester, and whispered
me that there had been question concerning you in the council. It was
debated whether or no, with safety to the common weal, yonder scarlet
letter might be taken off your bosom. On my life, Hester, I made my
entreaty to the worshipful magistrate that it might be done forthwith!"
"It lies not in the pleasure of the magistrates to take off this badge,"
calmly replied Hester. ''Were I worthy to be quit ofit, it would fall away
of its own nature, or be transformed into something that should speak a
different purport."
"Nay, then, wear it, if it suit you better," rejoined he. "A woman
must needs follow her own fancy, touching the adornment of her
person. The letter is gayly embroidered, and shows right bravely on
your bosom!"
All this while, Hester had been looking steadily at the old man, and
was shocked, as well as wonder-smitten, to discern what a change had
been wrought upon him within the past seven years. It was not so much
that he had grown older; for though the traces of advancing life were
visible, he bore his age well, and seemed to retain a wiry vigor and
alertness. But the former aspect of an intellectual and studious man,
calm and quiet, which was what she best remembered in him, had
altogether vanished, and been succeeded by an eager, searching, almost
fierce, yet carefully guarded look. It seemed to be his wish and purpose
HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN 137
to mask this expression with a smile; but the latter played him false, and
flickered over his visage so derisively, that the spectator could see his
blackness all the better for it. Ever and anon, too, there came a glare of
red light out of his eyes; as if the old man's soul were on fire, and kept on
smouldering duskily within his breast, until, by some casual puff of
passion, it was blown into a momentary flame. This he repressed as
speedily as possible, and strove to look as if nothing of the kind had
happened.
In a word, old Roger Chillingworth was a striking evidence of
man's faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a
reasonable space of time, undertake a devil's office. This unhappy
person had effected such a transformation by devoting himself, for
seven years, to the constant analysis of a heart full of torture, and
deriving his enjoyment thence, and adding fuel to those fiery tortures
which he analyzed and gloated over.
The scarlet letter burned on Hester Prynne's bosom. Here was
another ruin, the responsibility of which came partly home to her.
''What see you in my face," asked the physician, "that you look at it
so earnestly?"
"Something that would make me weep, if there were any tears
bitter enough for it," answered she. "But let it pass! It is of yonder
miserable man that I would speak."
"And what of him?" cried Roger Chillingworth eagerly, as if he
loved the topic, and were glad of an opportunity to discuss it with the
only person of whom he could make a confidant. "Not to hide the truth,
Mistress Hester, my thoughts happen just now to be busy with the
gentleman. So speak freely; and I will make an answer."
''When we last spake together," said Hester, "now seven years ago,
it was your pleasure to extort a promise of secrecy, as touching the
former relation betwixt yourself and me. As the life and good fame of
yonder man were in your hands, there seemed no choice to me, save to
be silent, in accordance with your behest. Yet it was not without heavy
misgivings that I thus bound myself; for, having cast off all duty
towards other human beings, there remained a duty towards him; and
something whispered me that I was betraying it, in pledging myself to
keep your counsel. Since that day, no man is so near to him as you. You
tread behind his every footstep. You are beside him, sleeping and
waking. You search his thoughts. You burrow and rankle in his heart!
Your clutch is on his life, and you cause him to die daily a living death;
and still he knows you not. In permitting this, I have surely acted a false
part by the only man to whom the power was left me to be true!"
THE SCARLET LETTER
"Hast thou not tortured him enough?" said Hester, noticing the
old man's look. "Has he not paid thee all?"
"No! - no! - He has but increased the debt!" answered the phy-
sician; and, as he proceeded, his manner lost its fiercer characteristics,
and subsided into the gloom. "Dost thou remember me, Hester, as I
was nine years agone? Even then, I was in the autumn of my days, nor
was it the early autumn. But all my life had been made up of earnest,
studious, thoughtful, quiet years, bestowed faithfully for the increase of
mine own knowledge, and faithfully, too, though this latter object was
but casual to the other, - faithfully for the advancement of human
welfare. No life had been more peaceful and innocent than mine; few
lives so rich with benefits conferred. Dost thou remember me? Was I
not, though you might deem me cold, nevertheless a man thoughtful for
others, craving little for himself, - kind, true, just, and of constant, if
not warm affections? Was I not all this?"
"All this, and more," said Hester.
"And what am I now?" demanded he, looking into her face, and
permitting the whole evil within him to be written on his features. "I
have already told thee what I am! A fiend! Who made me so?"
"It was myself!" cried Hester, shuddering. "It was I, not less than
he. Why hast thou not avenged thyself on me?"
"I have left thee to the scarlet letter," replied Roger Chillingworth.
"If that have not avenged me, I can do no more!"
He laid his finger on it, with a smile.
"It has avenged thee!" answered Hester Prynne.
"I judged no less," said the physician. "And now, what wouldst
thou with me touching this man?"
"I must reveal the secret," answered Hester, firmly. "He must
discern thee in thy true character. What may be the result, I know not.
But this long debt of confidence, due from me to him, whose bane and
ruin I have been, shall at length be paid. So far as concerns the
overthrow or preservation of his fair fame and his earthly state, and
perchance his life, he is in thy hands. Nor do I, - whom the scarlet
letter has disciplined to truth, though it be the truth of red-hot iron,
entering into the soul, - nor do I perceive such advantage in his living
any longer a life of ghastly emptiness, that I shall stoop to implore thy
mercy. Do with him as thou wilt! There is no good for him, - no good
for me,- no good for thee! There is no good for little Pearl! There is
no path to guide us out of this dismal maze!"
''Woman, I could wellnigh pity thee!" said Roger Chillingworth,
140 THE SCARLET LETTER
ago to have done with this injustice. What did it betoken? Had seven
long years, under the torture of the scarlet letter, inflicted so much of
misery, and wrought out no repentance?
The emotions of that brief space, while she stood gazing after the
crooked figure of old Roger Chillingworth, threw a dark light on
Hester's state of mind, revealing much that she might not otherwise
have acknowledged to herself.
He being gone, she summoned back her child.
"Pearl! Little Pearl! Where are you?"
Pearl, whose activity of spirit never flagged, had been at no loss for
amusement while her mother talked with the old gatherer of herbs. At
first, as already told, she had flirted fancifully with her own image in a
pool of water, beckoning the phantom forth, and- as it declined to
venture - seeking a passage for herself into its sphere of impalpable
earth and unattainable sky. Soon finding, however, that either she or the
image was unreal, she turned elsewhere for better pastime. She made
little boats out of birch-bark, and freighted them with snail-shells, and
sent out more ventures on the mighty deep than any merchant in New
England; but the larger part of them foundered near the shore. She
seized a live horse-shoe by the tail, and made prize of several five-
fingers, and laid out a jelly-fish to melt in the warm sun. Then she took
up the white foam, that streaked the line of the advancing tide, and
threw it upon the breeze, scampering after it with winged footsteps, to
catch the great snow-flakes ere they fell. Perceiving a flock of beach-
birds, that fed and fluttered along the shore, the naughty child picked up
her apron full of pebbles, and, creeping from rock to rock after these
small sea-fowl, displayed remarkable dexterity in pelting them. One
little gray bird, with a white breast, Pearl was almost sure, had been hit
by a pebble, and fluttered away with a broken wing. But then the elf-
child sighed, and gave up her sport; because it grieved her to have done
harm to a little being that was as wild as the sea-breeze, or as wild as
Pearl herself.
Her final employment was to gather sea-weed, of various kinds,
and make herself a scarf, or mantle, and a head-dress, and thus assume
the aspect of a little mermaid. She inherited her mother's gift for
devising drapery and costume. As the last touch to her mermaid's garb,
Pearl took some eel-grass, and imitated, as best she could, on her own
bosom, the decoration with which she was so familiar on her mother's.
A letter,- the letter A,- but freshly green, instead of scarlet! The
child bent her chin upon her breast, and contemplated this device with
HEsrER AND PEARL 143
strange interest; even as if the only thing for which she had been sent
into the world was to make out its hidden import.
"I wonder if mother will ask me what it means!" thought Pearl.
Just then, she heard her mother's voice, and, flitting along as lightly
as one of the little sea-birds, appeared before Hester Prynne, dancing,
laughing, and pointing her finger to the ornament upon her bosom.
"My little Pearl," said Hester, after a moment's silence, "the green
letter, and on thy childish bosom, has no purport. But dost thou know,
my child, what this letter means which thy mother is doomed to wear?"
"Yes, mother," said the child. "It is the great letter A. Thou hast
taught it me in the hom-book."
Hester looked steadily into her little face; but, though there was
that singular expression which she had so often remarked in her black
eyes, she could not satisfy herself whether Pearl really attached any
meaning to the symbol. She felt a morbid desire to ascertain the point.
"Dost thou know, child, wherefore thy mother wears this letter?"
"Truly do I!" answered Pearl, looking brightly into her mother's
face. "It is for the same reason that the minister keeps his hand over his
heart!"
"And what reason is that?" asked Hester, half smiling at the absurd
incongruity of the child's observation; but, on second thoughts, turning
pale. ''What has the letter to do with any heart, save mine?"
"Nay, mother, I have told all I know," said Pearl, more seriously
than she was wont to speak. "Ask yonder old man whom thou hast been
talking with! It may be he can tell. But in good earnest now, mother
dear, what does this scarlet letter mean?- and why dost thou wear it
on thy bosom? - and why does the minister keep his hand over his
heart?"
She took her mother's hand in both her own, and gazed into her
eyes with an earnestness that was seldom seen in her wild and capricious
character. The thought occurred to Hester, that the child might really
be seeking to approach her with childlike confidence, and doing what
she could, and as intelligently as she knew how, to establish a meeting-
point of sympathy. It showed Pearl in an unwonted aspect. Heretofore,
the mother, while loving her child with the intensity of a sole affection,
had schooled herself to hope for little other return than the wayward-
ness of an April breeze; which spends its time in airy sport, and has its
gusts of inexplicable passion, and is petulant in its best of moods, and
chills oftener than caresses you, when you take it to your bosom; in
requital of which misdemeanours, it will sometimes, of its own vague
144 THE SCARLET LETTER
purpose, kiss your cheek with a kind of doubtful tenderness, and play
gently with your hair, and then begone about its other idle business,
leaving a dreamy pleasure at your heart. And this, moreover, was a
mother's estimate of the child's disposition. Any other observer might
have seen few but unamiable traits, and have given them a far darker
coloring. But now the idea came strongly into Hester's mind, that Pearl,
with her remarkable precocity and acuteness, might already have ap-
proached the age when she could be made a friend, and intrusted with as
much of her mother's sorrows as could be imparted, without irreverence
either to the parent or the child. In the little chaos of Pearl's character,
there might be seen emerging - and could have been, from the very
first - the stedfast principles of an unflinching courage, - an uncon-
trollable will, - a sturdy pride, which might be disciplined into self-
respect, - and a bitter scorn of many things, which, when examined,
might be found to have the taint of falsehood in them. She possessed
affections, too, though hitherto acrid and disagreeable, as are the richest
flavors of unripe fruit. With all these sterling attributes, thought Hester,
the evil which she inherited from her mother must be great indeed, if a
noble woman do not grow out of this elfish child.
Pearl's inevitable tendency to hover about the enigma of the scarlet
letter seemed an innate quality of her being. From the earliest epoch of
her conscious life, she had entered upon this as her appointed mission.
Hester had often fancied that Providence had a design of justice and
retribution, in endowing the child with this marked propensity; but
never, until now, had she bethought herself to ask, whether, linked with
that design, there might not likewise be a purpose of mercy and
beneficence. If little Pearl were entertained with faith and trust, as a
spirit-messenger no less than an earthly child, might it not be her errand
to soothe away the sorrow that lay cold in her mother's heart, and
converted it into a tomb? - and to help her to overcome the passion,
once so wild, and even yet neither dead nor asleep, but only imprisoned
within the same tomb-like heart?
Such were some of the thoughts that now stirred in Hester's mind,
with as much vivacity of impression as if they had actually been whis-
pered into her ear. And there was little Pearl, all this while, holding her
mother's hand in both her own, and turning her face upward, while she
put these searching questions, once, and again, and still a third time.
''What does the letter mean, mother? - and why dost thou wear
it? - and why does the minister keep his hand over his heart?"
''What shall I say?" thought Hester to herself. - "No! If this be the
price of the child's sympathy, I cannot pay it!"
A FOREST WALK 14-5
heart imputed suspicion where none could have been felt, and partly
that both the minister and she would need the whole wide world to
breathe in, while they talked together,- for all these reasons, Hester
never thought of meeting him in any narrower privacy than beneath the
open sky.
At last, while attending in a sick-chamber, whither the Reverend
Mr. Dimmesdale had been summoned to make a prayer, she learnt that
he had gone, the day before, to visit the Apostle Eliot, among his Indian
converts. He would probably return, by a certain hour, in the afternoon
of the morrow. Betimes, therefore, the next day, Hester took little
Pearl, - who was necessarily the companion of all her mother's expedi-
tions, however inconvenient her presence, - and set forth.
The road, after the two wayfarers had crossed from the peninsula to
the mainland, was no other than a footpath. It straggled onward into
the mystery of the primeval forest. This hemmed it in so narrowly, and
stood so black and dense on either side, and disclosed such imperfect
glimpses of the sky above, that, to Hester's mind, it imaged not amiss
the moral wilderness in which she had so long been wandering. The day
was chill and sombre. Overhead was a gray expanse of cloud, slightly
stirred, however, by a breeze; so that a gleam of flickering sunshine
might now and then be seen at its solitary play along the path. This
flitting cheerfulness was always at the farther extremity of some long
vista through the forest. The sportive sunlight - feebly sportive, at
best, in the predominant pensiveness of the day and scene - withdrew
itself as they came nigh, and left the spots where it had danced the
drearier, because they had hoped to find them bright.
"Mother," said little Pearl, "the sunshine does not love you. It runs
away and hides itself, because it is afraid of something on your bosom.
Now, see! There it is, playing, a good way off. Stand you here, and let
me run and catch it. I am but a child. It will not flee from me; for I wear
nothing on my bosom yet!"
"Nor ever will, my child, I hope," said Hester.
"And why not, mother?" asked Pearl, stopping short, just at the
beginning of her race. "Will not it come of its own accord, when I am a
woman grown?"
"Run away, child," answered her mother, "and catch the sunshine!
It will soon be gone."
Pearl set forth, at a great pace, and, as Hester smiled to perceive,
did actually catch the sunshine, and stood laughing in the midst of it, all
brightened by its splendor, and scintillating with the vivacity excited by
rapid motion. The light lingered about the lonely child, as if glad of such
A FOREST WALK 147
a playmate, until her mother had drawn almost nigh enough to step into
the magic circle too.
"It will go now!" said Pearl, shaking her head.
"See!" answered Hester, smiling. "Now I can stretch out my hand,
and grasp some of it."
As she attempted to do so, the sunshine vanished; or, to judge from
the bright expression that was dancing on Pearl's features, her mother
could have fancied that the child had absorbed it into herself, and would
give it forth again, with a gleam about her path, as they should plunge
into some gloomier shade. There was no other attribute that so much
impressed her with a sense of new and untransmitted vigor in Pearl's
nature, as this never-failing vivacity of spirits; she had not the disease of
sadness, which almost all children, in these latter days, inherit, with the
scrofula, from the troubles of their ancestors. Perhaps this too was a
disease, and but the reflex of the wild energy with which Hester had
fought against her sorrows, before Pearl's birth. It was certainly a
doubtful charm, imparting a hard, metallic lustre to the child's charac-
ter. She wanted - what some people want throughout life - a grief
that should deeply touch her, and thus humanize and make her capable
of sympathy. But there was time enough yet for little Pearl!
"Come, my child!" said Hester, looking about her, from the spot
where Pearl had stood still in the sunshine. ''We will sit down a little way
within the wood, and rest ourselves."
"I am not aweary, mother," replied the little girl. "But you may sit
down, if you will tell me a story meanwhile."
"A story, child!" said Hester. "And about what?"
"0, a story about the Black Man!" answered Pearl, taking hold of
her mother's gown, and looking up, half earnestly, half mischievously,
into her face. "How he haunts this forest, and carries a book with
him, - a big, heavy book, with iron clasps; and how this ugly Black
Man offers his book and an iron pen to every body that meets him here
among the trees; and they are to write their names with their own
blood. And then he sets his mark on their bosoms! Didst thou ever meet
the Black Man, mother?"
"And who told you this story, Pearl?" asked her mother, recogniz-
ing a common superstition of the period.
"It was the old dame in the chimney-comer, at the house where you
watched last night," said the child. "But she fancied me asleep while she
was talking of it. She said that a thousand and a thousand people had
met him here, and had written in his book, and have his mark on them.
And that ugly-tempered lady, old Mistress Hibbins, was one. And,
1+8 THE SCARLET LETTER
mother, the old dame said that this scarlet letter was the Black Man's
mark on thee, and that it glows like a red flame when thou meetest him
at midnight, here in the dark wood. Is it true, mother? And dost thou go
to meet him in the night-time?"
"Didst thou ever awake, and find thy mother gone?" asked Hester.
"Not that I remember," said the child. "If thou fearest to leave me
in our cottage, thou mightest take me along with thee. I would very
gladly go! But, mother, tell me now! Is there such a Black Man? And
didst thou ever meet him? And is this his mark?"
''Wilt thou let me be at peace, if! once tell thee?" asked her mother.
"Yes, if thou tellest me all," answered Pearl.
"Once in my life I met the Black Man!" said her mother. ''This
scarlet letter is his mark!"
Thus conversing, they entered sufficiently deep into the wood to
secure themselves from the observation of any casual passenger along
the forest-track. Here they sat down on a luxuriant heap of moss; which,
at some epoch of the preceding century, had been a gigantic pine, with
its roots and trunk in the darksome shade, and its head aloft in the upper
atmosphere. It was a little dell where they had seated themselves, with a
leaf-strewn bank rising gently on either side, and a brook flowing
through the midst, over a bed of fallen and drowned leaves. The trees
impending over it had flung down great branches, from time to time,
which choked up the current, and compelled it to form eddies and black
depths at some points; while, in its swifter and livelier passages, there
appeared a channel-way of pebbles, and brown, sparkling sand. Letting
the eyes follow along the course of the stream, they could catch the
reflected light from its water, at some short distance within the forest,
but soon lost all traces of it amid the bewilderment of tree-trunks and
underbrush, and here and there a huge rock, covered over with gray
lichens. All these giant trees and boulders of granite seemed intent on
making a mystery of the course of this small brook; fearing, perhaps,
that, with its never-ceasing loquacity, it should whisper tales out of the
heart of the old forest whence it flowed, or mirror its revelations on the
smooth surface of a pool. Continually, indeed, as it stole onward, the
streamlet kept up a babble, kind, quiet, soothing, but melancholy, like
the voice of a young child that was spending its infancy without
playfulness, and knew not how to be merry among sad acquaintance and
events of sombre hue.
"0 brook! 0 foolish and tiresome little brook!" cried Pearl, after
listening awhile to its talk. ''Why art thou so sad? Pluck up a spirit, and
do not be all the time sighing and murmuring!"
A FOREST WALK 149
But the brook, in the course of its little lifetime among the forest-
trees, had gone through so solemn an experience that it could not help
talking about it, and seemed to have nothing else to say. Pearl resembled
the brook, inasmuch as the current of her life gushed from a well-spring
as mysterious, and had flowed through scenes shadowed as heavily with
gloom. But, unlike the little stream, she danced and sparkled, and
prattled airily along her course.
''What does this sad little brook say, mother?" inquired she.
"If thou hadst a sorrow of thine ow~, the brook might tell thee of
it," answered her mother, "even as it is telling me of mine! But now,
Pearl, I hear a footstep along the path, and the noise of one putting aside
the branches. I would have thee betake thyself to play, and leave me to
speak with him that comes yonder."
"Is it the Black Man?" asked Pearl.
"Wilt thou go and play, child?" repeated her mother. "But do not
stray far into the wood. And take heed that thou come at my first call."
"Yes, mother," answered Pearl. "But, if it be the Black Man, wilt
thou not let me stay a moment, and look at him, with his big book
under his arm?"
"Go, silly child!" said her mother, impatiently. "It is no Black Man!
Thou canst see him now through the trees. It is the minister!"
"And so it is!" said the child. "And, mother, he has his hand over
his heart! Is it because, when the minister wrote his name in the book,
the Black Man set his mark in that place? But why does he not wear it
outside his bosom, as thou dost, mother?"
"Go now, child, and thou shalt tease me as thou wilt another time!"
cried Hester Prynne. "But do not stray far. Keep where thou canst hear
the babble of the brook."
The child went singing away, following up the current of the
brook, and striving to mingle a more lightsome cadence with its melan-
choly voice. But the little stream would not be comforted, and still kept
telling its unintelligible secret of some very mournful mystery that had
happened - or making a prophetic lamentation about something that
was yet to happen - within the verge of the dismal forest. So Pearl,
who had enough of shadow in her own little life, chose to break off all
acquaintance with this repining brook. She set herself, therefore, to
gathering violets and wood-anemones, and some scarlet columbines
that she found growing in the crevices of a high rock.
When her elf-child had departed, Hester Prynne made a step or two
towards the track that led through the forest, but still remained under
the deep shadow of the trees. She beheld the minister advancing along
ISO THE SCARLET LETTER
the path, entirely alone, and leaning on a staff which he had cut by the
way-side. He looked haggard and feeble, and betrayed a nerveless
despondency in his air, which had never so remarkably characterized
him in his walks about the settlement, nor in any other situation where
he deemed himself liable to notice. Here it was wofully visible, in this
intense seclusion of the forest, which of itself would have been a heavy
trial to the spirits. There was a listlessness in his gait; as if he saw no
reason for taking one step farther, nor felt any desire to do so, but would
have been glad, could he be glad of any thing, to fling himself down at
the root of the nearest tree, and lie there passive for evermore. The
leaves might bestrew him, and the soil gradually accumulate and form a
little hillock over his frame, no matter whether there were life in it or no.
Death was too definite an object to be wished for, or avoided.
To Hester's eye, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale exhibited no
symptom of positive and vivacious suffering, except that, as little Pearl
had remarked, he kept his hand over his heart.
world beyond the grave, of two spirits who had been intimately con-
nected in their former life, but now stood coldly shuddering, in mutual
dread; as not yet familiar with their state, nor wonted to the companion-
ship of disembodied beings. Each a ghost, and awe-stricken at the other
ghost! They were awe-stricken likewise at themselves; because the crisis
flung back to them their consciousness, and revealed to each heart its
history and experience, as life never does, except at such breathless
epochs. The soul beheld its features in the mirror of the passing
moment. It was with fear, and tremulously, and, as it were, by a slow,
reluctant necessity, that Arthur Dimmesdale put forth his hand, chill as
death, and touched the chill hand of Hester Prynne. The grasp, cold as it
was, took away what was dreariest in the interview. They now felt
themselves, at least, inhabitants of the same sphere.
Without a word more spoken, - neither he nor she assuming the
guidance, but with an unexpressed consent, - they glided back into the
shadow of the woods, whence Hester had emerged, and sat down on
the heap of moss where she and Pearl had before been sitting. When
they found voice to speak, it was, at first, only to utter remarks and
inquiries such as any two acquaintance might have made, about the
gloomy sky, the threatening storm, and, next, the health of each. Thus
they went onward, not boldly, but step by step, into the themes that
were brooding deepest in their hearts. So long estranged by fate and
circumstances, they needed something slight and casual to run before,
and throw open the doors of intercourse, so that their real thoughts
might be led across the threshold.
After a while, the minister fixed his eyes on Hester Prynne's.
"Hester," said he, "hast thou found peace?"
She smiled drearily, looking down upon her bosom.
"Hast thou?" she asked.
"None! - nothing but despair!'' he answered. ''What else could I
look for, being what I am, and leading such a life as mine? Were I an
atheist, - a man devoid of conscience, - a wretch with coarse and
brutal instincts,- I might have found peace, long ere now. Nay, I
never should have lost it! But, as matters stand with my soul, whatever
of good capacity there originally was in me, all of God's gifts that were
the choicest have become the ministers of spiritual torment. Hester, I
am most miserable!"
''The people reverence thee," said Hester. "And surely thou work-
est good among them! Doth this bring thee no comfort?"
"More misery, Hester!- only the more misery!" answered the
152 THE SCARLET LETTER
clergyman, with a bitter smile. "As concerns the good which I may
appear to do, I have no faith in it. It must needs be a delusion. What can
a ruined soul, like mine, effect towards the redemption of other
souls?- or a polluted soul, towards their purification? And as for the
people's reverence, would that it were turned to scorn and hatred! Canst
thou deem it, Hester, a consolation, that I must stand up in my pulpit,
and meet so many eyes turned upward to my face, as if the light of
heaven were beaming from it!- must see my flock hungry for the
truth, and listening to my words as if a tongue of Pentecost were
speaking! - and then look inward, and discern the black reality of what
they idolize? I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the
contrast between what I seem and what I am! And Satan laughs at it!"
"You wrong yourself in this," said Hester, gently. "You have
deeply and sorely repented. Your sin is left behind you, in the days long
past. Your present life is not less holy, in very truth, than it seems in
people's eyes. Is there no reality in the penitence thus sealed and
witnessed by good works? And wherefore should it not bring you
peace?"
"No, Hester, no!" replied the clergyman. ''There is no substance in
it! It is cold and dead, and can do nothing for me! Of penance I have had
enough! Of penitence there has been none! Else, I should long ago have
thrown off these garments of mock holiness, and have shown myself to
mankind as they will see me at the judgment-seat. Happy are you,
Hester, that wear the scarlet letter openly upon your bosom! Mine
burns in secret! Thou little knowest what a relief it is, after the torment
of a seven years' cheat, to look into an eye that recognizes me for what I
am! Had I one friend,- or were it my worst enemy!- to whom,
when sickened with the praises of all other men, I could daily betake
myself, and be known as the vilest of all sinners, methinks my soul might
keep itself alive thereby. Even thus much of truth would save me! But,
now, it is all falsehood!- all emptiness!- all death!"
Hester Prynne looked into his face, but hesitated to speak. Yet,
uttering his long-restrained emotions so vehemently as he did, his
words here offered her the very point of circumstances in which to
interpose what she came to say. She conquered her fears, and spoke.
"Such a friend as thou hast even now wished for," said she, ''with
whom to weep over thy sin, thou hast in me, the partner of it!" - Again
she hesitated, but brought out the words with an effort. - ''Thou hast
long had such an enemy, and dwellest with him under the same roofl"
The minister started to his feet, gasping for breath, and clutching at
his heart as if he would have torn it out of his bosom.
THE PASfOR AND HIS PARISHIONER 153
"Ha! What sayest thou?" cried he. "An enemy! And under mine
own roofl What mean you?"
Hester Prynne was now fully sensible of the deep injury for which
she was responsible to this unhappy man, in permitting him to lie for so
many years, or, indeed, for a single moment, at the mercy of one, whose
purposes could not be other than malevolent. The very contiguity of his
enemy, beneath whatever mask the latter might conceal himself, was
enough to disturb the magnetic sphere of a being so sensitive as Arthur
Dimmesdale. There had been a period when Hester was less alive to this
consideration; or, perhaps, in the misanthropy of her own trouble, she
left the minister to bear what she might picture to herself as a more
tolerable doom. But of late, since the night of his vigil, all her sympa-
thies towards him had been both softened and invigorated. She now
read his heart more accurately. She doubted not, that the continual
presence of Roger Chillingworth,- the secret poison of his malignity,
infecting all the air about him, - and his authorized interference, as a
physician, with the minister's physical and spiritual infirmities, - that
these bad opportunities had been turned to a cruel purpose. By means of
them, the sufferer's conscience had been kept in an irritated state, the
tendency of which was, not to cure by wholesome pain, but to disorga-
nize and corrupt his spiritual being. Its result, on earth, could hardly fail
to be insanity, and hereafter, that eternal alienation from the Good and
True, of which madness is perhaps the earthly type.
Such was the ruin to which she had brought the man, once,- nay,
why should we not speak it? - still so passionately loved! Hester felt
that the sacrifice of the clergyman's good name, and death itself, as she
had already told Roger Chillingworth, would have been infinitely
preferable to the alternative which she had taken upon herself to choose.
And now, rather than have had this grievous wrong to confess, she
would gladly have lain down on the forest-leaves, and died there, at
Arthur Dimmesdale's feet.
"0 Arthur," cried she, "forgive me! In all things else, I have striven
to be true! Truth was the one virtue which I might have held fast, and
did hold fast through all extremity; save when thy good, - thy life, -
thy fame, -were put in question! Then I consented to a deception. But
a lie is never good, even though death threaten on the other side! Dost
thou not see what I would say? That old man!- the physician!- he
whom they call Roger Chillingworth! - he was my husband!"
The minister looked at her, for an instant, with all that violence of
passion, which- intermixed, in more shapes than one, with his higher,
purer, softer qualities- was, in fact, the portion of him which the
154 THE SCARLET LETTER
Devil claimed, and through which he sought to win the rest. Never was
there a blacker or a fiercer frown, than Hester now encountered. For the
brief space that it lasted, it was a dark transfiguration. But his character
had been so much enfeebled by suffering, that even its lower energies
were incapable of more than a temporary struggle. He sank down on the
ground, and buried his face in his hands.
"I might have known it!" murmured he. "I did know it! Was not
the secret told me in the natural recoil of my heart, at the first sight of
him, and as often as I have seen him since? Why did I not understand? 0
Hester Prynne, thou little, little knowest all the horror of this thing!
And the shame!- the indelicacy!- the horrible ugliness of this expo-
sure of a sick and guilty heart to the very eye that would gloat over it!
Woman, woman, thou art accountable for this! I cannot forgive thee!"
"Thou shalt forgive me!" cried Hester, flinging herself on the fallen
leaves beside him. "Let God punish! Thou shalt forgive!"
With sudden and desperate tenderness, she threw her arms around
him, and pressed his head against her bosom; little caring though his
cheek rested on the scarlet letter. He would have released himself, but
strove in vain to do so. Hester would not set him free, lest he should
look her sternly in the face. All the world had frowned on her,- for
seven long years had it frowned upon this lonely woman, - and still she
bore it all, nor ever once turned away her firm, sad eyes. Heaven,
likewise, had frowned upon her, and she had not died. But the frown of
this pale, weak, sinful, and sorrow-stricken man was what Hester could
not bear, and live!
''Wilt thou yet forgive me?" she repeated, over and over again.
''Wilt thou not frown? Wilt thou forgive?"
"'do forgive you, Hester," replied the minister, at length, with a deep
utterance out of an abyss of sadness, but no anger. "I freely forgive you
now. May God forgive us both! We are not, Hester, the worst sinners in
the world. There is one worse than even the polluted priest! That old
man's revenge has been blacker than my sin. He has violated, in cold
blood, the sanctity of a human heart. Thou and I, Hester, never did so!"
"Never, never!" whispered she. ''What we did had a consecration of
its own. We felt it so! We said so to each other! Hast thou forgotten it?"
"Hush, Hester!" said Arthur Dimmesdale, rising from the ground.
"No; I have not forgotten!"
They sat down again, side by side, and hand clasped in hand, on the
mossy trunk of the fallen tree. Life had never brought them a gloomier
hour; it was the point whither their pathway had so long been tending,
and darkening ever, as it stole along; - and yet it inclosed a charm that
THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER 155
made them linger upon it, and claim another, and another, and, after all,
another moment. The forest was obscure around them, and creaked
with a blast that was passing through it. The boughs were tossing
heavily above their heads; while one solemn old tree groaned dolefully
to another, as if telling the sad story of the pair that sat beneath, or
constrained to forebode evil to come.
And yet they lingered. How dreary looked the forest-track that led
backward to the settlement, where Hester Prynne must take up again
the burden of her ignominy, and the minister the hollow mockery of his
good name! So they lingered an instant longer. No golden light had
ever been so precious as the gloom of this dark forest. Here, seen only
by his eyes, the scarlet letter need not burn into the bosom of the fallen
woman! Here, seen only by her eyes, Arthur Dimmesdale, false to God
and man, might be, for one moment, true!
He started at a thought that suddenly occurred to him.
"Hester," cried he, "here is a new horror! Roger Chillingworth
knows your purpose to reveal his true character. Will he continue, then,
to keep our secret? What will now be the course of his revenge?"
''There is a strange secrecy in his nature," replied Hester, thought-
fully; "and it has grown upon him by the hidden practices of his
revenge. I deem it not likely that he will betray the secret. He will
doubtless seek other means of satiating his dark passion."
"And I!- how am I to live longer, breathing the same air with this
deadly enemy?" exclaimed Arthur Dimmesdale, shrinking within him-
self, and pressing his hand nervously against his heart, - a gesture that
had grown involuntary with him. ''Think for me, Hester! Thou art
strong. Resolve for me!"
''Thou must dwell no longer with this man," said Hester, slowly
and firmly. ''Thy heart must be no longer under his evil eye!"
"It were far worse than death!" replied the minister. "But how to
avoid it? What choice remains to me? Shall I lie down again on these
withered leaves, where I cast myself when thou didst tell me what he
was? Must I sink down there, and die at once?"
"Alas, what a ruin has befallen thee!" said Hester, with the tears
gushing into her eyes. ''Wilt thou die for very weakness? There is no
other cause!"
''The judgment of God is on me," answered the conscience-stricken
priest. "It is too mighty for me to struggle with!"
"Heaven would show mercy," rejoined Hester, "hadst thou but the
strength to take advantage of it."
"Be thou strong for me!" answered he. "Advise me what to do."
THE SCARLET LETTER
"Is the world then so narrow?" exclaimed Hester Prynne, fixing her
deep eyes on the minister's, and instinctively exercising a magnetic
power over a spirit so shattered and subdued, that it could hardly hold
itself erect. "Doth the universe lie within the compass of yonder town,
which only a little time ago was but a leaf-strewn desert, as lonely as this
around us? Whither leads yonder forest-track? Backward to the settle-
ment, thou sayest! Yes; but onward, too! Deeper it goes, and deeper,
into the wilderness, less plainly to be seen at every step; until, some few
miles hence, the yellow leaves will show no vestige of the white man's
tread. There thou art free! So brief a journey would bring thee from a
world where thou hast been most wretched, to one where thou mayest
still be happy! Is there not shade enough in all this boundless forest to
hide thy heart from the gaze of Roger Chillingworth?"
''Yes, Hester; but only under the fallen leaves!" replied the minis-
ter, with a sad smile.
''Then there is the broad pathway of the sea!" continued Hester. "It
brought thee hither. If thou so choose, it will bear thee back again. In
our native land, whether in some remote rural village or in vast Lon-
don,- or, surely, in Germany, in France, in pleasant Italy,- thou
wouldst be beyond his power and knowledge! And what hast thou to do
with all these iron men, and their opinions? They have kept thy better
part in bondage too long already!"
"It cannot be!" answered the minister, listening as if he were called
upon to realize a dream. "I am powerless to go. Wretched and sinful as I
am, I have had no other thought than to drag on my earthly existence in
the sphere where Providence hath placed me. Lost as my own soul is, I
would still do what I may for other human souls! I dare not quit my
post, though an unfaithful sentinel, whose sure reward is death and
dishonor, when his dreary watch shall come to an end!"
''Thou art crushed under this seven years' weight of misery,"
replied Hester, fervently resolved to buoy him up with her own energy.
"But thou shalt leave it all behind thee! It shall not cumber thy steps, as
thou treadest along the forest-path; neither shalt thou freight the ship
with it, if thou prefer to cross the sea. Leave this wreck and ruin here
where it hath happened! Meddle no more with it! Begin all anew! Hast
thou exhausted possibility in the failure of this one trial? Not so! The
future is yet full of trial and success. There is happiness to be enjoyed!
There is good to be done! Exchange this false life of thine for a true one.
Be, if thy spirit summon thee to such a mission, the teacher and apostle
of the red men. Or, - as is more thy nature, - be a scholar and a sage
among the wisest and the most renowned of the cultivated world.
A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE 157
Preach! Write! Act! Do any thing, save to lie down and die! Give up this
name of Arthur Dirnmesdale, and make thyself another, and a high one,
such as thou canst wear without fear or shame. Why shouldst thou tarry
so much as one other day in the torments that have so gnawed into thy
life!- that have made thee feeble to will and to do!- that will leave
thee powerless even to repent! Up, and away!"
"0 Hester!" cried Arthur Dirnmesdale, in whose eyes a fitful light,
kindled by her enthusiasm, flashed up and died away, "thou tellest of
running a race to a man whose knees are tottering beneath him! I must
die here. There is not the strength or courage left me to venture into the
wide, strange, difficult world, alone!"
It was the last expression of the despondency of a broken spirit. He
lacked energy to grasp the better fortune that seemed within his reach.
He repeated the word.
"Alone, Hester!"
''Thou shalt not go alone!" answered she, in a deep whisper.
Then, all was spoken!
softness to her features. There played around her mouth, and beamed
out of her eyes, a radiant and tender smile, that seemed gushing from
the very heart of womanhood. A crimson flush was glowing on her
cheek, that had been long so pale. Her sex, her youth, and the whole
richness of her beauty, came back from what men call the irrevocable
past, and clustered themselves, with her maiden hope, and a happiness
before unknown, within the magic circle of this hour. And, as if the
gloom of the earth and sky had been but the effiuence of these two
mortal hearts, it vanished with their sorrow. All at once, as with a
sudden smile of heaven, forth burst the sunshine, pouring a very flood
into the obscure forest, gladdening each green leaf, transmuting the
yellow fallen ones to gold, and gleaming adown the gray trunks of the
solemn trees. The objects that had made a shadow hitherto, embodied
the brightness now. The course of the little brook might be traced by its
merry gleam afar into the wood's heart of mystery, which had become a
mystery of joy.
Such was the sympathy of Nature- that wild, heathen Nature of
the forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by higher
truth - with the bliss of these two spirits! Love, whether newly born,
or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create a sunshine,
filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward
world. Had the forest still kept its gloom, it would have been bright in
Hester's eyes, and bright in Arthur Dimmesdale's!
Hester looked at him with the thrill of another joy.
''Thou must know Pearl!" said she. "Our little Pearl! Thou hast
seen her,- yes, I know it!- but thou wilt see her now with other
eyes. She is a strange child! I hardly comprehend her! But thou wilt love
her dearly, as I do, and wilt advise me how to deal with her."
"Dost thou think the child will be glad to know me?" asked the
minister, somewhat uneasily. "I have long shrunk from children, be-
cause they often show a distrust, - a backwardness to be familiar with
me. I have even been afraid of little Pearl!"
"Ah, that was sad!" answered the mother. "But she will love thee
dearly, and thou her. She is not far off. I will call her! Pearl! Pearl!"
"I see the child," observed the minister. "Yonder she is, standing in
a streak of sunshine, a good way off, on the other side of the brook. So
thou thinkest the child will love me?"
Hester smiled, and again called to Pearl, who was visible, at some
distance, as the minister had described her, like a bright-apparelled
vision, in a sunbeam, which fell down upon her through an arch of
boughs. The ray quivered to and fro, making her figure dim or dis-
A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE 161
tinct, - now like a real child, now like a child's spirit, - as the splendor
went and came again. She heard her mother's voice, and approached
slowly through the forest.
Pearl had not found the hour pass wearisomely, while her mother
sat talking with the clergyman. The great black forest - stem as it
showed itself to those who brought the guilt and troubles of the world
into its bosom - became the playmate of the lonely infant, as well as it
knew how. Sombre as it was, it put on the kindest of its moods to
welcome her. It offered her the partridge-berries, the growth of the
preceding autumn, but ripening only in the spring, and now red as
drops of blood upon the withered leaves. These Pearl gathered, and was
pleased with their wild flavor. The small denizens of the wilderness
hardly took pains to move out of her path. A partridge, indeed, with a
brood of ten behind her, ran forward threateningly, but soon repented
of her fierceness, and clucked to her young ones not to be afraid. A
pigeon, alone on a low branch, allowed Pearl to come beneath, and
uttered a sound as much of greeting as alarm. A squirrel, from the lofty
depths of his domestic tree, chattered either in anger or merriment, -
for a squirrel is such a choleric and humorous little personage that it is
hard to distinguish between his moods, - so he chattered at the child,
and flung down a nut upon her head. It was a last year's nut, and already
gnawed by his sharp tooth. A fox, startled from his sleep by her
light footstep on the leaves, looked inquisitively at Pearl, as doubting
whether it were better to steal off, or renew his nap on the same spot. A
wolf, it is said, - but here the tale has surely lapsed into the improb-
able, - came up, and smelt of Pearl's robe, and offered his savage head
to be patted by her hand. The truth seems to be, however, that the
mother-forest, and these wild things which it nourished, all recognized
a kindred wildness in the human child.
And she was gentler here than in the grassy-margined streets of the
settlement, or in her mother's cottage. The flowers appeared to know it;
and one and another whispered, as she passed, "Adorn thyself with me,
thou beautiful child, adorn thyself with me!"- and, to please them,
Pearl gathered the violets, and anemones, and columbines, and some
twigs of the freshest green, which the old trees held down before her
eyes. With these she decorated her hair, and her young waist, and
became a nymph-child, or an infant dryad, or whatever else was in
closest sympathy with the antique wood. In such guise had Pearl
adorned herself, when she heard her mother's voice, and came slowly
back.
Slowly; for she saw the clergyman!
162 THE SCARLET LETTER
with me. They will not climb my knee, nor prattle in my ear, nor answer
to my smile; but stand apart, and eye me strangely. Even little babes,
when I take them in my arms, weep bitterly. Yet Pearl, twice in her little
lifetime, hath been kind to me! The first time, - thou knowest it well!
The last was when thou ledst her with thee to the house of yonder stern
old Governor."
"And thou didst plead so bravely in her behalf and mine!" answered
the mother. "I remember it; and so shall little Pearl. Fear nothing! She
may be strange and shy at first, but will soon learn to love thee!"
By this time Pearl had reached the margin of the brook, and stood
on the farther side, gazing silently at Hester and the clergyman, who still
sat together on the mossy tree-trunk, waiting to receive her. Just where
she had paused the brook chanced to form a pool, so smooth and quiet
that it reflected a perfect image of her little figure, with all the brilliant
picturesqueness of her beauty, in its adornment of flowers and wreathed
foliage, but more refined and spiritualized than the reality. This image,
so nearly identical with the living Pearl, seemed to communicate some-
what of its own shadowy and intangible quality to the child herself. It
was strange, the way in which Pearl stood, looking so stedfastly at them
through the dim medium of the forest-gloom; herself, meanwhile, all
glorified with a ray of sunshine, that was attracted thitherward as by a
certain sympathy. In the brook beneath stood another child, - another
and the same, - with likewise its ray of golden light. Hester felt herself,
in some indistinct and tantalizing manner, estranged from Pearl; as if
the child, in her lonely ramble through the forest, had strayed out of the
sphere in which she and her mother dwelt together, and was now vainly
seeking to return to it.
There was both truth and error in the impression; the child and
mother were estranged, but through Hester's fault, not Pearl's. Since
the latter rambled from her side, another inmate had been admitted
within the circle of the mother's feelings, and so modified the aspect of
them all, that Pearl, the returning wanderer, could not find her wonted
place, and hardly knew where she was.
"I have a strange fancy," observed the sensitive minister, "that this
brook is the boundary between two worlds, and that thou canst never
meet thy Pearl again. Or is she an elfish spirit, who, as the legends of our
childhood taught us, is forbidden to cross a running stream? Pray hasten
her; for this delay has already imparted a tremor to my nerves."
"Come, dearest child!" said Hester encouragingly, and stretching
out both her arms. "How slow thou art! When hast thou been so
164 THE SCARLET LETTER
sluggish before now? Here is a friend of mine, who must be thy friend
also. Thou wilt have twice as much love, henceforward, as thy mother
alone could give thee! Leap across the brook and come to us. Thou canst
leap like a young deer!"
Pearl, without responding in any manner to these honey-sweet
expressions, remained on the other side of the brook. Now she fixed her
bright, wild eyes on her mother, now on the minister, and now included
them both in the same glance; as if to detect and explain to herself the
relation which they bore to one another. For some unaccountable
reason, as Arthur Dimmesdale felt the child's eyes upon himself, his
hand - with that gesture so habitual as to have become involuntary -
stole over his heart. At length, assuming a singular air of authority, Pearl
stretched out her hand, with the small forefinger extended, and pointing
evidently towards her mother's breast. And beneath, in the mirror of the
brook, there was the flower-girdled and sunny image of little Pearl,
pointing her small forefinger too.
''Thou strange child, why dost thou not come to me?" exclaimed
Hester.
Pearl still pointed with her forefinger; and a frown gathered on her
brow; the more impressive from the childish, the almost baby-like
aspect of the features that conveyed it. As her mother still kept beckon-
ing to her, and arraying her face in a holiday suit of unaccustomed
smiles, the child stamped her foot with a yet more imperious look and
gesture. In the brook, again, was the fantastic beauty of the image, with
its reflected frown, its pointed finger, and imperious gesture, giving
emphasis to the aspect of little Pearl.
"Hasten, Pearl; or I shall be angry with thee!" cried Hester Prynne,
who, however inured to such behaviour on the elf-child's pan at other
seasons, was naturally anxious for a mote seemly deportment now.
"Leap across the brook, naughty child, and run hither! Else I must come
to thee!"
But Pearl, not a whit startled at her mother's threats, any more than
mollified by her entreaties, now suddenly burst into a fit of passion,
gesticulating violently, and throwing her small figure into the most
extravagant contortions. She accompanied this wild outbreak with
piercing shrieks, which the woods reverberated on all sides; so that,
alone as she was in her childish and unreasonable wrath, it seemed as if a
hidden multitude were lending her their sympathy and encouragement.
Seen in the brook, once more, was the shadowy wrath of Pearl's image,
crowned and girdled with flowers, but stamping its foot, wildly gesticu-
THE CHILD AT THE BROOK-SIDE
lating, and, in the midst of all, still pointing its small forefinger at
Hester's bosom!
"I see what ails the child," whispered Hester to the clergyman, and
turning pale in spite of a strong effort to conceal her trouble and
annoyance. "Children will not abide any, the slightest, change in the
accustomed aspect of things that are daily before their eyes. Pearl misses
something which she has always seen me wear!"
"I pray you," answered the minister, "if thou hast any means of
pacifying the child, do it forthwith! Save it were the cankered wrath of
an old witch, like Mistress Hibbins," added he, attempting to smile, "I
know nothing that I would not sooner encounter than this passion in a
child. In Pearl's young beauty, as in the wrinkled witch, it has a
preternatural effect. Pacify her, if thou lovest me!"
Hester turned again towards Pearl, with a crimson blush upon her
cheek, a conscious glance aside at the clergyman, and then a heavy sigh;
while, even before she had time to speak, the blush yielded to a deadly
pallor.
"Pearl," said she, sadly, "look down at thy feet! There!- before
thee! -on the hither side of the brook!"
The child turned her eyes to the point indicated; and there lay the
scarlet letter, so close upon the margin of the stream, that the gold
embroidery was reflected in it.
"Bring it hither!" said Hester.
"Come thou and take it up!" answered Pearl.
''Was ever such a child!" observed Hester aside to the minister. "0,
I have much to tell thee about her. But, in very truth, she is right as
regards this hateful token. I must bear its torture yet a little longer,-
only a few days longer,- until we shall have left this region, and look
back hither as to a land which we have dreamed of. The forest cannot
hide it! The mid-ocean shall take it from my hand, and swallow it up for
ever!"
With these words, she advanced to the margin of the brook, took
up the scarlet letter, and fastened it again into her bosom. Hopefully,
but a moment ago, as Hester had spoken of drowning it in the deep sea,
there was a sense of inevitable doom upon her, as she thus received back
this deadly symbol from the hand of fate. She had flung it into infinite
space! - she had drawn an hour's free breath! - and here again was
the scarlet misery, glittering on the old spot! So it ever is, whether thus
typified or no, that an evil deed invests itself with the character of doom.
Hester next gathered up the heavy tresses of her hair, and confined them
166 THE SCARLET LETTER
beneath her cap. As if there were a withering spell in the sad letter, her
beauty, the warmth and richness of her womanhood, departed, like
fading sunshine; and a gray shadow seemed to fall across her.
When the dreary change was wrought, she extended her hand to
Pearl.
"Dost thou know thy mother now, child?" asked she, reproachful-
ly, but with a subdued tone. ''Wilt thou come across the brook, and own
thy mother, now that she has her shame upon her,- now that she is
sad?"
"Yes; now I will!" answered the child, bounding across the brook,
and clasping Hester in her arms. "Now thou art my mother indeed! And
I am thy little Pearl!"
In a mood of tenderness that was not usual with her, she drew
down her mother's head, and kissed her brow and both her cheeks. But
then - by a kind of necessity that always impelled this child to alloy
whatever comfort she might chance to give with a throb of anguish -
Pearl put up her mouth, and kissed the scarlet letter too!
''That was not kind!" said Hester. ''When thou hast shown me a
little love, thou mockest me!"
''Why doth the minister sit yonder?" asked Pearl.
"He waits to welcome thee," replied her mother. "Come thou, and
entreat his blessing! He loves thee, my little Pearl, and loves thy mother
too. Wilt thou not love him? Come! he longs to greet thee!"
"Doth he love us?" said Pearl, looking up with acute intelligence
into her mother's face. ''Will he go back with us, hand in hand, we three
together, into the town?"
"Not now, dear child," answered Hester. "But in days to come he
will walk hand in hand with us. We will have a home and fireside of our
own; and thou shalt sit upon his knee; and he will teach thee many
things, and love thee dearly. Thou wilt love him; wilt thou not?"
"And will he always keep his hand over his heart?" inquired Pearl.
"Foolish child, what a question is that!" exclaimed her mother.
"Come and ask his blessing!"
But, whether influenced by the jealousy that seems instinctive with
every petted child towards a dangerous rival, or from whatever caprice
of her freakish nature, Pearl would show no favor to the clergyman. It
was only by an exertion of force that her mother brought her up to him,
hanging back, and manifesting her reluctance by odd grimaces; of
which, ever since her babyhood, she had possessed a singular variety,
and could transform her mobile physiognomy into a series of different
aspects, with a new mischief in them, each and all. The minister -
THE MINISfER IN A MAZE 167
life, his native gifts, his culture, and his entire development would
secure him a home only in the midst of civilization and refinement; the
higher the state, the more delicately adapted to it the man. In further-
ance of this choice, it so happened that a ship lay in the harbour; one of
those questionable cruisers, frequent at that day, which, without being
absolutely outlaws of the deep, yet roamed over its surface with a
remarkable irresponsibility of character. This vessel had recently arrived
from the Spanish Main, and, within three days' time, would sail for
Bristol. Hester Prynne - whose vocation, as a self-enlisted Sister of
Charity, had brought her acquainted with the captain and crew -
could take upon herself to secure the passage of two individuals and a
child, with all the secrecy which circumstances rendered more than
desirable.
The minister had inquired of Hester, with no little interest, the
precise time at which the vessel might be expected to depart. It would
probably be on the fourth day from the present. "That is most fortu-
nate!" he had then said to himself. Now, why the Reverend Mr.
Dimmesdale considered it so very fortunate, we hesitate to reveal.
Nevertheless,- to hold nothing back from the reader,- it was be-
cause, on the third day from the present, he was to preach the Election
Sermon; and, as such an occasion formed an honorable epoch in the life
of a New England clergyman, he could not have chanced upon a more
suitable mode and time of terminating his professional career. "At least,
they shall say of me," thought this exemplary man, "that I leave no
public duty unperformed, nor ill performed!" Sad, indeed, that an
introspection so profound and acute as this poor minister's should be so
miserably deceived! We have had, and may still have, worse things to tell
of him; but none, we apprehend, so pitiably weak; no evidence, at once
so slight and irrefragable, of a subtle disease, that had long since begun
to eat into the real substance of his character. No man, for any consider-
able period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude,
without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.
The excitement of Mr. Dimmesdale's feelings, as he returned from
his interview with Hester, lent him unaccustomed physical energy, and
hurried him townward at a rapid pace. The pathway among the woods
seemed wilder, more uncouth with its rude natural obstacles, and less
trodden by the foot of man, than he remembered it on his outward
journey. But he leaped across the plashy places, thrust himself through
the clinging underbrush, climbed the ascent, plunged into the hollow,
and overcame, in short, all the difficulties of the track, with an unwearia-
ble activity that astonished him. He could not but recall how feebly, and
THE MINISfER IN A MAZE
with what frequent pauses for breath, he had toiled over the same
ground only two days before. As he drew near the town, he took an
impression of change from the series of familiar objects that presented
themselves. It seemed not yesterday, not one, nor two, but many days,
or even years ago, since he had quitted them. There, indeed, was each
former trace of the street, as he remembered it, and all the peculiarities
of the houses, with the due multitude of gable-peaks, and a weathercock
at every point where his memory suggested one. Not the less, however,
came this importunately obtrusive sense of change. The same was true
as regarded the acquaintances whom he met, and all the well-known
shapes of human life, about the little town. They looked neither older
nor younger, now; the beards of the aged were no whiter, nor could the
creeping babe of yesterday walk on his feet to-day; it was impossible to
describe in what respect they differed from the individuals on whom he
had so recently bestowed a patting glance; and yet the minister's deepest
sense seemed to inform him of their mutability. A similar impression
struck him most remarkably, as he passed under the walls of his own
church. The edifice had so very strange, and yet so familiar, an aspect,
that Mr. Dimmesdale's mind vibrated between two ideas; either that he
had seen it only in a dream hitherto, or that he was merely dreaming
about it now.
This phenomenon, in the various shapes which it assumed, indicat-
ed no external change, but so sudden and important a change in the
spectator of the familiar scene, that the intervening space of a single day
had operated on his consciousness like the lapse of years. The minister's
own will, and Hester's will, and the fate that grew between them, had
wrought this transformation. It was the same town as heretofore; but
the same minister returned not from the forest. He might have said to
the friends who greeted him, - "I am not the man for whom you take
me! I left him yonder in the forest, withdrawn into a secret dell, by a
mossy tree-trunk, and near a melancholy brook! Go, seek your minister,
and see if his emaciated figure, his thin cheek, his white, heavy, pain-
wrinkled brow, be not flung down there like a cast-off garment!" His
friends, no doubt, would still have insisted with him, - "Thou art
thyself the man!"- but the error would have been their own, not his.
Before Mr. Dimmesdale reached home, his inner man gave him
other evidences of a revolution in the sphere of thought and feeling. In
truth, nothing short of a total change of dynasty and moral code, in that
interior kingdom, was adequate to account for the impulses now com-
municated to the unfortunate and startled minister. At every step he was
incited to do some strange, wild, wicked thing or other, with a sense
170 THE SCARLET LETTER
instilment thereof into her mind would probably have caused this aged
sister to drop down dead, at once, as by the effect of an intensely
poisonous infusion. What he really did whisper, the minister could
never afterwards recollect. There was, perhaps, a fortunate disorder in
his utterance, which failed to impart any distinct idea to the good
widow's comprehension, or which Providence interpreted after a
method of its own. Assuredly, as the minister looked back, he beheld an
expression of divine gratitude and ecstasy that seemed like the shine of
the celestial city on her face, so wrinkled and ashy pale.
Again, a third instance. After parting from the old church-member,
he met the youngest sister of them all. It was a maiden newly won -
and won by the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale's own sermon, on the
Sabbath after his vigil - to barter the transitory pleasures of the world
for the heavenly hope, that was to assume brighter substance as life grew
dark around her, and which would gild the utter gloom with final glory.
She was fair and pure as a lily that had bloomed in Paradise. The
minister knew well that he was himself enshrined within the stainless
sanctity of her heart, which hung its snowy curtains about his image,
imparting to religion the warmth oflove, and to love a religious purity.
Satan, that afternoon, had surely led the poor young girl away from her
mother's side, and thrown her into the pathway of this sorely tempted,
or - shall we not rather say? - this lost and desperate man. As she
drew nigh, the arch-fiend whispered him to condense into small com-
pass and drop into her tender bosom a germ of evil that would be sure to
blossom darkly soon, and bear black fruit betimes. Such was his sense of
power over this virgin soul, trusting him as she did, that the minister felt
potent to blight all the field of innocence with but one wicked look, and
develop all its opposite with but a word. So - with a mightier struggle
than he had yet sustained - he held his Geneva cloak before his face,
and hurried onward, making no sign of recognition, and leaving the
young sister to digest his rudeness as she might. She ransacked her
conscience, - which was full of harmless little matters, like her pocket
or her work -bag, - and took herself to task, poor thing, for a thousand
imaginary faults; and went about her household duties with swollen
eyelids the next morning.
Before the minister had time to celebrate his victory over this last
temptation, he was conscious of another impulse, more ludicrous, and
almost as horrible. It was, - we blush to tell it, - it was to stop short
in the road, and teach some very wicked words to a knot of little Puritan
children who were playing there, and had but just begun to talk.
172 THE SCARLET LETTER
"Ha, ha, ha!" cackled the old witch-lady, still nodding her high
head-dress at the minister. "Well, well, we must needs talk thus in the
daytime! You carry it off like an old hand! But at midnight, and in the
forest, we shall have other talk together!"
She passed on with her aged stateliness, but often turning back her
head and smiling at him, like one willing to recognize a secret intimacy
of connection.
"Have I then sold myself," thought the minister, "to the fiend
whom, if men say true, this yellow-starched and velveted old hag has
chosen for her prince and master!"
The wretched minister! He had made a bargain very like it!
Tempted by a dream of happiness, he had yielded himself with deliber-
ate choice, as he had never done before, to what he knew was deadly sin.
And the infectious poison of that sin had been thus rapidly diffused
throughout his moral system. It had stupefied all blessed impulses, and
awakened into vivid life the whole brotherhood of bad ones. Scorn,
bitterness, unprovoked malignity, gratuitous desire of ill, ridicule of
whatever was good and holy, all awoke, to tempt, even while they
frightened him. And his encounter with old Mistress Hibbins, if it were
a real incident, did but show his sympathy and fellowship with wicked
mortals and the world of perverted spirits.
He had by this time reached his dwelling, on the edge of the burial-
ground, and, hastening up the stairs, took refuge in his study. The
minister was glad to have reached this shelter, without first betraying
himself to the world by any of those strange and wicked eccentricities to
which he had been continually impelled while passing through the
streets. He entered the accustomed room, and looked around him on its
books, its windows, its fireplace, and the tapestried comfort of the walls,
with the same perception of strangeness that had haunted him through-
out his walk from the forest-dell into the town, and thitherward. Here
he had studied and written; here, gone through fast and vigil, and come
forth half alive; here, striven to pray; here, borne a hundred thousand
agonies! There was the Bible, in its rich old Hebrew, with Moses and
the Prophets speaking to him, and God's voice through all! There, on
the table, with the inky pen beside it, was an unfinished sermon, with a
sentence broken in the midst, where his thoughts had ceased to gush out
upon the page two days before. He knew that it was himself, the thin
and white-cheeked minister, who had done and suffered these things,
and written thus far into the Election Sermon! But he seemed to stand
apart, and eye this former self with scornful, pitying, but half-envious
curiosity. That self was gone! Another man had returned out of the
174 THE SCARLET LETTER
again, the scarlet letter brought her back from this twilight indistinct-
ness, and revealed her under the moral aspect of its own illumination.
Her face, so long familiar to the townspeople, showed the marble
quietude which they were accustomed to behold there. It was like a
mask; or rather, like the frozen calmness of a dead woman's features;
owing this dreary resemblance to the fact that Hester was actually dead,
in respect to any claim of sympathy, and had departed out of the world
with which she still seemed to mingle.
It might be, on this one day, that there was an expression unseen
before, nor, indeed, vivid enough to be detected now; unless some
preternaturally gifted observer should have first read the heart, and have
afterwards sought a corresponding development in the countenance and
mien. Such a spiritual seer might have conceived, that, after sustaining
the gaze of the multitude through seven miserable years as a necessity, a
penance, and something which it was a stern religion to endure, she
now, for one last time more, encountered it freely and voluntarily, in
order to convert what had so long been agony into a kind of triumph.
"Look your last on the scarlet letter and its wearer!" - the people's
victim and life-long bond-slave, as they fancied her, might say to them.
"Yet a little while, and she will be beyond your reach! A few hours
longer, and the deep, mysterious ocean will quench and hide for ever the
symbol which ye have caused to burn upon her bosom!" Nor were it an
inconsistency too improbable to be assigned to human nature, should
we suppose a feeling of regret in Hester's mind, at the moment when
she was about to win her freedom from the pain which had been thus
deeply incorporated with her being. Might there not be an irresistible
desire to quaff a last, long, breathless draught of the cup of wormwood
and aloes, with which nearly all her years of womanhood had been
perpetually flavored? The wine of life, henceforth to be presented to her
lips, must be indeed rich, delicious, and exhilarating, in its chased and
golden beaker; or else leave an inevitable and weary languor, after the
lees of bitterness wherewith she had been drugged, as with a cordial of
intensest potency.
Pearl was decked out with airy gayety. It would have been impossi-
ble to guess that this bright and sunny apparition owed its existence to
the shape of gloomy gray; or that a fancy, at once so gorgeous and so
delicate as must have been requisite to contrive the child's apparel, was
the same that had achieved a task perhaps more difficult, in imparting so
distinct a peculiarity to Hester's simple robe. The dress, so proper was it
to little Pearl, seemed an effluence, or inevitable development and
outward manifestation of her character, no more to be separated from
THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY 177
to herself. "In the dark night-time, he calls us to him, and holds thy hand
and mine, as when we stood with him on the scaffold yonder! And in
the deep forest, where only the old trees can hear, and the strip of sky see
it, he talks with thee, sitting on a heap of moss! And he kisses my
forehead, too, so that the little brook would hardly wash it offi But here
in the sunny day, and among all the people, he knows us not; nor must
we know him! A strange, sad man is he, with his hand always over his
heart!"
"Be quiet, Pearl! Thou understandest not these things," said her
mother. "Think not now of the minister, but look about thee, and see
how cheery is every body's face to-day. The children have come from
their schools, and the grown people from their workshops and their
fields, on purpose to be happy. For, to-day, a new man is beginning to
rule over them; and so - as has been the custom of mankind ever since
a nation was first gathered - they make merry and rejoice; as if a good
and golden year were at length to pass over the poor old world!"
It was as Hester said, in regard to the unwonted jollity that
brightened the faces of the people. Into this festal season of the year -
as it already was, and continued to be during the greater part of two
centuries - the Puritans compressed whatever mirth and public joy
they deemed allowable to human infirmity; thereby so far dispelling the
customary cloud, that, for the space of a single holiday, they appeared
scarcely more grave than most other communities at a period of general
affliction.
But we perhaps exaggerate the gray or sable tinge, which undoubt-
edly characterized the mood and manners of the age. The persons now
in the market-place of Boston had not been born to an inheritance of
Puritanic gloom. They were native Englishmen, whose fathers had lived
in the sunny richness of the Elizabethan epoch; a time when the life of
England, viewed as one great mass, would appear to have been as
stately, magnificent, and joyous, as the world has ever witnessed. Had
they followed their hereditary taste, the New England settlers would
have illustrated all events of public importance by bonfires, banquets,
pageantries, and processions. Nor would it have been impracticable, in
the observance of majestic ceremonies, to combine mirthful recreation
with solemnity, and give, as it were, a grotesque and brilliant embroi-
dery to the great robe of state, which a nation, at such festivals, puts on.
There was some shadow of an attempt of this kind in the mode of
celebrating the day on which the political year of the colony com-
menced. The dim reflection of a remembered splendor, a colorless and
THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY 179
who had known how to be merry, in their day,) that they would
compare favorably, in point of holiday keeping, with their descendants,
even at so long an interval as ourselves. Their immediate posterity, the
generation next to the early emigrants, wore the blackest shade of
Puritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all the
subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up. We have yet to learn
again the forgotten art of gayety.
The picture of human life in the market-place, though its general
tint was the sad gray, brown, or black of the English emigrants, was yet
enlivened by some diversity of hue. A party oflndians - in their savage
finery of curiously embroidered deer-skin robes, wampum-belts, red
and yellow ochre, and feathers, and armed with the bow and arrow and
stone-headed spear- stood apart, with countenances of inflexible
gravity, beyond what even the Puritan aspect could attain. Nor, wild as
were these painted barbarians, were they the wildest feature of the
scene. This distinction could more justly be claimed by some mari-
ners, - a part of the crew of the vessel from the Spanish Main, - who
had come ashore to see the humors of Election Day. They were rough-
looking desperadoes, with sun-blackened faces, and an immensity of
beard; their wide, short trousers were confined about the waist by belts,
often clasped with a rough plate of gold, and sustaining always a long
knife, and, in some instances, a sword. From beneath their broad-
brimmed hats of palm-leaf, gleamed eyes which, even in good nature
and merriment, had a kind of animal ferocity. They transgressed, with-
out fear or scruple, the rules of behaviour that were binding on all
others; smoking tobacco under the beadle's very nose, although each
whiff would have cost a townsman a shilling; and quaffing, at their
pleasure, draughts of wine or aqua-vitae from pocket-flasks, which they
freely tendered to the gaping crowd around them. It remarkably charac-
terized the incomplete morality of the age, rigid as we call it, that a
license was allowed the seafaring class, not merely for their freaks on
shore, but for far more desperate deeds on their proper element. The
sailor of that day would go near to be arraigned as a pirate in our own.
There could be little doubt, for instance, that this very ship's crew,
though no unfavorable specimens of the nautical brotherhood, had
been guilty, as we should phrase it, of depredations on the Spanish
commerce, such as would have perilled all their necks in a modern court
of justice.
But the sea, in those old times, heaved, swelled, and foamed very
much at its own will, or subject only to the tempestuous wind, with
THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY 181
fever, this voyage! What with the ship's surgeon and this other doctor,
our only danger will be from drug or pill; more by token, as there is a lot
of apothecary's stuff aboard, which I traded for with a Spanish vessel."
''What mean you?" inquired Hester, startled more than she permit-
ted to appear. "Have you another passenger?"
''Why, know you not," cried the shipmaster, "that this physician
here - Chillingworth, he calls himself- is minded to try my cabin-
fare with you? Ay, ay, you must have known it; for he tells me he is of
your party, and a close friend to the gentleman you spoke of,- he that
is in peril from these sour old Puritan rulers!"
''They know each other well, indeed," replied Hester, with a mien
of calmness, though in the utmost consternation. ''They have long dwelt
together."
Nothing further passed between the mariner and Hester Prynne.
But, at that instant, she beheld old Roger Chillingworth himself,
standing in the remotest comer of the market-place, and smiling on her;
a smile which - across the wide and bustling square, and through all
the talk and laughter, and various thoughts, moods, and interests of the
crowd - conveyed secret and fearful meaning.
was brought back to her former mood by the shimmer of the sunshine
on the weapons and bright armour of the military company, which
followed after the music, and formed the honorary escort of the proces-
sion. This body of soldiery - which still sustains a corporate existence,
and marches down from past ages with an ancient and honorable
fame - was composed of no mercenary materials. Its ranks were filled
with gentlemen, who felt the stirrings of martial impulse, and sought to
establish a kind of College of Arms, where, as in an association of
Knights Templars, they might learn the science, and, so far as peaceful
exercise would teach them, the practices of war. The high estimation
then placed upon the military character might be seen in the lofty port
of each individual member of the company. Some of them, indeed, by
their services in the Low Countries and on other fields of European
warfare, had fairly won their title to assume the name and pomp of
soldiership. The entire array, moreover, clad in burnished steel, and
with plumage nodding over their bright morions, had a brilliancy of
effect which no modem display can aspire to equal.
And yet the men of civil eminence, who came immediately behind
the military escort, were better worth a thoughtful observer's eye. Even
in outward demeanour they showed a stamp of majesty that made the
warrior's haughty stride look vulgar, if not absurd. It was an age when
what we call talent had far less consideration than now, but the massive
materials which produce stability and dignity of character a great deal
more. The people possessed, by hereditary right, the quality of rever-
ence; which, in their descendants, if it survive at all, exists in smaller
proportion, and with a vastly diminished force in the selection and
estimate of public men. The change may be for good or ill, and is partly,
perhaps, for both. In that old day, the English settler on these rude
shores, - having left king, nobles, and all degrees of awful rank behind,
while still the faculty and necessity of reverence were strong in him, -
bestowed it on the white hair and venerable brow of age; on long-tried
integrity; on solid wisdom and sad-colored experience; on endowments
of that grave and weighty order, which gives the idea of permanence,
and comes under the general definition of respectability. These primi-
tive statesmen, therefore,- Bradstreet, Endicott, Dudley, Bellingham,
and their compeers, - who were elevated to power by the early choice
of the people, seem to have been not often brilliant, but distinguished
by a ponderous sobriety, rather than activity of intellect. They had
fortitude and self-reliance, and, in time of difficulty or peril, stood up
for the welfare of the state like a line of cliffs against a tempestuous tide.
The traits of character here indicated were well represented in the square
THE SCARLET LETTER
between them. She thought of the dim forest, with its little dell of
solitude, and love, and anguish, and the mossy tree-trunk, where, sitting
hand in hand, they had mingled their sad and passionate talk with the
melancholy murmur of the brook. How deeply had they known each
other then! And was this the man? She hardly knew him now! He,
moving proudly past, enveloped, as it were, in the rich music, with the
procession of majestic and venerable fathers; he, so unattainable in his
worldly position, and still more so in that far vista of his unsympathiz-
ing thoughts, through which she now beheld him! Her spirit sank with
the idea that all must have been a delusion, and that, vividly as she had
dreamed it, there could be no real bond betwixt the clergyman and
herself. And thus much of woman was there in Hester, that she could
scarcely forgive him, - least of all now, when the heavy footstep of
their approaching Fate might be heard, nearer, nearer, nearer!- for
being able so completely to withdraw himself from their mutual world;
while she groped darkly, and stretched forth her cold hands, and found
him not.
Pearl either saw and responded to her mother's feelings, or herself
felt the remoteness and intangibility that had fallen around the minister.
While the procession passed, the child was uneasy, fluttering up and
down, like a bird on the point of taking flight. When the whole had
gone by, she looked up into Hester's face.
"Mother," said she, ''was that the same minister who kissed me by
the brook?"
"Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl!" whispered her mother. ''We
must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the
forest."
"I could not be sure that it was he; so strange he looked," contin-
ued the child. "Else I would have run to him, and bid him kiss me now,
before all the people; even as he did yonder among the dark old trees.
What would the minister have said, mother? Would he have clapped his
hand over his heart, and scowled on me, and bid me begone?"
''What should he say, Pearl," answered Hester, "save that it was no
time to kiss, and that kisses are not to be given in the market-place? Well
for thee, foolish child, that thou didst not speak to him!"
Another shade of the same sentiment, in reference to Mr. Dimmes-
dale, was expressed by a person whose eccentricities- or insanity, as
we should term it - led her to do what few of the townspeople would
have ventured on; to begin a conversation with the wearer of the scarlet
letter, in public. It was Mistress Hibbins, who, arrayed in great magnifi-
cence, with a triple ruff, a broidered stomacher, a gown of rich velvet,
186 lHE SCARLET LETTER
and a gold-headed cane, had come forth to see the procession. As this
ancient lady had the renown (which subsequently cost her no less a price
than her life) of being a principal actor in all the works of necromancy
that were continually going forward, the crowd gave way before her,
and seemed to fear the touch of her garment, as if it carried the plague
among its gorgeous folds. Seen in conjunction with Hester Prynne, -
kindly as so many now felt towards the latter,- the dread inspired by
Mistress Hibbins was doubled, .and caused a general movement from
that part of the market-place in which the two women stood.
"Now, what mortal imagination could conceive it!" whispered the
old lady confidentially to Hester. "Yonder divine man! That saint on
earth, as the people uphold him to be, and as - I must needs say - he
really looks! Who, now, that saw him pass in the procession, would
think how little while it is since he went forth out of his study,-
chewing a Hebrew text of Scripture in his mouth, I warrant, - to take
an airing in the forest! Aha! we know what that means, Hester Prynne!
But, truly, forsooth, I find it hard to believe him the same man. Many a
church-member saw I, walking behind the music, that has danced in the
same measure with me, when Somebody was fiddler, and, it might be,
an Indian powwow or a Lapland wizard changing hands with us! That
is but a trifle, when a woman knows the world. But this minister!
Couldst thou surely tell, Hester, whether he was the same man that
encountered thee on the forest-path!"
"Madam, I know not of what you speak," answered Hester Prynne,
feeling Mistress Hibbins to be of infirm mind; yet strangely startled and
awe-stricken by the confidence with which she affirmed a personal
connection between so many persons (herself among them) and the Evil
One. "It is not for me to talk lightly of a learned and pious minister of
the Word, like the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale!"
"Fie, woman, fie!" cried the old lady, shaking her finger at Hester.
"Dost thou think I have been to the forest so many times, and have yet
no skill to judge who else has been there? Yea; though no leaf of the wild
garlands, which they wore while they danced, be left in their hair! I
know thee, Hester; for I behold the token. We may all see it in the
sunshine; and it glows like a red flame in the dark. Thou wearest it
openly; so there need be no question about that. But this minister! Let
me tell thee in thine ear! When the Black Man sees one of his own
servants, signed and sealed, so shy of owning to the bond as is the
Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, he hath a way of ordering matters so that
the mark shall be disclosed in open daylight to the eyes of all the world!
THE PROCESSION
What is it that the minister seeks to hide, with his hand always over his
heart? Ha, Hester Prynne!"
''What is it, good Mistress Hibbins?" eagerly asked little Pearl.
"Hast thou seen it?"
"No matter, darling!" responded Mistress Hibbins, making Pearl a
profound reverence. ''Thou thyself wilt see it, one time or another. They
say; child, thou art of the lineage of the Prince of the Air! Wilt thou ride
with me, some fine night, to see thy father? Then thou shalt know
wherefore the minister keeps his hand over his heart!"
Laughing so shrilly that all the market-place could hear her, the
weird old gentlewoman took her departure.
By this time the preliminary prayer had been offered in the
meeting-house, and the accents of the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale were
heard commencing his discourse. An irresistible feeling kept Hester
near the spot. As the sacred edifice was too much thronged to admit
another auditor, she took up her position close beside the scaffold of the
pillory. It was in sufficient proximity to bring the whole sermon to her
ears, in the shape of an indistinct, but varied, murmur and flow of the
minister's very peculia£ voice.
This vocal organ was in itself a rich endowment; insomuch that a
listener, comprehending nothing of the language in which the preacher
spoke, might still have been swayed to and fro by the mere tone and
cadence. Like all other music, it breathed passion and pathos, and
emotions high or tender, in a tongue native to the human heart,
wherever educated. Muffled as the sound was by its passage through the
church-walls, Hester Prynne listened with such intentness, and sympa-
thized so intimately, that the sermon had throughout a meaning for her,
entirely apart from its indistinguishable words. These, perhaps, if more
distinctly heard, might have been only a grosser medium, and have
clogged the spiritual sense. Now she caught the low undertone, as of the
wind sinking down to repose itself; then ascended with it, as it rose
through progressive gradations of sweetness and power, until its vol-
ume seemed to envelop her with an atmosphere of awe and solemn
grandeur. And yet, majestic as the voice sometimes became, there was
for ever in it an essential character of plaintiveness. A loud or low
expression of anguish, - the whisper, or the shriek, as it might be
conceived, of suffering humanity, that touched a sensibility in every
bosom! At times this deep strain of pathos was all that could be heard,
and scarcely heard, sighing amid a desolate silence. But even when the
minister's voice grew high and commanding, - when it gushed irre-
188 THE SCARLET LETTER
attempted to lay hands upon her, with purpose to snatch a kiss. Finding
it as impossible to touch her as to catch a humming-bird in the air, he
took from his hat the gold chain that was twisted about it, and threw it
to the child. Pearl immediately twined it around her neck and waist,
with such happy skill, that, once seen there, it became a part of her, and
it was difficult to imagine her without it.
''Thy mother is yonder woman with the scarlet letter," said the
seaman. ''Wilt thou carry her a message from me?"
"If the message pleases me I will," answered Pearl.
"Then tell her," rejoined he, "that I spake again with the black-a-
visaged, hump-shouldered old doctor, and he engages to bring his
friend, the gentleman she wots of, aboard with him. So let thy mother
take no thought, save for herself and thee. Wilt thou tell her this, thou
witch-baby?"
"Mistress Hibbins says my father is the Prince of the Air!" cried
Pearl, with her naughty smile. "If thou callest me that ill name, I shall
tell him of thee; and he will chase thy ship with a tempest!"
Pursuing a zigzag course across the market-place, the child re-
turned to her mother, and communicated what the mariner had said.
Hester's strong, calm, stedfastly enduring spirit almost sank, at last, on
beholding this dark and grim countenance of an inevitable doom,
which - at the moment when a passage seemed to open for the minis-
ter and herself out of their labyrinth of misery - showed itself, with an
unrelenting smile, right in the midst of their path.
With her mind harassed by the terrible perplexity in which the
shipmaster's intelligence involved her, she was also subjected to another
trial. There were many people present, from the country roundabout,
who had often heard of the scarlet letter, and to whom it had been made
terrific by a hundred false or exaggerated rumors, but who had never
beheld it with their own bodily eyes. These, after exhausting other
modes of amusement, now thronged about Hester Prynne with rude
and boorish intrusiveness. Unscrupulous as it was, however, it could
not bring them nearer than a circuit of several yards. At that distance
they accordingly stood, fixed there by the centrifugal force of the
repugnance which the mystic symbol inspired. The whole gang of
sailors, likewise, observing the press of spectators, and learning the
purport of the scarlet letter, carne and thrust their sunburnt and
desperado-looking faces into the ring. Even the Indians were affected by
a sort of cold shadow of the white man's curiosity, and, gliding through
the crowd, fastened their snake-like black eyes on Hester's bosom;
conceiving, perhaps, that the wearer of this brilliantly embroidered
190 THE SCARLET LETTER
through mortal lips more evidently than it did through his. Its influence
could be seen, as it were, descending upon him, and possessing him,
and continually lifting him out of the written discourse that lay
before him, and filling him with ideas that must have been as marvel-
lous to himself as to his audience. His subject, it appeared, had been the
relation between the Deity and the communities of mankind, with a
special reference to the New England which they were here planting in
the wilderness. And, as he drew towards the dose, a spirit as of
prophecy had come upon him, constraining him to its purpose as
mightily as the old prophets of Israel were constrained; only with this
difference, that, whereas the Jewish seers had denounced judgments and
ruin on their country, it was his mission to foretell a high and glorious
destiny for the newly gathered people of the Lord. But, throughout it
all, and through the whole discourse, there had been a certain deep, sad
undertone of pathos, which could not be interpreted otherwise than as
the natural regret of one soon to pass away. Yes; their minister whom
they so loved - and who so loved them all, that he could not depart
heavenward without a sigh - had the foreboding of untimely death
upon him, and would soon leave them in their tears! This idea of his
transitory stay on earth gave the last emphasis to tl)e effect which the
preacher had produced; it was as if an angel, in his passage to the skies,
had shaken his bright wings over the people for an instant, - at once a
shadow and a splendor,- and had shed down a shower of golden
truths upon them.
Thus, there had come to the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale- as to
most men, in their various spheres, though seldom recognized until
they see it far behind them - an epoch of life more brilliant and full of
triumph than any previous one, or than any which could hereafter be.
He stood, at this moment, on the very proudest eminence of superior-
ity, to which the gifts of intellect, rich lore, prevailing eloquence, and a
reputation of whitest sanctity, could exalt a clergyman in New Eng-
land's earliest days, when the professional character was of itself a lofty
pedestal. Such was the position which the minister occupied, as he
bowed his head forward on the cushions of the pulpit, at the dose of his
Election Sermon. Meanwhile, Hester Prynne was standing beside the
scaffold of the pillory, with the scarlet letter still burning on her breast!
Now was heard again the clangor of the music, and the measured
tramp of the military escort, issuing from the church-door. The proces-
sion was to be marshalled thence to the town-hall, where a solemn
banquet would complete the ceremonies of the day.
Once more, therefore, the train of venerable and majestic fathers
192 THE SCARLET LETTER
was seen moving through a broad pathway of the people, who drew
back reverently, on either side, as the Governor and magistrates, the old
and wise men, the holy ministers, and all that were eminent and
renowned, advanced into the midst of them. When they were fairly in
the market-place, their presence was greeted by a shout. This - though
doubtless it might acquire additional force and volume from the child-
like loyalty which the age awarded to its rulers - was felt to be an
irrepressible outburst of the enthusiasm kindled in the auditors by that
high strain of eloquence which was yet reverberating in their ears. Each
felt the impulse in himself, and, in the same breath, caught it from his
neighbour. Within the church, it had hardly been kept down; beneath
the sky, it pealed upward to the zenith. There were human beings
enough, and enough of highly wrought and symphonious feeling, to
produce that more impressive sound than the organ-tones of the blast,
or the thunder, or the roar of the sea; even that mighty swell of many
voices, blended into one great voice by the universal impulse which
makes likewise one vast heart out of the many. Never, from the soil of
New England, had gone up such a shout! Never, on New England soil,
had stood the man so honored by his mortal brethren as the preacher!
How fared it with him then? Were there not the brilliant particles
of a halo in the air about his head? So etherealized by spirit as he was,
and so apotheosized by worshipping admirers, did his footsteps in the
procession really tread upon the dust of earth?
As the ranks of military men and civil fathers moved onward, all
eyes were turned towards the point where the minister was seen to
approach among them. The shout died into a murmur, as one portion of
the crowd after another obtained a glimpse of him. How feeble and pale
he looked amid all his triumph! The energy- or say, rather, the
inspiration which had held him up, until he should have delivered the
sacred message that brought its own strength along with it from
heaven - was withdrawn, now that it had so faithfully performed its
office. The glow, which they had just before beheld burning on his
cheek, was extinguished, like a flame that sinks down hopelessly among
the late-decaying embers. It seemed hardly the face of a man alive, with
such a deathlike hue; it was hardly a man with life in him, that tottered
on his path so nervelessly, yet tottered, and did not fall!
One of his clerical brethren,- it was the venerable John Wil-
son,- observing the state in which Mr. Dimmesdale was left by the
retiring wave of intellect and sensibility, stepped forward hastily to offer
his support. The minister tremulously, but decidedly, repelled the old
THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET LETTER 193
"Ha, tempter! Methinks thou art too late!" answered the minister,
encountering his eye, fearfully, but firmly. ''Thy power is not what it
was! With God's help, I shall escape thee now!"
He again extended his hand to the woman of the scarlet letter.
"Hester Prynne," cried he, with a piercing earnestness, "in the
name of Him, so terrible and so merciful, who gives me grace, at this last
moment, to do what - for my own heavy sin and miserable agony - I
withheld myself from doing seven years ago, come hither now, and
twine thy strength about me! Thy strength, Hester; but let it be guided
by the will which God hath granted me! This wretched and wronged
old man is opposing it with all his might! - with all his own might and
the fiend's! Come, Hester, come! Support me up yonder scaffold!"
The crowd was in a tumult. The men of rank and dignity, who
stood more immediately around the clergyman, were so taken by
surprise, and so perplexed as to the purport of what they saw, - unable
to receive the explanation which most readily presented itself, or to
imagine any other,- that they remained silent and inactive spectators
of the judgment which Providence seemed about to work. They beheld
the minister, leaning on Hester's shoulder and supported by her arm
around him, approach the scaffold, and ascend its steps; while still the
little hand of the sin-born child was clasped in his. Old Roger Chilling-
worth followed, as one intimately connected with the drama of guilt and
sorrow in which they had all been actors, and well entitled, therefore, to
be present at its closing scene.
"Hadst thou sought the whole earth over," said he, looking darkly
at the clergyman, "there was no one place so secret, - no high place nor
lowly place, where thou couldst have escaped me, - save on this very
scaffold!"
''Thanks be to Him who hath led me hither!" answered the
minister.
Yet he trembled, and turned to Hester with an expression of doubt
and anxiety in his eyes, not the less evidently betrayed, that there was a
feeble smile upon his lips.
"Is not this better," murmured he, "than what we dreamed of in the
forest?"
"I know not! I know not!" she hurriedly replied. "Better? Yea; so
we may both die, and little Pearl die with us!"
"For thee and Pearl, be it as God shall order," said the minister;
"and God is merciful! Let me now do the will which he hath made plain
before my sight. For, Hester, I am a dying man. So let me make haste to
take my shame upon me."
THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET LETTER 195
XXIV. Conclusion
After many days, when time sufficed for the people to arrange their
thoughts in reference to the foregoing scene, there was more than one
account of what had been witnessed on the scaffold.
Most of the spectators testified to having seen, on the breast of the
unhappy minister, a scARLET LETTER- the very semblance of that
worn by Hester Prynne - imprinted in the flesh. As regarded its origin,
there were various explanations, all of which must necessarily have been
conjectural. Some affirmed that the Reverend Mr. Dirnmesdale, on the
very day when Hester Prynne first wore her ignominious badge, had
begun a course of penance, - which he afterwards, in so many futile
methods, followed out, - by inflicting a hideous torture on himself.
Others contended that the stigma had not been produced until a long
time subsequent, when old Roger Chillingworth, being a potent necro-
mancer, had caused it to appear, through the agency. of magic and
poisonous drugs. Others, again, - and those best able to appreciate the
minister's peculiar sensibility, and the wonderful operation of his spirit
upon the body,- whispered their belief, that the awful symbol was the
effect of the ever active tooth of remorse, gnawing from the inmost
heart outwardly, and at last manifesting Heaven's dreadful judgment by
the visible presence of the letter. The reader may choose among these
theories. We have thrown all the light we could acquire upon the
portent, and would gladly, now that it has done its office, erase its deep
print out of our own brain; where long meditation has fixed it in very
undesirable distinctness.
It is singular, nevertheless, that certain persons, who were specta-
tors of the whole scene, and professed never once to have removed their
eyes from the Reverend Mr. Dirnmesdale, denied that there was any
mark whatever on his breast, more than on a new-born infant's. Neither,
by their report, had his dying words acknowledged, nor even remotely
THE SCARLET LETTER
implied, any, the slightest connection, on his part, with the guilt for
which Hester Prynne had so long worn the scarlet letter. According to
these highly respectable witnesses, the minister, conscious that he was
dying, - conscious, also, that the reverence of the multitude placed
him already among saints and angels, - had desired, by yielding up his
breath in the arms of that fallen woman, to express to the world how
utterly nugatory is the choicest of man's own righteousness. After
exhausting life in his efforts for mankind's spiritual good, he had made
the manner of his death a parable, in order to impress on his admirers
the mighty and mournful lesson, that, in the view oflnfinite Purity, we
are sinners all alike. It was to teach them, that the holiest among us has
but attained so far above his fellows as to discern more clearly the Mercy
which looks down, and repudiate more utterly the phantom of human
merit, which would look aspiringly upward. Without disputing a truth
so momentous, we must be allowed to consider this version of Mr.
Dimmesdale's story as only an instance of that stubborn fidelity with
which a man's friends - and especially a clergyman's - will sometimes
uphold his character; when proofs, clear as the mid-day sunshine on the
scarlet letter, establish him a false and sin-stained creature of the dust.
The authority which we have chiefly followed - a manuscript of
old date, drawn up from the verbal testimony of individuals, some of
whom had known Hester Prynne, while others had heard the tale from
contemporary witnesses - fully confirms the view taken in the forego-
ing pages. Among many morals which press upon us from the poor
minister's miserable experience, we put only this into a sentence: - "Be
true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet
some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!"
Nothing was more remarkable than the change which took place,
almost immediately after Mr. Dimmesdale's death, in the appearance
and demeanour of the old man known as Roger Chillingworth. All his
strength and energy - all his vital and intellectual force - seemed at
once to desert him; insomuch that he positively withered up, shrivelled
away, and almost vanished from mortal sight, like an uprooted weed
that lies wilting in the sun. This unhappy man 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, - when, in
short, there was no more devil's work on earth for him to do, it only
remained for the unhumanized mortal to betake himself whither his
Master would find him tasks enough, and pay him his wages duly. But,
to all these shadowy beings, so long our near acquaintances, - as well
CONCLUSION 199
intense a former life, was more dreary and desolate than even she could
bear. But her hesitation was only for an instant, though long enough to
display a scarlet letter on her breast.
And Hester Prynne had returned, and taken up her long-forsaken
shame. But where was little Pearl? If still alive, she must now have been
in the flush and bloom of early womanhood. None knew- nor ever
learned, with the fulness of perfect certainty - whether the elf-child
had gone thus untimely to a maiden grave; or whether her wild, rich
nature had been softened and subdued, and made capable of a woman's
gentle happiness. But, through the remainder of Hester's life, there were
indications that the recluse of the scarlet letter was the object of love and
interest with some inhabitant of another land. Letters came, with
armorial seals upon them, though of bearings unknown to English
heraldry. In the cottage there were articles of comfort and luxury, such
as Hester never cared to use, but which only wealth could have pur-
chased, and affection have imagined for her. There were trifles, too,
little ornaments, beautiful tokens of a continual remembrance, that
must have been wrought by delicate fingers, at the impulse of a fond
heart. And, once, Hester was seen embroidering a baby-garment, with
such a lavish richness of golden fancy as would have raised a public
tumult, had any infant, thus apparelled, been shown to our sombre-
hued community.
In fine, the gossips of that day believed,- and Mr. Surveyor Pue,
who made investigations a century later, believed, - and one of his
recent successors in office, moreover, faithfully believes, - that Pearl
was not only alive, but married, and happy, and mindful of her mother;
and that she would most joyfully have entertained that sad and lonely
mother at her fireside.
But there was a more real life for Hester Prynne, here, in New
England, than in that unknown region where Pearl had found a home.
Here had been her sin; here, her sorrow; and here was yet to be her
penitence. She had returned, therefore, and resumed, - of her own free
will, for not the sternest magistrate of that iron period would have
imposed it, - resumed the symbol of which we have related so dark a
tale. Never afterwards did it quit her bosom. But, in the lapse of the
toilsome, thoughtful, and self-devoted years that made up Hester's life,
the scarlet letter ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world's scorn
and bitterness, and became a type of something to be sorrowed over,
and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence too. And, as Hester
Prynne had no selfish ends, nor lived in any measure for her own profit
and enjoyment, people brought all their sorrows and perplexities, and
CONCLUSION 201
besought her counsel, as one who had herself gone through a mighty
trouble. Women, more especially,- in the continually recurring trials
of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful pas-
sion, - or with the dreary burden of a heart unyielded, because unval-
ued and unsought, - came to Hester's cottage, demanding why they
were so wretched, and what the remedy! Hester comforted and coun-
selled them, as best she might. She assured them, too, of her firm belief,
that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe
for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to
establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground
of mutual happiness. Earlier in life, Hester had vainly imagined that she
herself might be the destined prophetess, but had long since recognized
the impossibility that any mission of divine and mysterious truth should
be confided to a woman stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or
even burdened with a life-long sorrow. The angel and apostle of the
coming revelation must be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure, and
beautiful; and wise, moreover, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal
medium of joy; and showing how sacred love should make us happy, by
the truest test of a life successful to such an end!
So said Hester Prynne, and glanced her sad eyes downward at the
scarlet letter. And, after many, many years, a new grave was delved, near
an old and sunken one, in that burial-ground beside which King's
Chapel has since been built. It was near that old and sunken grave, yet
with a space between, as if the dust of the two sleepers had no right to
mingle. Yet one tombstone served for both. All around, there were
monuments carved with armorial bearings; and on this simple slab of
slate - as the curious investigator may still discern, and perplex himself
with the purport - there appeared the semblance of an engraved es-
cutcheon. It bore a device, a herald's wording of which might serve for a
motto and brief description of our now concluded legend; so sombre is
it, and relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than
the shadow:-
THE END.
PART1WO
In a letter dated 1850 and written to his friend and old Bowdoin
classmate, Horatio Bridge, Hawthorne began to write the history of his
most famous novel's critical reception. First, he sums up the response of
his wife to the concluding chapter of The Sct~rlet Letter: "It broke her
heart and sent her to bed with a grievous headache - which I look
upon as a triumphant success! Judging from its effect on her and the
publisher, I may calculate on what bowlers call a ten-strike. Yet I do not
make any such calculation," Hawthorne goes on immediately to say.
"My writings do not; nor ever will, appeal to the broadest class of
sympathies." In fact, he proceeds by predicting that if anything the
introduction to his novel, "The Custom-House," which has "an imagi-
native touch here and there - ... may be more widely attractive than
the main narrative." The Scarlet Letter, he admits, "lacks sunshine"
(Crowley 151). (These comments and other reviews quoted from
Hawthorne's contemporaries may be found in J. Donald Crowley's
H11wthorne: The Criticlll HeritRtJe [1971].)
Hawthorne's predictions proved prophetic, in the sense that many
of the volume's first reviewers were pleased by the imaginative touches
of "The Custom-House" and did find the novel that followed it depress-
ing. George Ripley, writing in the New York Tribune Supplement,
praised "The Custom-House" for its "unrivalled force of graphic delin-
eation" and predicted it "will furnish an agreeable amusement to those
2.05
206 THE CRITICAL BACKGROUND
who are so far from the scene of action as to feel no wound in their
personal relations" (Crowley 155, 159). ''We confess," Anne W. Abbott
wrote in the N twth American Review, "that to our individual taste, this
naughty [Custom-House] chapter is more piquant than anything in the
book.... We like the preface better than the tale" (Crowley 164-65).
As for "the tale," it left no small number of book reviewers of
Hawthorne's day with headaches, although not for the same reason the
novel left Sophia Hawthorne with one. Contemporary reviewers saw
The Scarlet Letter as evidence of national moral decay as well as of the
decline of the novel. "Our interest'' in Hester Prynne, Abbott claims,
"only continues while we have hope for her soul"; once Hester's
"humility catches a new tint, and we find it pride, ... she disappoints
us .... We were looking to behold a Christian." As for Arthur Dimmes-
dale, ''we are told repeatedly, that the Christian element yet pervades
his character and guides its efforts; but it seems strangely wanting"
(165--66).
A self-described Christian, Abbott was not writing in a Christian
forum; those reviewers who did were even more severe. According to
Orestes Brownson, Hawthorne misused his God-given faculties by
investing a subject (adultery) "not fit ... for popular literature" with
"all the fascinations of genius, and all the charms of a highly polished
style." He created an adulteress who "suffers not from remorse, but
from regret," together with an adulterer who "suffers ... not from the
fact of the crime itself but from the consciousness of not being what he
seems to the world, from his having permitted the partner in his guilt
... to be punished, without his having the manliness to avow his share
in the guilt" (Crowley 176).
Even more disapproving was Arthur Cleveland Coxe in the Church
Review. Believing that stories should be of "moral benefit," Coxe de-
clares himself "astonished" that Hawthorne would choose adultery for
his subject. Such incidents may have been common even in Puritan
times, he admits, but "good taste might be pardoned for not giving
them prominence in fiction." Summarizing the story as the "nauseous
amour'' of a Puritan pastor, and a woman whose mind is even more
"debauched" than her body, Coxe goes on to ask whether "filth" is now
requisite to romance and whether "the French era" has "actually begun
in our literature."
To be sure, there were some reviewers who did not see The Scarlet
Letter as either a danger to morals or a precursor to a "French" (that is,
amoral or immoral) era in American literature. George Bailey Loring,
for instance, writing in the Massachusetts Quarterly Review, went so far as
THECRT.nCALBACKGROUND 207
to say that the novel was a "vehicle of religion and ethics" because it
properly exposed the inhumanity of Puritanism, which repressed the
sensuous element in human nature" (Crowley 169). But most of those
who assessed the morality of The Scarlet Letter positively did so by
claiming that the novel was actually a morally instructive, even Puritan-
ical, work that warned against the pitfalls of sensuality in general and
adulterous misdeeds in particular. E. A. Duyckinck took that tack in The
Literary World. As for "the moral," he writes, "though severe, it is
wholesome, and is a sounder bit of Puritan divinity than we have been
of late accustomed to hear from the degenerate successors of Cotton
Mather.... The spirit of his old Puritan ancestors, to whom he refers in
the preface, lives in Nathaniel Hawthorne" (Crowley 156-57).
E. P. Whipple agreed, stating in Graham's MRIJa:z.ine that the
"moral purpose of the book" is so "definite" that "the most abandoned
libertine could not read the volume without being thrilled into some-
thing like virtuous resolution." In Whipple's view no novel could be
more un- French: "to those who have theories of seduction and adultery
modeled after the French school of novelists," he says,
the volume may afford matter for very instructive and edifying
contemplation; for, in truth, Hawthorne, in The Scarlet Letter, has
utterly undermined the whole philosophy on which the French
novel rests .... He has made his guilty parties end, not as his own
fancy or his own benevolent sympathies might dictate, but as the
spiritual laws, lying back of all persons, dictated to him. (Crowley
156, 157, 161-62)
In addition to finding sound moral teaching in the book, both
Whipple and Duyckinck detected philosophy and artfulness. Duyckinck
referred to the novel as "a drama in which thoughts are acts," while
describing as "perfect" the "atmosphere of the piece." Whipple called
The Scarlet Letter a "beautiful and touching romance" with "a profound
philosophy underlying the story"; Hawthorne's regular readers, he
predicted, ''will hardly be prepared for a novel of so much tragic interest
and tragic power, so deep in thought and so condensed in style." The
only fault he finds in the book, "if fault it have, is the almost morbid
intensity with which the characters are realized, and the consequent lack
of sufficient geniality in the delineation" (Crowley 160-61).
This criticism of the novel's morbid intensity is perhaps stated most
strongly in an essay by Henry F. Chorley and published in the Athe-
ntleUm. Calling the novel "most powerful" but "more than ordinarily
painful," Chorley explains that the "misery of the woman" at the center
of the story "is . . .present in every page," but that "her slow and painful
208 THE CRITICAL BACKGROUND
and dark, sunlight and shadow, as well as on the role ofliterary history
in Hawthorne. He suggests that both the novel's heavenly light and its
"distinctness of mid-day'' need to be referred back to poems by Cole-
ridge and Wordsworth- especially to Wordsworth's great "Ode: Inti-
mations oflmmortality," in which "celestial light'' is distinguished from
"the light of common day'' (Hawthorne's Imagery 27-28, 34).
Darrel Abel was another critic writing during the 1950s who
combined a formalist attention to artistic structure with an interest in
literary antecedents. In writing about Arthur Dimmesdale, he adheres
closely to the text, developing Matthiessen's argument about the struc-
tural importance of the three scaffold scenes by showing that these
scenes prove that Dimmesdale, not Hester Prynne, is the novel's main
character. In his study, The Moral Picturesque (articles published in book
form in 1988), Abel oudines the scenes as follows: at the beginning of
the book, Dimmesdale is not on the scaffold with Hester but knows he
should be; in the middle, he ascends the scaffold alone, at night; at the
end he does so in public, to confess his sin. The plot of the novel, in
Abel's view, "exhibits the protracted struggle between influences seek-
ing to prevent the minister from ascending this emblematic scaffold ...
and influences seeking to induce him to do so" (227). But when Abel
turns his attention from this character whose "role is the structural and
thematic center of the romance" (225) to other characters, he widens
the angle of his vision to encompass not just the form of one novel, but
also the backdrop of literary history. Through Hester, who "typifies
romantic individualism" (180), Hawthorne supposedly showed that it
is not enough to be a sincere self living in nature and believing that all
true love has a consecration of its own. Through Pearl, according to
Abel, Hawthorne argued even more specifically with a specific Roman-
tic poet, Wordsworth, and showed that the Wordsworthian child of
nature is not necessarily a pure and moral child, because humanity, not
nature, is the source of morality. With the remaining main character in
the story, Chillingworth, Hawthorne took on a group ofbelatedAmeri-
can Romantics, according to Abel: the Transcendentalists of Haw-
thorne's own place and time. Through the "diabolized physician,"
Hawthorne allegedly showed the Transcendentalists' "optimism" about
"human nature and its possibilities" to be questionable, if not unjusti-
fied (207).
The debate about whether Hester or Dimmesdale lies at the novel's
center was, to some extent, finessed by Roy R. Male in his book
Hawthorne's Tragic Vision ( 195 7). Male argues that the first third of The
Scarlet Letter describes Hester's "limited ascension," as she "recognizes
THE CRITICAL BACKGROUND 215
her guilt" and "reaches the peak of her moral development''; that the
second third of the novel is concerned with the shifting of the burden of
guilt, represented by Chillingworth, from Hester to Dimmesdale; and
that "the final third (Chapters XVII to XXIV) deals with Dimmesdale's
ascension .... Where Hester's ascension was limited," Male explains,
Dimmesdale's "is complete" (97-98). Male's reading turns the novel
into something like a Christian tragedy: Christian in that it is about the
burden of original sin (symbolized for Male by the act of adultery
committed before the opening of the novel); tragic in that, "like Oedipus
Tyrannus and King Lear, [it] is about ways of seeing" (recognition,
discovery, insight, self-recognition) and, finally, about cathartic revela-
tion (101 passim).
creating light and dividing night from day." The world's religions "all
... seem to posit some dichotomy (between darkness and light], such as
the Yin andY ang of the Orient'' (26, 29). Whereas Hawthorne's images
of black flowers and black weeds had interested formalist critics because
such images provided unity within The Scarlet Letter, these same images
captivate postformalists like Levin because they exemplify an ancient
mythology of blackness and thus a unity within human consciousness.
Levin was not the first critic to read The Scarlet Letter in light of a
persistent fable or mythology. As early as 1953, when formalism was
still the dominant critical approach, William Bysshe Stein viewed Haw-
thorne's novel as a relatively recent version of the ancient Faust myth in
his Hawthorne1s Faust: A Study ofthe Devil Archetype. Faust, of course,
was the scholar-magician who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for
secret or forbidden knowledge. Stein first points out a parallel between
Faust and Chillingworth, the scholar-alchemist who has learned his
magic among the New England "Indians." Chillingworth, like Faust,
pays a terrible price for the knowledge he seeks:
After Hester refuses to reveal the identity of her lover, [Chilling-
worth] extorts a pledge of silence from her on the legal state of their
relations. But something in his cruel smile causes her to regret her
promise, and she inquires in fear: "Art thou like the Black Man that
haunts the forest round about us? Hast thou enticed me into a
bond that will prove the ruin of my soul?" His answer is sardoni-
cally elusive: "Not thy soul! No, not thine!" (109)
Having yielded to the temptation to exchange his own soul for knowl-
edge, Chillingworth, like Faust, becomes a tempter himself. And Hes-
ter, by entering into a pact with her husband not to tell anyone that she
is his wife, becomes a secondary Faust figure.
She is Faustian in her suffering: suffering that is in large part caused
by the pact she has entered into with the evil Chillingworth. She is
Faustian, too, in that she becomes an intellectual rebel in whose mind,
the novel tells us, "the world's law was no law." Finally, she is Faustian
because she, too, becomes a temptress. And Dimmesdale, whom she
tempts in the forest to run away with her, exits the forest as the novel's
third· Faust: "Nothing short of a total change of dynasty and moral
code," the novel tells us, ''was adequate to account for (Dimmesdale's]
impulses" to make blasphemous and seductive suggestions to pious
members of his congregation. "Am I given over utterly to the fiend?" he
wonders. "Did I make a contract with him in the forest and sign it with
my blood?" (Stein 117-18).
THE CRITICAL BACKGROUND 219
WORKS CITED
Abel, Darrel. The Moral Picturesque: Studies in Hawthorne's Fiction. West
Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1988. This is a collection of essays first
printed in various journals in the 1950s.
Baym, Nina. ''The Significance of Plot in Hawthorne's Romances."
Ruined Eden ofthe Present: Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe. Ed. G. R.
Thompson and Virgil L. Lokke. West Lafayette: Purdue UP,
1981. 49-70.
Chase, Richard. The American Nwel and Its Tradition. Garden City:
Doubleday, 1957.
Crews, Frederick C. The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological
Themes. New York: Oxford UP, 1966.
Crowley, J. Donald, ed. Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage. New York:
Barnes, 1971. Contains all the early reviews quoted in the preced-
ing essay.
Fiedler, Leslie. Lwe and Death in the American Nwel. Rev. ed. New
York: Stein and Day, 1966.
Fogle, Richard Harter. Hawthorne's Fiction: The Light and the Dark.
Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1952.
--.Hawthorne's Imagery. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1969.
James, Henry. Hawthorne. 1879. New York: AMS, 1968.
Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. New York:
Seltzer, 1923.
Levin, Harry. The Power of Blackness. New York: Knopf, 1958.
Male, Roy R. Hawthorne's Tragic Vision. New York: Norton, 1957.
Matthiessen, F. 0. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age
ofEmerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford UP, 1941.
McPherson, Hugo. Hawthorne RS Myth-Maker: A Study in Imagination.
Toronto: U ofToronto P, 1969.
Pearce, Roy Harvey. Hawthorne Centenary Essays. Columbus: Ohio
State UP, 1964. Contains the essay on The Scarlet Letter by Charles
Feidelson, Jr., cited in the preceding essay.
Schubert, Leland. Hawthorne, the Artist: Fine Art Devices in Fiction.
Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1944.
Stein, William Bysshe. Hawthorne's Faust: A Study ofthe Devil Archetype.
Gainesville: U of Florida P, 1953.
Waggoner, Hyatt H. Hawthorne: A Critical Study. Cambridge:
Belknap-Harvard UP, 1955.
Woodberry, George, E. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: Houghton,
1902. American Men of Letters series. Cambridge: Riverside
Press.
Psychoanalytic Criticism
and
The Scarlet Letter
Why are oedipal wishes and fears repressed by the conscious side of
the mind? And what happens to them after they have been censored? As
Roy P. Basler puts it in Sex, Symbolism, and Psychology in Literature
(1975), "from the beginning of recorded history such wishes have been
restrained by the most powerful religious and social taboos, and as a
result have come to be regarded as 'unnatural,"' even though "Freud
found that such wishes are more or less characteristic of normal human
development":
In dreams, particularly, Freud found ample evidence that such
wishes persisted.... Hence he conceived that natural urges, when
identified as "wrong," may be repressed but not obliterated....
In the unconscious, these urges take on symbolic garb, regarded
as nonsense by the waking mind that does not recognize their
significance. ( 14)
Freud's belief in the significance of dreams, of course, was no more
original than his belief that there is an unconscious side to the psyche.
Again, it was the extent to which he developed a theory of how dreams
work- and the extent to which that theory helped him, by analogy, to
understand far more than just dreams - that made him unusual, impor-
tant, and influential beyond the perimeters of medical schools and
psychiatrists' offices.
scribes to the notion that the artist turns a powerful, secret wish into a
literary fantasy, and he uses Freud's notion about the oedipal complex to
explain why the popular stories of so many heroes in literature are so
similar. A year after Rank had published his psychoanalytic account of
heroic texts, Ernest Jones, Freud's student and eventual biographer,
turned his attention to a tragic text: Shakespeare's Hamlet. In an essay
first published in the American Journal of Psychology, Jones, like Rank,
makes use of the oedipal concept; he suggests that Hamlet is a victim of
strong feelings toward his mother, the queen.
Between 1909 and 1949 numerous other critics decided that psy-
chological and psychoanalytic theory could assist in the understanding
of literature. I. A. Richards, Kenneth Burke, and Edmund Wilson were
among the most influential to become interested in the new approach.
Not all of the early critics were committed to the approach, neither were
all of them Freudians. Some followed Alfred Adler, who believed that
writers write out of inferiority complexes, and others applied the ideas
of Carl Gustav Jung, who had broken with Freud over Freud's emphasis
on sex and who had developed a theory of the collective unconscious.
According to Jungian theory, a great novel like The Scarlet Letter is not a
disguised expression of Hawthorne's personal, repressed wishes; rather,
it is a manifestation of desires once held by the whole human race but
now repressed because of the advent of civilization.
It is important to point out that among those who relied on Freud's
models were a number of critics who were poets and novelists as well.
Conrad Aiken wrote a Freudian study of American literature, and poets
such as Robert Graves and W. H. Auden applied Freudian insights
when writing critical prose. William Faulkner, Henry James, James
Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Marcel Proust, and Dylan Thomas are only a
few of the novelists who have either written criticism influenced by
Freud or who have written novels that conceive of character, conflict,
and creative writing itself in Freudian terms. The poet H. D. (Hilda
Doolittle) was actually a patient of Freud's and provided an account
of her analysis in her book Tribute to Freud. By giving Freudian theory
credibility among students of literature that only they could be-
stow, such writers helped to endow psychoanalytic criticism with
the largely Freudian orientation that, one could argue, it still ex-
hibits today.
The willingness, even eagerness, of writers to use Freudian models
in producing literature and criticism of their own consummated a
relationship that, to Freud and other pioneering psychoanalytic theo-
rists, had seemed fated from the beginning; after all, therapy involves
228 PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
the dose analysis of language. Rene W ellek and Austin Warren included
"psychological" criticism as one of the five "extrinsic" approaches to
literature described in their influential book, Theory ofLiterature (1942).
Psychological criticism, they suggest, typically attempts to do at least
one of the following: provide a psychological study of an individual
writer; explore the nature of the creative process; generalize about
"types and laws present within works of literature"; or theorize about
the psychological "effects of literature upon its readers" (81). Entire
books on psychoanalytic criticism even began to appear, such as Freder-
ick J, Hoffinan's Freudianism and the Literary Mind (1945).
Probably because of Freud's characterization of the creative mind
as "clamorous" if not ill, psychoanalytic criticism written before 1950
tended to psychoanalyze the individual author. Poems were read as
fantasies that allowed authors to indulge repressed wishes, to protect
themselves from deep-seated anxieties, or both. A perfect example of
author analysis would be Marie Bonaparte's 1933 study of Edgar Allan
Poe. Bonaparte found Poe to be so fixated on his mother that his
repressed longing emerges in his stories in images such as the white spot
on a black eat's breast, said to represent mother's milk.
A later generation of psychoanalytic critics often paused to analyze
the characters in novels and plays before proceeding to the authors. But
not for long, since characters, both evil and good, tended to be seen by
these critics as the author's potential selves, or projections of various
repressed aspects of his or her psyche. For instance, in A Psychoanalytic
Study ofthe Double in Literature (1970), Robert Rogers begins with the
view that human beings are double or multiple in nature. Using this
assumption, along with the psychoanalytic concept of "dissociation"
(best known by its result, the dual or multiple personality), Rogers
concludes that writers reveal instinctual or repressed selves in their
books, often without realizing that they have done so.
In the view of critics attempting to arrive at more psychological
insights into an author than biographical materials can provide, a work
of literature is a fantasy or a dream - or at least so analogous to
daydream or dream that Freudian analysis can help explain the nature of
the mind that produced it. The author's purpose in writing is to gratify
secretly some forbidden wish, in particular an infantile wish or desire
that has been repressed into the unconscious mind. To discover what
the wish is, the psychoanalytic critic employs many of the terms and
procedures developed by Freud to analyze dreams.
The literal surface of a work is sometimes spoken of as its "manifest
content'' and treated as a "manifest dream" or "dream story'' would be
WHAT IS PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM? 229
treated by a Freudian analyst. Just as the analyst tries to figure o~t the
"dream thought'' behind the dream story, that is, the latent content
hidden in the manifest dream, the psychoanalytic literary critic tries to
expose the latent, underlying content of a work. Freud used the words
"condensation" and "displacement" to explain two of the mental pro-
cesses whereby the mind disguises its wishes and fears in dream stories.
In condensation, several thoughts or persons may be condensed into a
single manifestation or image in a dream story; in displacement, an
anxiety, a wish, or a person may be displaced onto the image of another,
with which or whom it is loosely connected through a string of associ-
ations that only an analyst can untangle. Psychoanalytic critics treat
metaphors as if they were dream condensations; they treat metonyms -
figures of speech based on extremely loose, arbitrary associations - as if
they were dream displacements. Thus, figurative literary language in
general is treated as something that evolves as the writer's conscious
mind resists what the unconscious tells it to picture or describe. A
symbol is, in Daniel Weiss's words, "a meaningful concealment of truth
as the truth promises to emerge as some frightening or forbidden idea"
(20).
In a 1970 article entitled ''The 'Unconscious' of Literature," Nor-
man Holland, a literary critic trained in psychoanalysis, succinctly sums
up the attitudes held by critics who psychoanalyze authors, but without
quite saying that it is the author that is being analyzed by the psychoana-
lytic critic. "When one looks at a poem psychoanalytically," he writes,
"one considers it as though it were a dream or as though some ideal
patient [were speaking] from the couch in iambic pentameter." One
"looks for the general level or levels of fantasy associated with the
language. By level I mean the familiar stages of childhood develop-
ment - oral [when desires for nourishment and infantile sexual desires
overlap], anal [when infants receive their primary pleasure from defeca-
tion], urethral [when urinary functions are the locus of sexual pleasure],
phallic [when the penis or, in girls, some penis substitute is of primary
interest], oedipal." Holland continues by analyzing not Robert Frost
but Frost's poem, "Mending Wall," in terms of a specifically oral fantasy
that is not particular to its author. "Mending Wall" is "about breaking
down the wall which marks the separated or individuated self so as to
return to a state of closeness to some Other'' - including and perhaps
essentially the nursing mother ("Unconscious" 136, 139).
While not denying the idea that the unconscious plays a role in
creativity, psychoanalytic critics such as Holland began to focus more
on the ways in which authors create works that appeal to our repressed
PSYCHOANALITIC CRITICISM
wishes and fancies. Consequently, they shifted their focus away from the
psyche of the author and toward the psychology of the reader and the
text. Holland's theories, which have concerned themselves more with
the reader than with the text, have helped to establish another school of
critical theory: reader-response criticism. Elizabeth Wright explains
Holland's brand of modem psychoanalytic criticism in this way:
What draws us as readers to a text is the secret expression of what
we desire to hear, much as we protest we do not. The disguise must
be good enough to fool the censor into thinking that the text is
respectable, but bad enough to allow the unconscious to glimpse
the unrespectable. ( 117)
Whereas Holland came increasingly to focus on the reader rather
than on the work being read, others who turned away from character
and author diagnosis preferred to concentrate on texts; they remained
skeptical that readers regularly fulfill wishes by reading. Following the
theories of D. W. Winnicott, a psychoanalytic theorist who has argued
that even young babies have relationships as well as raw wishes, these
textually oriented psychoanalytic critics contend that the relationship
between reader and text depends greatly on the text. To be sure, some
works fulfill the reader's secret wishes, but others - maybe most - do
not. The texts created by some authors effectively resist the reader's
involvement.
In determining the nature of the text, such critics may regard the
text in terms of a dream. But no longer do they assume that dreams are
meaningful in the way that works of literature are. Rather, they assume
something more complex. "If we move outward" from one "scene to
others in the [same] novel," Meredith Skura writes, "as Freud moves
from the dream to its associations, we find that the paths of movement
are really quite similar'' (181). Dreams are viewed more as a language
than as symptoms of repression. In fact, the French structuralist psycho-
analyst Jacques Lacan treats the unconscious as a language, as a form of
discourse. Thus, we may study dreams psychoanalytically in order to
learn about literature, even as we may study literature in order to learn
more about the unconscious. In Lacan's seminar on Poe's ''The Pur-
loined Letter," a pattern of repetition like that used by psychoanalysts in
their analyses is used to arrive at a reading of the story. According to
Wright, "the new psychoanalytic structural approach to literature"
employs "analogies from psychoanalysis ... to explain the workings of
the text as distinct from the workings of a particular author's, charac-
ter's, or even reader's mind" (125).
WHAT IS PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM? 231
Joanne Feit Diehl, whose essay begins on page 235, is far from
being the first critic to use Freudian concepts in coming to terms with
The Scarlet Letter. Joseph Levi published a ground-breaking study in
American Imago in 1953, and slightly more than a decade later Frederick
C. Crews published his classic Freudian reading of the novel in his book,
The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes (1966). (A
summary of Crews's argument may be found in the preceding "Intro-
duction: The Critical Background.") Other psychoanalytic readings of
the novel, most of them Freudian but some of them based on the
theories of Lacan and others, have been published since 1966.
Whereas Crews had focused on Arthur Dimmesdale's libidinous
(and forbidden) desire for Hester Prynne, and on how that desire,
because it has been suppressed, must be fulfilled through other dis-
guised means (scourging, writing, etc.), most of the more recent Freud-
ian readings have developed Levi's somewhat older idea that the novel is
grounded in the author's oedipal feelings. As Clay Daniel puts it in "The
Scarlet Letter: Hawthorne, Freud, and the Transcendentalists" (1986),
"Hawthorne's masterwork in part is the product of the author's attempt
to resolve his Oedipal complex, which was reactivated immediately
prior to his writing the story by the death of his mother'' (23).
Most Freudians who have interpreted the novel since Daniel have
similarly assumed that Hawthorne expresses his disguised oedipal desire
through his portrayal of Dimmesdale's relationship with Hester. Hes-
ter, after all, is a mother, and the reason Dimmesdale can't have her is
that she already has a husband. But not all Freudians have seen in the
Dimmesdale-Hester relationship Hawthorne's longing for his lost
mother being worked out. In an article published in Literature and
Psychology (1974), Allan Lefcowitz has argued provocatively that it is
Dimmesdale, not Chillingworth, who represents the father (he, after all,
is the father of Hester's only child, conceived in a scene prior to the
novel's opening), and that it is Chillingworth, not Dimmesdale, who
represents the oedipal son. Like the boy who feels hostility toward the
man who first claimed the mother's affections, Chillingworth hovers
near Hester and goads the father of her child. To the objection that
Chillingworth is old, ugly, and married to Hester, Lefcowitz would
respond with the reminder that an author's self-projection into an
oedipal fantasy would inevitably involve disguise.
In "Re-Reading The Letter: Hawthorne, the Fetish, and the (Fam-
ily) Romance," Diehl follows the lead of predecessors such as Daniel
and Lefcowitz in reading the novel as an expression of its author's
oedipal feelings. (She follows Daniel in interpreting Dimmesdale, not
232 PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM:
A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Psychological or Psychoanalytic
Studies of Literature
Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Impor-
tanceofFairy Tales. New York: Knopf, 1977. Although this book is
about fairy tales instead of literary works written for publication, it
offers model Freudian readings of well-known stories.
Crews, Frederick C. Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Itkology, and
Critical Method. New York: Oxford UP, 1975.
- - . Relatrons of Literary Study. New York: MLA, 1967. See the
chapter "Literature and Psychology."
Hallman, Ralph. Psychology of Literature: A Study ofAlienation and
Tragedy. New York: Philosophical Library, 1961.
Hartman, Geoffrey. Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text. Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979. See especially the essays by
Hartman, Johnson, Nelson, and Schwartz.
Hertz, Neil. The End ofthe Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime.
New York: Columbia UP, 1985.
Holland, Norman N. Dynamics ofLiterary Response. New York: Oxford
UP, 1968.
---.Poems in Persons: An Introduction to The Psychoanalysis ofLitera-
ture. New York: Norton, 1973.
Kris, Ernest. Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art. New York: International
Universities, 1952.
Lucas, F. L. Literature and Psychology. London: Cassell, 1951.
Natoli, Joseph, ed. Psychological Perspectives on Literature: Freudian Dissi-
tknts and Non-Freudians: A Casebook. Hamden: Archon Books-
Shoe String, 1984.
Phillips, William, ed. Art and Psychoanalysis. New York: Columbia UP,
1977.
Rogers, Robert. A Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature.
Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1970.
Skura, Meredith. The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process. New
Haven: Yale UP, 1981.
Strelka, Joseph P. Literary Criticism and Psychology. University Park:
Pennsylvania State UP, 1976. See especially the essays by Lerner
and Peckham.
Weiss, Daniel. The Critic Agonistes: Psychology, Myth, and the Art of
Fiction. Ed. Stephen Arkin and Eric Solomon. Seattle: U ofWash-
ington P, 1985.
JOANNE FEIT DIEHL 235
The text is a fetish object, and this fetish desires me. The text
chooses me, by a whole disposition of invisible screens, selec-
PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
of his son's life. That the absence of the father would have intensified the
boy's feelings toward the mother there is little doubt. Moreover, the
conversion of the father's absence into permanent separation through
his death when Nathaniel was four years old - unmarked by any visible
event at home - would have offered the young boy no sign to substan-
tiate his father's disappearance in actuality, thus enhancing its impor-
tance to him on the level of fantasy.
In regard to the mother, Hawthorne's experience reveals an aspect
of the Family Romance that is equally intense. Once again, the particu-
lar circumstances of the early life are crucial: one recalls Nathaniel's
mother's rejection by her husband's family and the later difficulties the
mother found in making an independent home for her children. Such
early trauma may lie at the origins of the extraordinary burst of energy
Hawthorne experienced following what his wife Sophia called his
"brain fever," suffered immediately after his mother's death, an energy
related to the reawakening of early repressed drives associated with
ambivalent feelings toward his mother and as-yet-unresolved guilt over
his father's failure to return.
In two descriptions that mark endings, one physical, the other
literary, Hawthorne recounts his attempt and failure to achieve control
over a flood of feeling. Here is Hawthorne on his last moments with his
mother:
At about five o'clock, I went to my mother's chamber, and was
shocked to see such an alteration since my last visit, the day before
yesterday. I love my mother; but there has been, ever since my
boyhood, a sort of coldness of intercourse between us, such as is
apt to come between persons of strong feelings, if they are not
managed rightly. I did not expect to be much moved at the time-
that is to say, to feel any overpowering emotion struggling, just
then - though I knew that I should deeply remember and re-
gret.... Mrs. Dike left the chamber, and then I found the tears
slowly gathering in my eyes. I tried to keep them down; but it
would not be - I kept filling up, till, for a few moments, I shook
with sobs. For a long time, I knelt there, holding her hand; and
surely it is the darkest hour I ever lived. (American Notebooks
428-29)
Hawthorne confesses to a similar struggle to attain control in only one
other instance - when he read the closing pages of The Scarlet Letter to
his wife: " ... my emotions when I read the last scene ... to my wife,
just after writing it,- tried to read it, rather, for my voice swelled and
heaved, as if! were tossed up and down on an ocean as it subsides after a
JOANNE FEIT DIEHL 239
Hester lends him her physical support as the crowd next beholds "the
minister, leaning on Hester's shoulder and supported by her arm
around him, approach the scaffold, and ascend its steps; while still the
little hand of the sin-born child was clasped in his" (194). It is only
when Dimmesdale confesses that he achieves true union with the
tainted mother; the comfort of the breast, the reunion with the mother/
JOANNE FEIT DIEHL 243
the editor" from the sexual desires that are the origins of the story he is
about to relate. Indeed, as John Irwin has suggested in his American
Hieroglyphics (1980), the image of the beheading itself may be seen as a
symbolic castration. By presencing an absence, the allusion to behead-
ing functions much as does the letter inscribed on Hester's breast,
simultaneously marking her incriminating sexuality and gesturing to-
ward its status as forbidden object. However, in the first instance of
figural beheading the effect is to displace the fear of castration while
preserving the affective charge of punishment; in the second instance,
the addition of the sign, of the A, symbolically marks Hester as the
object of a desire that must be denied.
In a description that echoes neither the theme of rejection nor a
longing for death, Hawthorne recounts the discovery of the cloth letter
itself:
This rag of scarlet cloth, - for time, and wear, and a sacrilegious
moth, had reduced it to little other than a rag, - on careful
examination, assumed the shape of a letter.... My eyes fastened
themselves upon the old scarlet letter, and would not be turned
aside. Certainly, there was some deep meaning in it, most worthy
of interpretation, and which, as it were, streamed forth from the
mystic symbol, subtly communicating itself to my sensibilities, but
evading the analysis of my mind. (42-43)
lovers resting, albeit with a space between them, side by side. Despite
the narrator's claim that the inscription serves as a motto for the story
that precedes it, the heraldic device, when translated into words, does
not so much explain or "sum up" the story as it insists upon the A's
abiding presence. In this final description's act of double distancing,
Hawthorne reiterates the resilience of what the A symbolizes: the desire
for contact and reunion with the forbidden, which must be approached
through a language that will protect the very distance the author seeks
to traverse.
Theorizing on the character of desire and its relation to denial, Leo
Bersani has commented that
a sense both of the forbidden nature of certain desires and of the
incompatibility of reality with our desiring imagination makes the
negation of desire inevitable. But to deny desire is not to eliminate
it; in fact, such denials multiply the appearances of each desire in
the self's history. In denying a desire, we condemn ourselves to
finding it everywhere. (6)
In narrative terms, this would suggest that the A, rather than diminish-
ing in force, gathers its own momentum, just as writing provides access
to the origins of the scene of repression but cannot, of course, restore
the scene with the incestuous wish intact. Although in the opening
pages of ''The Custom-House," the narrator had announced his desire
to depart Salem and escape the "press of the familiar," the romance's
close reveals instead a desire to return to the motherland and to speak
with a voice that will reach the dead. Like the archives of the uncon-
scious that, as Derrida maintains, "are always already transcriptions," so
the worn yet still powerfully evocative A-shaped piece of cloth Surveyor
Hawthorne discovers already represents the transcription of his author's
unconscious transgressive desire for the dead mother. As a sign that bars
itself, the A operates for Dimmesdale within The Scarlet Letter as does
the fetish, both to presence the forbidden desire and to keep that
forbidden incestuous wish from being brought to consciousness. That
the A, on the other hand, empowers rather than defeats Hester, that the
experience of mothering affords her the capacity to transmute the
stigma of shame into a badge of commitment and charity, suggests the
regenerative power of the woman - a fact that she is nevertheless
prohibited from displaying in verbal discourse, forbidden as she is from
becoming the prophet of a new and more enlightened age. In my
judgment, that she is so deprived speaks to the Hawthornian insis-
tence on silencing the mother and thereby of further identifying the
JOANNE FEIT DIEHL 251
deeply troubled but verbally empowered fetishist with the father and
the son.
Shadowing the text and shining beyond it, the scarlet A therefore
signifies at once the articulated oedipal anxieties and the covert incestu-
ous desires expressed in the fetishistic silence. Yet the A also signifies a
breaking of that silence, for it represents a conflict between the desiring
authorial son and the yearnings of the phallic mother, the mother who
would free herself from his fetishizing imagination to achieve the
authority tested, but finally denied her, in The Scarlet Letter- the
power of the woman's voice. Imprisoned in her maternal identity while
protected by it, Hester cannot escape its stigmatization as Pearl can,
because the mother is drawn back to the scene of the "crime," as much
victimized by the altruism that converts her A into "Angel" as by the
adultery for which it ostensibly stands. Similarly, Dimmesdale, the
transgressing son, can acknowledge his paternity only at the moment of
his death: punishment for the violation that has always already occurred
is the price of adulthood. That maternity and paternity are psychically
illicit from the point of view of the child only underscores the signifi-
cance of the primal scene. Finally, when we, as readers, gaze at the
scarlet letter, we might imagine the unconscious text Hawthorne re-
collects in his narrative, witnessing along with him the scar of primal
desire, the bleeding yet inviolate wound, the cultural script, or, as
Chillingworth would have it, the "dark necessity'' that implicates us all
in the novel's fatal Family Romance.
WORKS CITED
Baym, Nina. "Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Mother: A Biographical
Speculation." American Literature 54 (1982): 1-27.
Bersani, Leo. A Future for AstyaMX. Boston: Little, 1976.
Crews, Frederick C. The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological
Themes. New York: Oxford UP, 1966.
Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works ofSigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. Vol. 2. London:
Hogarth, 1953-74.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The American Notebooks. Ed. Claude M. Simp-
son. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1972.
- - . The English Notebooks. Ed. Randall Stewart. New York: Russell,
1962.
Irwin, John. American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hiero-
glyphics in the American Renaissance. New Haven: Yale UP, 1980.
Reader-Response Criticism
and
The Scarlet Letter
Fish pauses to say this about his analysis and also, by extension, about
the overall critical strategy he has largely developed: "Whatever is
persuasive and illuminating about [it] ... is the result of my substitut-
ing for one question- what does this sentence mean?- another,
more operational question- what does this sentence do?" He then
quotes a line from John Milton's Paradise Lost, a line that refers to Satan
and the other fallen angels: "Nor did they not perceive their evil plight."
Whereas more traditional critics might say that the "meaning'' of the
line is ''They did perceive their evil plight," Fish relates the uncertain
movement of the reader's mind to that half-satisfYing interpretation.
Furthermore, he declares that "the reader's inability to tell whether or
not 'they' do perceive and his involuntary question ... are part of the
line's meaning, even though they take place in the mind, not on the
page" (Text 26).
This stress on what pages do to minds pervades the writings of
most, if not all, reader-response critics. Wolfgang Iser, author of The
Implied Reader (1974) and The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic
Response (1976), finds texts to be full of "gaps," and these gaps, or
"blanks," as he sometimes calls them, powerfully affect the reader. The
reader is forced to explain them, to connect what the gaps separate,
literally to create in his or her mind a poem or novel or play that isn't in
the text but that the text incites. Stephen Booth, who greatly influenced
Fish, equally emphasizes what words, sentences, and passages "do." He
stresses in his analyses the "reading experience that results" from a
"multiplicity of organizations" in, say, a Shakespeare sonnet (Essay ix).
Sometimes these organizations don't make complete sense, and some-
times they even seem curiously contradictory. But that is precisely what
interests reader-response critics, who, unlike formalists, are at least as
interested in fragmentary, inconclusive, and even unfinished texts as in
polished, unified works. For it is the reader's struggle to make sense of a
challenging work that reader-response critics seek to describe.
In Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century
Literature (1972), Fish reveals his preference for literature that makes
readers work at making meaning. He contrasts two kinds of literary
presentation. By the phrase "rhetorical presentation," he describes lit-
erature that reflects and reinforces opinions that readers already hold; by
"dialectical presentation," he refers to works that prod and provoke. A
dialectical text, rather than presenting an opinion as if it were truth,
challenges readers to discover truths on their own. Such a text may not
even have the kind of symmetry that formalist critics seek. Instead of
offering a "single, sustained argument," a dialectical text, or self-
WHAT IS READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM? 255
consuming artifact, may be "so arranged that to enter into the spirit and
assumptions of any one of [its) ... units is implicitly to reject the spirit
and assumptions of the unit immediately preceding'' (Artifacts 9). Such
a text needs a reader-response critic to elucidate its workings. Another
kind of critic is likely to try to explain why the units are unified and
coherent, not why such units are contradicting and "consuming" their
predecessors. The reader-response critic proceeds by describing the
reader's way of dealing with the sudden twists and turns that character-
ize the dialectical text - that make the reader return to earlier passages
and to see them in an entirely new light.
''The value of such a procedure," Fish has written, "is predicated on
the idea of meaning as an event,". not as something "located (presumed
to be imbedded) in the utterance" or "verbal object as a thing in itself''
(Text 28). By redefining meaning as an event, the reader-response critic
once again locates meaning in time: the reader's time. A text exists and
signifies while it is being read, and what it signifies or means will
depend, to no small extent, on when it is read. (Paradise Lost had some
meanings for a seventeenth-century Puritan that it would not have for a
twentieth-century atheist.)
With the redefinition of literature as something that only exists
meaningfully in the mind of the reader, with the redefinition of the
literary work as a catalyst of mental events, comes a concurrent redefini-
tion of the reader. No longer is the reader the passive recipient of those
ideas that an author has planted in a text. ''The reader is active,"
Rosenblatt insists (123). Fish begins "Literature in the Reader'' with a
similar observation: "If at this moment someone were to ask, 'what are
you doing,' you might reply, 'I am reading,' and thereby acknowledge
that reading is ... something you do" (Text 22). In "How to Recognize
a Poem When You See One," he is even more provocative: "Interpreters
do not decode poems: they make them" (Text 327). Iser, in focusing
critical interest on the gaps in texts - on what is not expressed -
similarly redefines the reader as an active maker. In an essay entitled
"Interaction between Text and Reader," he argues that what is missing
from a narrative causes the reader to fill in the blanks creatively.
Iser's title implies a cooperation between reader and text that is also
implied in Rosenblatt's definition of a poem as ''what the reader lives
through under the guidance of the text." Indeed, Rosenblatt borrowed
the term "transactional" to describe the dynamics of the reading process,
which in her view involves interdependent texts and readers interacting.
The view that texts and readers make poems together, though, is not
READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM
Hawthorne also makes us see how differently the same reality may be
read in the scene in which Dimmesdale exposes the stigma on his chest
after having confessed. Some townspeople see a red A that Chilling-
worth has magically wrought; others see a mark that Dimmesdale has
inflicted on himself; still others see a mark made by God, and a few
"highly respectable witnesses" see nothing at all! Brodhead writes,
"Hawthorne releases us from his narrative authority and allows us to
choose among these, or to adopt whatever explanation we like" (68).
It is only a short step from Brodhead's approach to that taken by
Kenneth Dauber, because both critics stress the reader's active involve-
ment in the meaning-making process. In his book Rediscovering Haw-
thorne (1977), Dauber, like Brodhead, focuses on the way in which the
text of The Scarlet Letter obliges its readers to choose between different
or even opposite meanings. At some points we are led to see Pearl as an
evil imp; at others, we are persuaded to view her behavior as the natural
psychological response to rejection. Similarly, "Chillingworth, de-
scribed, initially, as the implacable arch-fiend, is demythologized in 'The
Leech and His Patient' " (99).
Committing what formalists had called "the affective fallacy,"
Dauber focuses on the mental activity of the reader who has to make
sense of this "fragmented," "dislocated," and "remarkably unhinged"
story (97). Adapting the ideas of E. H. Gombrich and modem reading
theory, Dauber argues that readers locate individual elements of what
they read in structures that they hypothesize as they read, fitting them
into "patterns" or "schemata" that they "continually project" (98).
When "faced with such contradiction" as is found in The Scarlet Letter,
the reader "may choose to see ambiguity or paradox" as meaning, may
make sense of the text by "impos[ing] his own world on the world of
The Scarlet Letter," or, better yet, may be "drawn into a point 'between'
schemata," where "schematizations are never avoided, but they remain
potential" (99-100). What Dauber envisions is a reader who learns to
see alternative potentialities in each "semi-autonomous" tableau, action,
image, or comment that he or she comes across (96).
In the essay that begins on page 263, David Leverenz builds on
several ideas about The Scarlet Letter advanced by Brodhead and Dau-
ber, while making use of the more general theories of leading reader-
response theorists such as Stanley Fish and Jane Tompkins. Like Brod-
head, Leverenz sees The Scarlet Letter as a novel that dramatizes the act
of interpretation and that allows the reader the freedom to choose from
among possible meanings. Like Dauber, he sees that the novel contains
contradictory elements and invites diverse, even irreconcilable, read-
260 READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM
ings. And, like Fish and Tompkins, he is interested in the way in which
"textual meanings are established by readers in any historical mo-
ment'' - readers whose readings are guided by their "interpretive
communities."
But Leverenz avails himself of more of the moves practiced by
contemporary reader-response critics than do Brodhead or Dauber. For
one thing, he self-consciously alludes to and places himself vis-a-vis
theorists like Fish and Tompkins, Mailloux and Walter Benn Michaels.
For another, he provides a history of readers' responses to the novel,
thus discussing the response of the contemporary reader against the
background of the novel's reception.
Similarly, Leverenz's essay may be distinguished from those writ-
ten by contemporary reader-response theorists. Although he alludes to
and adapts the theory of interpretive community, he differs from Fish
and Tompkins when he suggests that The Scarlet Letter seems to have a
mind of its own; it "both induces" and resists or "undermines" the
"interpretive expectations of its contemporary readers." Thus, Leverenz
argues, it is a novel that "posits a more ambivalent relation between text
and community than the theory of interpretive community so far
allows." Indeed, Leverenz seems willing to admit, formalists may have
been right insofar as they granted a measure of authority and indepen-
dence to the text.
Focusing first on the early chapters of the novel, Leverenz argues
that they align our sympathies with Hester and seem to "mandate,"
certainly for present-day readers, an "aggressive feminist interpreta-
tion." But he goes on to show that later chapters encourage other kinds
of interpretation. In our attempts to find out truths as yet unrevealed by
the narrator, we are aligned with Chillingworth as well as with Hester:
"Chillingworth's probing brings out the reader's power of psychologi-
cal detection," Leverenz writes, "while Hester's character encourages
feminist responses." Leverenz's version of reader-response criticism thus
verges on being all-inclusive. Like the narratologists, he conceives the
reader and the narrator to be interlocked, twin halves of one entity or
event, and his interest in past as well as present responses aligns him
with reader-reception theory.
But these forays into theoretical territories either at or off the edge
of the usual map of reader-response criticism in no way weaken Lever-
enz's essay as an example of the reader-response approach. After all,
reader-response criticism is finally only a name we give to a variety of
analyses that share an interest in the reader's reactions. The best of those
analyses - whether Norman Holland's in his psychoanalytic mode or
A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 261
READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM:
A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Some Introductions to
Reader-Response Criticism
Fish, Stanley E. "Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics." New
Literary History 2 (1970): 123-61. Rpt. in Fish 21-67. Also rpt. in
Primeau 154-79.
Holland, Norman N. "UNITY IDENTITY TEXT SELF." PMLA 90
(1975): 813-22.
Holub, Robert C. Receptum Theory: A Critical Introduction. New York:
Methuen, 1984.
Mailloux, Steven. "Learning to Read: Interpretation and Reader-
Response Criticism." Studies in the Literary I m&ttJination 12 ( 1979):
93-108.
- - - "Reader-Response Criticism?" Genre 10 (1977): 413-31.
Rosenblatt, Louise M. ''Towards a Transactional Theory of Reading."
Journal of Reading Behavior 1 (1969): 31-47. Rpt. in Primeau
121-46.
Suleiman, Susan R. "Introduction: Varieties of Audience-Oriented
Criticism." Suleiman 3-45.
Tompkins, Jane P. "An Introduction ro Reader-Response Criticism."
Tompkins ix-xxiv.
Reader-Response Criticism in
Anthologies and Collections
Fish, Stanley Eugene. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of
Interpretive Communities. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980. In this
volume are collected most ofFish's most influential essays, includ-
ing "Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics," "What It's Like
to Read L'Allegro and Il Penseroso," "Interpreting the Variorum,"
"Is There a Text in This.Class?" "How to Recognize a Poem When
You See One," and ''What Makes an Interpretation Acceptable?"
READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM
Garvin, Harry R., ed. Theories ofReading, Looking, and Listening. Lewis-
burg: Bucknell UP, 1981. See the essays by Cain and Rosenblatt.
Primeau, Ronald, ed. Influx: Essays on Literary Influence. Port Washing-
ton: Kennikat, 1977. See the essays by Fish, Holland, and
Rosenblatt.
Suleiman, Susan R., and loge Crosman, eds. The Reader in the Text:
Essays onAudience and Interpretation. Princeton: Princeton UP,
1980. See especially the essays by Culler, Iser, and Todorov.
Tompkins, Jane P., ed. Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to
Post-Structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980. See espe-
cially the essays by Bleich, Fish, Holland, Prince, and Tompkins.
Reader-Response Criticism:
Some Major Works
Bleich, David. Subjective Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
1978.
Booth, Stephen. An Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets. New Haven: Yale
UP, 1969.
Eco, Umberto. TheRoleoftheReader. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979.
Fish, Stanley Eugene. Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of
Seventeenth-Century Literature. Berkeley: U of California P, 1972.
- - . Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. 2nd ed. Berkeley:
U of California P, 1971.
Holland, Norman N. 5 Readers Reading. New Haven: Yale UP, 1975.
Iser, Wolfgang. The Act ofReading: A Theory ofAesthetic Response.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.
- - , . The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction
from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974.
Jauss, Hans Robert. Tuward anAesthetic ofReception. Trans. Timothy
Bahti. lntrod. Paul de Man. Brighton, Eng.: Harvester, 1982.
Mailloux, Steven. Interpretive ConventUms: The Reader in the Study of
American Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982.
Prince, Gerald. Narratology. New York: Mouton, 1982.
DAVID LEVERENZ
Mrs. Hawthorne's Headache:
Reading The Scarlet Letter
When Hawthorne read the end of The Scarlet Letter to his wife, it
"broke her heart and sent her to bed with a grievous headache - which
I look upon as a triumphant success!" His Chillingworth-like tone belies
his own feelings. Ostensibly his "triumphant'' sense of professional
satisfaction depends on breaking a woman's heart and mind, much as his
READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM
narrative pacifies the heart and mind of its heroine. But Hawthorne's
"success" also depends on evoking great sympathy for female suffering.
Several years later he vividly recalled "my emotions when I read the last
scene of The Scarlet Letter to my wife, just after writing it - tried to
read it, rather, for my voice swelled and heaved, as if I were tossed up
and down on an ocean, as it subsides after a storm." As Randall Stewart
notes, "Hawthorne was not in the habit of breaking down." This scene,
and the shaking sobs that overcame him at his dying mother's bedside,
"are the only recorded instances of uncontrolled emotion" in Haw-
thorne's career (95).
Mrs. Hawthorne's headache is a rare moment in the history of
American reader responses. It reveals not only a spouse's ambiguously
painful reaction but also the author's incompatible accounts of his own
first reading. Both responses seem deeply divided: one with a splitting
headache, the other with a split self-presentation. If we accept at face
value the goal announced by Hawthorne's narrator in the first para-
graph of "The Custom-House," to seek a self-completing commu-
nion with his readers, his quest to discover "the divided segment of
the writer's own nature" (22) ends in frustration. Both Hawthorne
and his most intimate sympathizer experience inward turmoil and
self-controlled withdrawal. As several first readers commented in
print, Hawthorne's romance left them with similarly intense and unre-
solved feelings - of sadness, pain, annoyance, and almost hypnotic
fascination.
The Scarlet Letter's strange power over its contemporary readers
derives from its unresolved tensions. What starts as a feminist revolt
against punitive patriarchal authority ends in a muddle of sympathetic
pity for ambiguous victims. Througnout, a gentlemanly moralist frames
the story so curiously as to ally his empathies with his inquisitions.
Ostensibly he voices Hawthorne's controlling moral surface, where
oscillations of concern both induce and evade interpretive judgments.
Yet his characterizations of Hester and Chillingworth bring out Haw-
thorne's profoundly contradictory affinities with a rebellious, autono-
mous female psyche and an intrusive male accuser. The narrative's
increasing preoccupation with Dimmesdale's guilt both blankets and
discovers that fearful inward intercourse. D. H. Lawrence's directive to
trust the tale, not the teller, rightly challenges the narrator's inauthentic
moral stance (13). But that becomes a complicating insight, not a
simplifying dismissal. In learning to see beyond Hawthorne's narrator,
readers can see what lies beneath the author's distrust of any coercive
DAVID LEVERENZ
fatalistic alliance with the prison's "darkening close" (54). His narrative
will be both, inextricably. He opens and shuts the door.
What seems here to be only a slight discomfort with the rose's
radical implications eventually becomes an ambivalent inquisition into
the dangers of Hester's lawless passion. The narrative issues forth as
Chillingworth as well as Hester. Chillingworth's probing brings out the
reader's powers of psychological detection while Hester's character
encourages feminist responses. At once rebel and inquisitor, the narra-
tor falsely joins these poles in a mystifying voice-over. He implies that
the law can be transcended by means of Dimmesdale's growth through
pain toward spiritual purity or softened through Hester's growth
through pain toward maternal sympathy. To the degree that we can also
perceive his own voice as an "issue" we can locate the unresolved
tensions under his still more mystified "sweet moral blossom" of being
true to oneself.
Hester Prynne's first gesture, to repel the beadle's authority, refo-
cuses narrative sympathies. Her radical feminism goes further than
Hyatt Waggoner's sense of her as a champion of the oppressed (145)
and beyond Nina Baym's various arguments that she champions the
private imagination (124-35). In chapter 13 Hester goes so far as to
imagine the "hopeless task" of building the whole social system anew,
changing sex roles so completely that both womanhood and manhood
will become unrecognizable to themselves (134). It seems an extraordi-
nary instance of negative capability that Hawthorne, who forbade his
daughter to write because it was unfeminine, could imagine the most
radical woman in nineteenth-century New England, even retrospective-
ly. Though his narrator interjects several times that Hester's mind has
gone so astray only because her heart "had lost its regular and healthy
throb" (134), his abstracted, fitful cavils seem to heighten our sense of
her sustained independence.
Hester's private question about the "race" of women can still leap
off the page for modem readers: ''Was existence worth accepting, even
to the happiest among them?" ( 134). She has long since "decided in the
negative" (134) this question for herself. Later, from her radical free-
dom of fresh perception, she sees all social institutions ''with hardly
more reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the
judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the church" (157).
Not even Melville, with his more impulsive extremes of negation, offers
such a laconic, liberating list. For Hester the comforts of fireside and
church grow from the punitive powers of the clergy and judiciary, as
interlocked and equivalent institutions.
DAVID LEVERENZ 269
II
A narrative that begins by challenging patriarchal punishment ends
by accepting punishment as a prelude to kindness. From Anthony
Trollope to Frederic Carpenter and beyond, the ending has disturbed
many readers who like Hester's spirited subjectivity. As one critic noted
in 1954, "unlike his judicial ancestor, who consigned a witch to the
gallows with an undismayed countenance, Hawthorne would have
sprung the trap with a sigh. If one were the witch, one might well
wonder wherein lay the vital difference" (Cronin 98).
Though my reading continues that tradition, I question whether
the narrator who executes such an about-face represents all of Haw-
thorne. While he provides a safely overarching frame of moral values to
which both Hawthorne and his audience could consciously assent, the
narrator's evasive mixture of sympathy and judgment also provides a
safe way of going beyond socially responsible norms to investigate
dangerously attractive interior states of mind. From the first paragraph
of ''The Custom-House" Hawthorne presents his "intrusive author" as
a solicitous, sensible, yet receptive interpreter whose movement from
torpid business surroundings to a romantic sensibility opens the door
for Hester's story. His first reaction to the scarlet letter, after all, is
hilariously inappropriate: he measures it, and finds that "each limb
proved to be precisely three inches and a quarter in length" (43). This
habit of precise accounting would seem perfectly natural to the "man of
business," the "main-spring" of the Custom-House, who could "make
the incomprehensible as clear as daylight," and for whom a "stain on his
conscience" would be no more troublesome than an error in his ac-
counts or an ink-blot in his record books (37-38). But the scarlet letter
takes the narrator beyond his own more satirical accounts. Its meanings
"streamed forth from the mystic symbol, subtly communicating itself to
my sensibilities, but evading the analysis of my mind" (43).
This tension between sensibility and analysis persists throughout
the narrative. The power of authority to take the shameful measure of
vulnerable subjectivity terrifies the narrator. Yet he seems equally terri-
fied of the heart-freezing isolation inherent in aggressive autonomy.
Fleeing coercive authority, including his own, he defines himself simply
as an imaginative re-creator of Surveyor Pue's manuscript and imagines
Hester's rebellious self-reliance with sustained flights of empathy. Flee-
ing self-reliance, he chastises Hester's pride and relentlessly accuses
Chillingworth's self-possessed malice. For him subjectivity always seems
vulnerable to alien invasion. Chillingworth's own invasion of Dimmes-
DAVID LEVERENZ 271
dale's soul manifests the devil's entry into the scholar-physician. Perpet-
ually oscillating betweeen subjectivity and authority, the narrator
dodges being pinned down to one mode or the other. To commit
himself either way might expose his fearful cruelty of heart or his equally
fearful vulnerability to violation.
His solution, both for himself and his heroine, is the fluidity of
sympathetic relationship. He strives to "stand in some true relation with
his audience," fictionalizing his reader as "a kind and apprehensive,
though not the closest friend." Without such a relation, he says,
"thoughts are frozen and utterance benumbed" (22). The metaphor
comes close to self-exposure. Seeking a nonthreatening communication
that protects him from real intimacy, he indicates his fear of a solidifying
self-possession. The audience has to warm the intrinsic coldness of his
heart and tongue.
Similarly, the coldness of Hester's radical speculations must be
warmed by her mothering heart. "A woman," he concludes, "never
overcomes these problems by any exercise of thought"; they can be
solved only by letting the heart "come uppermost'' ( 134). Having
established Hester's radical potential, the narrator. now undercuts her
force by dramatizing her transformation back to lovability, not toward
public combat. The "magic touch" to bring about her "transfiguration,"
as he says earlier ( 133), sets the second half of the narrative in motion.
She vows to redeem Dimmesdale from his own weakness and his
malevolent tormentor. She will accomplish "the rescue of the victim"
from her husband's "power'' (135). Meanwhile, like a good mistress,
she remains bonded to her child, her duties, her isolation, her marginal
status, and her hopeless dreams of union.
The narrator's astonishing corollary to Hester's decline into sympa-
thy unites Chillingworth, Dimmesdale, and himself in a loving ascen-
sion. After Dimmesdale spurns Hester to gain an uncontaminated
integration for his purified maleness, we are asked to imagine him
united in heaven not just with God but with Chillingworth as well. In
the middle of the story the narrator oddly interpolates that "hatred, by a
gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love," if new
irritations of hostility do not impede the process (130). At several other
points he implies that rage and desire fuse as violent passion. Now the
narrator inverts the devil's work. He adopts the ability to transform hate
into love as his final test of the reader's tender capacities.
Asking his readers to be merciful to Chillingworth, he wonders
"whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom." Each
272 READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM
masks he wants to lift. Yet while the storyteller oscillates between guilt
and decorum, his story brings out a much riskier inwardness, whose
unresolved tensions sent Mrs. Hawthorne to bed and Hester to a deeper
solitude. Hester's epitaph suitably blazons forth her red strength against
her black background. By contrast, the narrator's epitaph could be the
remark he addresses to "the minister in a maze": "No man, for any
considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the
multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the
true" ( 168). In accommodating his voice to the contradictions of public
authority, the narrator joins Boston's congregated sepulchres, while
Hester's life continues to speak with embattled vitality.
WORKS CITED
Baym, Nina. The Shape ofHawthorne's Career. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1976.
Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction ofMothering. Berkeley: U of Cali-
fornia P, 1978.
Cronin, Morton. "Hawthorne on Romantic Love and the Status of
Women." PMLA 69 (1954): 89-98.
Crowley, J. Donald, ed. Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage. New York:
Barnes, 1970.
James, Henry. Hawthorne. Introd. Tony Tanner. London: Macmillan,
1967.
Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. Garden City:
Doubleday, 1951.
Stewart, Randall. Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography. New Haven: Yale
UP, 1948.
Trollope, Anthony. ''The Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne." North
American Review. Spring 1879: 203-22.
Waggoner, Hyatt H. Hawthorne: A Critical Study. Rev. ed. Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1963.
Feminist Criticism
and
The Scarlet Letter
ness from its mother, just about the time that boys- but not girls-
identifY with their father, the family representative of culture. The
language learned reflects a binary logic that opposes such terms as
active/passive, masculine/feminine, sun/moon, father/mother, head/
heart, son/daughter, intelligent/sensitive, brother/sister, fonnlmatter,
phallus/vagina, reason/emotion. Because this logic tends to group with
masculinity such qualities as light, thought, and activity, French femi-
nists have said that the structure of language is phallocentric: it privi-
leges the phallus and, more generally, masculinity by associating them
with things and values more appreciated by the (masculine-dominated)
culture. Moreover, French feminists believe, "masculine desire domi-
nates speech and posits woman as an idealized fantasy-fulfillment for the
incurable emotional lack caused by separation from the mother'' (Jones
83).
In the view of French feminists, language is associated with separa-
tion from the mother, characterized by distinctions that represent the
world from the male point of view, and seems systematically to give
women one of two choices. Either they can imagine and represent
themselves as men imagine and represent them (in which case they may
speak, but will speak as men) or they can choose "silence," becoming in
the process "the invisible and unheard sex" (Jones 83).
But some influential French feminists have argued that language
only seems to give women such a narrow range of choices. There is
another possibility, namely, that women can develop a feminine lan-
guage. In various ways, early French feminists such as Annie Leclerc,
Xaviere Gauthier, and Marguerite Duras have suggested that there is
something that may be called Pecriture ]eminine: women's writing.
Recently, Julia Kristeva has said that feminine language is "semiotic,"
not "symbolic." Rather than rigidly opposing and ranking elements of
reality, rather than symbolizing one thing but not another in terms of a
third, feminine language is rhythmic and unifYing. If from the male
perspective it seems fluid to the point of being chaotic, that is the fault
of the male perspective.
According to Kristeva, feminine language is derived from the pre-
oedipal period of fusion between mother and child. Associated with the
maternal, feminine language is not only threatening to culture, which is
patriarchal, but also a medium through which women may be creative
in new ways. But Kristeva has paired her central, liberating claim-
that truly feminist innovation in all fields requires an understanding of
the relation between maternity and feminine creation - with a warn-
ing. A feminist language that refuses to participate in "masculine"
FEMINIST CRITICISM
herself proceeds, in the same essay, to point out that women have had
their own style, which includes reflexive constructions ("she found
herself crying'') and particular, recurring themes (clothing and self-
fashioning are two that Kolodny mentions; other American feminists
have focused on madness, disease, and the demonic).
Interested as they have become in the "French" subject of feminine
style, American feminist critics began by analyzing literary texts rather
than by philosophizing abstractly about language. Many reviewed the
great works by male writers, embarking on a revisionist rereading of
literary tradition. These critics examined the portrayals of women char-
acters, exposing the patriarchal ideology implicit in such works and
showing how clearly this tradition of systematic masculine dominance is
inscribed in our literary tradition. Kate Millett, Carolyn G. Heilbrun,
and Judith Fetterley, among many others, created this model for Amer-
ican feminist criticism, a model that Elaine Showalter came to call
"the feminist critique" of "male-constructed literary history'' ("Poetics"
25).
Meanwhile, another group of critics including Sandra Gilbert,
Susan Gubar, Patricia Meyer Spacks, and Showalter herself created a
somewhat different model, one that Showalter has termed "gynocriti-
cism." Whereas the "feminist critique" has analyzed works by men,
practitioners of gynocriticism have studied the writings of those women
who, against all odds, produced what Showalter calls "a literature of
their own." In The Female Imaginatron (1975), Spacks examines the
female literary tradition to find out how great women writers across the
ages have felt, perceived themselves, and imagined reality. Gilbert and
Gubar, in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), concern themselves with
well-known women writers of the nineteenth century, but they too find
that general concerns, images, and themes recur, because the authors
that they treat wrote "in a culture whose fundamental definitions of
literary authority are both overtly and covertly patriarchal" (45).
If one of the purposes of gynocriticism is to (re)study well-known
women authors, another is to rediscover women's history and culture,
particularly women's communities that have nurtured female creativity.
Still another related purpose is to discover neglected or forgotten
women writers and thus to forge an alternative literary tradition, a
canon that better represents the female perspective by better represent-
ing the literary works that have been written by women. Showalter, inA
Literature ofTheir Own ( 1977), admirably began to fulfill this purpose,
providing a remarkably comprehensive overview of women's writing
through three of its phases. She defines these as the "Feminine, Femi-
280 FEMINIST CRITICISM
nist, and Female" phases, phases during which women first imitated
a masculine tradition ( 1840-80), then protested against its stan-
dards and values (1880-1920), and finally advocated their own auton-
omous, female perspective (1920 to the present).
With the recovery of a body of women's texts, attention has
returned to a question raised a decade ago by Lillian Robinson: doesn't
American feminist criticism need to formulate a theory of its own
practice? Won't reliance on theoretical assumptions, categories, and
strategies developed by men and associated with nonfeminist schools of
thought prevent feminism from being accepted as equivalent to these
other critical discourses? Not all American feminists believe that a
special or unifying theory of feminist practice is urgently needed;
Showalter's historiaal approach to women's culture allows a feminist
critic to use theories based on nonfeminist disciplines. Kolodny has
advocated a "playful pluralism" that encompasses a variety of critical
schools and methods. But Jane Marcus and others have responded that
if feminists adopt too wide a range of approaches, they may relax the
tensions between feminists and the educational establishment necessary
for political activism.
The question of whether feminism weakens or fortifies itself by
emphasizing its separateness - and by developing unity through sepa-
rateness - is one of several areas of debate within American feminism.
Another area of disagreement touched on earlier, between feminists
who stress universal feminine attributes (the feminine imagination,
feminine writing) and those who focus on the political conditions
experienced by particular groups of women during specific periods in
history, parallels a larger distinction between American feminist critics
and their British counterparts.
While it has been customary to refer to an Anglo-American tradi-
tion of feminist criticism, British feminists tend to distinguish them-
selves from what they see as an American overemphasis on texts linking
women across boundaries and decades and an underemphasis on popu-
lar art and culture. They regard their own critical practice as more
political than that of American feminists, whom they have often faulted
for being uninterested in historical detail. They would join such Ameri-
can critics as Myra Jehlen in suggesting that a continuing preoccupation
with women writers might create the danger of placing women's texts
outside the history that conditions them.
In the view of British feminists, the American opposition to male
stereotypes that denigrate women has often led to counterstereotypes of
feminine virtue that ignore real differences of race, class, and culture
WHAT IS FEMINIST CRITICISM? 281
young girl's innocence with "a single word" [ 123]) and one of Haw-
thorne's own measures of artistic success. Person reminds us that Haw-
thorne considered The Scarlet Letter "'a triumphant success,' a 'ten-
strike'" because it "had such an effect on [his wife] Sophia that it 'broke
her heart and sent her to bed with a grievous headache"' (122).
The phallic power to control and master women is very much what
the essay that begins on page 288 is about. There, Shari Benstock
explains how a patriarchal Puritan society attempts to master one
woman, Hester Prynne, in part by marking her with a letter that reduces
her to a single, rather simple identity- that of a sinner.
Benstock also shows how Hester subverts such attempts from the
moment she steps forth from the prison door and, instead of trying to
hide what is meant to stand for her sin, openly reveals the letter on her
breast. Through that and other, consequent actions, she identifies
herself not as a sinner but as a sexual woman- and more. For, as
Benstock points out, Hester proceeds by artfully altering both the letter
and other symbols constructed by the Puritan society. Slowly, carefully,
sometimes luxuriously, she makes them stand for things unintended by
the patriarchs who, by controlling language, have controlled women as
well. In fact, Hester ends up by opening "an inexhaustible chain of
substitutions," making the scarlet A stand for Angel, Able, Adored-
and, finally, "Authority over her own identity."
As Benstock realizes, Hawthorne begins to raise the issue of gender
in his introduction to the novel. In "The Custom-House" he associates
embroidery, femininity, and storytelling, reinforcing the kind of con-
nections that are part of our culture's masculine-dominated "logic" and
forming the kind of connections that Tori! Moi refers to as "sexual/
textual" in her book, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory
(1985). Ultimately, The Scarlet Letter critiques those same kinds of
associations - femininity and falsity, truth and masculinity. Like Hes-
ter, the novel teaches us to distrust easy, traditional, patriarchal modes
of interpretation that would tell us that "A" (or woman) does not mean
"Able." Moreover, by demonstrating the multiple meanings of a letter
and by occasionally dissociating meaning from gender, the novel even
manages to undermine or challenge the idea of absolute sexual
difference.
Benstock's reading of The Scarlet Letter has obviously been influ-
enced by French as well as American feminist theory. The French
influence shows in local details, such as references to Kristeva's theory.
But it is also evident in Benstock's general focus on women and
patriarchal or phallocentric language, which associates the feminine
FEMINIST CRITICISM
with certain words and ideas, the masculine with others. Returning to
the Greeks, Benstock explains that early myths linked the earth with the
female body, the plow with the penis, and, by extension, with masculin-
ity. Furthermore, she suggests that since civilization has been equated
with dominion over the earth, it has also come to imply the domination
of women by men. Equally French is Benstock's allusion to a primary
bond between Hester and Pearl that precedes language and, therefore,
culture.
Benstock's essay, however, does more than critique, or decon-
struct, the logic of binary oppositions (male/female, plow/earth,
dominant/passive) and associations (male/plow/dominant, female/earth/
passive) inherent in masculine-dominated language; it also shows Haw-
thorne engaged in the same enterprise. As Benstock points out, Haw-
thorne portrays a New England earth from which wild rosebushes grow
but which resists patriarchal, civilizing law; it seems that neither plans
nor plows can help the Puritans raise up an ornamental garden from
such hard soil. In turning Hawthorne into a precursor of French
feminist theory, Benstock again demonstrates what American feminists
like Baym and Fryer have long known, namely, that Hawthorne himself
is not easily categorized. At once backward- and forward-looking, he is
as patriarchal as he is prototypically feminist, as much a part of the
answer to "the dark question" concerning "the whole race of woman-
hood" as he has been part of the problem.
FEMINIST CRITICISM:
A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The
Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination.
New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.
Jacobus, Mary, ed. Women Writing and Writing About Women. New
York: Barnes, 1979.
Miller, Nancy K., ed. The Poetics of Gender. New York: Columbia UP,
1986.
Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style
in the W orkr ofMary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists
from Bronte to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977.
- - - . The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and
Theory. New York: Pantheon, 1985.
Spacks, Patricia Meyer. The Female Imagination. New York: Knopf,
1975.
Feminist Criticism of
Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter
Baym, Nina. "The Significance of Plot in Hawthorne's Romances."
Ruined Eden of the Present: Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe. Ed. G. R.
Thompson and Virgil Lokke. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1981.
49-70.
---.''Thwarted Nature: Nathaniel Hawthorne as Feminist." Ameri-
can N OTJelists Revisited: Essays in Feminist Criticism. Ed. Fritz Fleisch-
mann. Boston: Hall, 1982. 58-77.
Fryer, Judith. The Faces ofEve: Women in the Nineteenth-Century Ameri-
can Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1976.
Herzog, Kristin. Women, Ethnics, and Exotics: Images of Power in Mid-
Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1983.
Kamuf, Peggy. "Hawthorne's Genres: The Letter of the Law Appli-
quee." After Strange Texts: The Role ofTheory in the Study of
Literature. Ed. Gregory S. Jay and David L. Miller. University: U
of Alabama P, 1985. 69-84.
288 FEMINIST CRITICISM
SHARI BENSTOCK
The Scarlet Letter (a)doree,
or the Female Body Embroidered
When the jail door is "flung open from within" and Hester Prynne
"step[s] into the open air, as ifby her own free-will," she stands, we are
told, "fully revealed before the crowd" (56-57). She denies an initial
impulse to cover the token of her shame, the scarlet letter from which
the text takes its title, with the body of her infant daughter. Instead,
Hester parades her sin, exhibiting baby and letter before the collective
gaze of the Puritan community:
she took the baby on her arm, and, with a burning blush, and yet a
haughty smile, and a glance that would not be abashed, looked
around at her townspeople and neighbours. On the breast of her
gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery
and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A.
(57)
This gesture of revelation, like the exquisitely wrought letter itself,
masks self-representation. Offering herself as an object of scrutiny to the
crowd, Hester remains obscured to the degree that "her beauty shone
SHARI BENSTOCK
out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was
enveloped" (57). As Peggy Kamuf (79) has suggested, the A "so
fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom" (57-58)
opens an inexhaustible chain of substitutions (adulteress, angel, able,
adored, etc.) that includes Authority over her own identity, an authority
that the letter protects.
The opening scene of The Scarlet Letter parades before the reader
and the assembled Boston public the body of sin, or more accurately,
woman's body as (emblem of) sin. The female body is both an agent of
human reproduction and a field of representation, emblematized first by
the scarlet letter on Hester's slate-gray gown and again at the story's end
by the slate tombstone bearing the heraldic legend "ON A FIELD, SABLE,
THE LEITER A, GULEs" (201). The Scarlet Letter exposes a relation
between babies and words, between biological reproduction and sym-
bolic representations. Puritan theocracy would suppress one element of
this relation, symbolizing the baby as the sign of God's will in the
universe ordered by patriarchal religious and civil law. Woman's body
serves as the space where social, religious, and cultural values are
inscribed (quite literally in Hester's case); moreover, it produces the
very terms of that inscription: Pearl is the scarlet letter in human form
(90).
Hester Prynne, however, subverts the Puritan-patriarchal laws of
meaning in two ways. First, she embroiders and embellishes the com-
munity's representational codes, thereby confusing them. The letter A,
which is to stand as the sign of sexual fall, escapes by way of Hester's
needle the interpretive code it would enforce, opening itself to a wholly
other logic. It makes a spectacle of femininity, of female sexuality, of all
that Puritan law hopes to repress. Second, Hester refuses to name her
child's father, thereby placing Pearl- material sign of the mother's
sin- outside the bo(u)nds of Puritan ideology. By her birth, which is
represented textually as a form of mysterious regeneration, Pearl cannot
circulate within the terms of symbolic, communal social-sexual ex-
change. Missing a father, the guiding term of paternal authority, she
remains her "mother's child" (95). Despite all efforts by the Puritan
community to bring mother and daughter under the authority of God
and man, Hester and Pearl remain resolutely outside patriarchal
conventions.
Issues of gender, then, are at the very heart of the story told by The
Scarlet Letter: the history of the letter, supposedly discovered by Haw-
thorne in the Custom-House, bears importantly on the questions the
tale poses about narrative sources and symbolic powers as well as about
290 FEMINIST CRITICISM
the mystery of paternal origins that the story seeks to solve. The scarlet
letter is passed from generation to generation by men, and Hawthorne
feels burdened by "filial duty'' to his "official ancestor," Jonathan Pue,
to present again the tale of the letter. "Mr. Surveyor Pue" is the Custom-
House official who "authorized and authenticated" the historical events
on which the story is based (44).
The tale itself, however, focuses attention on representations of
womanhood, with special emphasis on Puritan efforts to regulate female
sexuality within religious, legal, and economic structures. Puritan
thought assigns the powers of naming, owning, and ordering to a
paternal theological order, derived linearly (and literally) from the
Word of God-the-Father. Divinity transcends biology; God-the-Father
is Alpha and Omega, origin of life and its final meaning; the human
body is corporeal matter to be transcended. As agents of human repro-
duction, women are subsumed by this symbolic order, which assigns
weight and value to women's work.
Repeating a particularly misogynistic version of paternal ordering,
The Scarlet Letter draws a relation between mere storytelling and the
domestic art of embroidery. In "The Custom-House," the autobio-
graphical introduction to the text, Hawthorne reveals his fear of losing
his "imaginative faculty," or "fancy'' (45, 46). The text that follows,
which he claims to have found and "dress[ed] up" as a romance (44),
fashions a tale around the "fantastic" artistry of Hester Prynne's needle-
work skills (57). By various means, then, Hawthorne suggests that
literary genres are marked by gender, displaying forms of sexual-textual
difference not only in their subject matter but also in their structures and
narrative methods. The Scarlet Letter prompts us to ask: does the
feminine bear the same relation to storytelling as it does to embroidery
or the female body to sin? Following recent developments in feminist
theory, I will argue that the feminine, so powerfully at work in Haw-
thorne's tale, works not to exploit oppositional structures of sexual-
textual difference but rather to expose the fictional nature of these
modes, revealing absolute sexual difference as a fantasy of patriarchal
oppositional and hierarchical logic. I refer to this figure as the "textual
feminine," since it reveals itself in language, where it both supports
traditional notions of femininity and subverts these powerful represen-
tations of woman-in-the-feminine. Fantasies of the feminine undergird
classic Western models of narrative, which the textual feminine -
represented in Hawthorne's text by the gilded letter A - elaborates,
ornaments, embellishes, and seeks to undermine.
SHARI BENSfOCK 291
By the same rhetorical gestures that The Scarlet Letter exposes the
effects of secret (sexual) sin to the light of noonday sun, it also hides the
cultural assumptions that have historically undergirded representations
of women. Feminist criticism demonstrates that these assumptions are
not "natural" or God-given, as cultures and religions would have us
believe, but are socially and economically constructed to further the
ends of patriarchy. Patriarchy defines social gender roles for women and
men from biological sex functions, thus keeping women within the
confines of domesticity and under the husband's power as familial
patriarch. Because reproduction of the species takes place through the
woman's body, she is seen as closer to "nature," while man is the agent
of society and culture, which he creates through symbolic representa-
tions of the natural environment. The power of symbols and signs to
enforce social order is manifest in Puritan thought, where the spiritual
and immaterial is figured by signs and portents and where all natural
occurrences (lightning, thunder) take on symbolic meaning. Woman's
body, whose sexual organs are hidden internally and whose reproduc-
tive operations remain mysterious, becomes a vessel to be filled with
symbclic meaning: virgin/adulteress, madonna/mother, whore/witch.
Gabriele Schwab suggests that witchcraft was a male invention, born of
the fear of sexually powerful or independent women who represented
natural forces that needed to be "tamed."
These dichotomous and oppressive representations of woman are
the product of the binary structure of Western thought, the earliest
forms being those from fifth-century Greek culture, which rewrote
earlier agricultural myths. In the most ancient myths, both the land and
the female body were inherently fertile, giving birth to seeds and babies
by spontaneous generation. The triangular shape of the letter A, for
instance, reproduces the sign for the Nile River Delta, an ancient pre-
Christian symbol of female fertility and rebirth of the land. Early myths
SHARI BENSTOCK 293
and deposited one of its gigantic products directly beneath rhe hall-
window'' (93). A number of symbolic associations attach to rhis rude
image of reproductive excess. Vegetation rhat overruns its boundaries
emblematizes unrestrained female sexuality, which is believed to know
no limits or boundaries. In rhis instance, rhe cabbages and pumpkin
invoke folk mythology of human origins, where babies are found under
cabbage leaves. The gigantic pumpkin in rhe Governor's garden repre-
sents not only reproductive excess but capitalist productivity, rhe ability
of gold to reproduce itself: "rhis great lump of vegetable gold was as rich
an ornament as New England earrh would offer him" (93). This is one
of many places in rhe text in which capitalist-patriarchal gains are
figured as ornament and sumptuary excess. Within rhe value systems of
rhe story, Hester Prynne's needlework elaborates a gendered relation of
economic (re)production to ornament in Puritan society: lacking finan-
cial support from her husband or from rhe farber of her child, she
produces by her womanly art rhe gold necessary to support herself and
Pearl.
The failure of civilization to bring nature under its control is even
more dramatically symbolized by rhe wild rosebush rhat blooms in rhe
overgrown grass-plot in front of rhe prison from which Hester emerges.
The rosebush gives rise to various stories about its origins, including
speculation rhat "it had sprung up under rhe footsteps of rhe sainted
Ann Hutchinson, as she entered rhe prison-door'' (54). Ann Hutchin-
son, founder ofrhe antinomian sect (which means, literally, "against rhe
law''), figures an alternate history for Hester Prynne, a lost story of
female independence and resistance to patriarchal law. Hester's daugh-
ter, in response to Pastor Wilson's catechism ("Canst rhou tell me, my
child, who made rhee?" [96]), traces her origins to rhis rosebush.
Rather rhan attributing her origins to God rhe farber, as church doc-
trine decrees, Pearl returns to an archaic, preliterate story, substituting
roses for cabbages: "rhe child finally announced rhat she had not been
made at all, but had been plucked by her mother off rhe bush of wild
roses, rhat grew by rhe prison-door'' (97). In rhis schema, Pearl is not
her mother's daughter but rather a symbolic descendant of Ann
Hutchinson.
Pearl is certainly a rarer, more exotic fruit rhan anything rhe
Governor's garden can produce, and her radiant beauty is intensified by
rhe mystery of her origins: a "lovely and immortal flower," she "had
sprung ... out of rhe rank luxuriance of a guilty passion" (81). If in rhe
hermeneutics of Hawthorne's romance Hester's gold embroidery signi-
fies spiritual adornment, rhe "application of a design" on "rhe fabric of
SHARI BENSIOCK 295
for the ''very material change in the public estimation" ( 199) of little
Pearl, providing evidentiary proof of her value in God's eyes. That
proof comes not through the mother, although Hester is finally
deemed by the community an admirable mother, but through an (ab-
sent, dead) paternal line, from the man who should have fathered
Hester's children but could not. The phallic power that Chillingworth
lacked in life, its failure ascribed to the intellectual and ascetic life he led,
is transformed in death through the legacy of his properties in England
and the New World. Dimmesdale's unacknowledged and illicit legacy is
Pearl herself.
Mother as Matter
WORKS CITED
Abraham, Nicholas, and Maria Torok. Vecorce et le noyau. 2nd ed. Paris:
Flammarion, 1987.
Benstock, Shari. Textualizing the Feminine: Essays on the Limits of Genre.
Norman: U of Oklahoma P. Forthcoming.
Carton, Evan. The Rhetoric ofAmerican Romance. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1985.
DuBois, Page. Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representa-
tions ofWomen. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.
Kamuf, Peggy. "Hawthorne's Genres: The Letter of the Law Appli-
quee." After Strange Texts: The Role ofTheory in the Study of
Literature. Ed. Gregory S. Jay and David L. Miller. University: U
of Alabama P, 1985. 69-84.
Kristeva, Julia. "Stabat Mater." Tales of Love. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez.
New York: Columbia UP, 1987. 234-63.
SHARI BENSTOCK 303
WHAT IS DECONSTRUCTION?
Deconstruction has a reputation for being the most complex and
forbidding of contemporary critical approaches to literature, but in fact
almost all of us have, at one time, either deconstructed a text or badly
wanted to deconstruct one. Sometimes when we hear a lecturer effec-
tively marshall evidence to show that a book means primarily one thing,
we long to interrupt and ask what he or she would make of other,
conveniendy overlooked passages, passages that seem to contradict the
lecturer's thesis. Sometimes, after reading a provocative critical article
that almost convinces us that a familiar work means the opposite of what
we assumed it meant, we may wish to make an equally convincing case
for our former reading of the text. We may not think that the poem or
novel in question better supports our interpretation, but we may recog-
nize that the text can be used to support both readings. And sometimes
we simply want to make that point: texts can be used to support
seemingly irreconcilable positions.
To reach this conclusion is to feel the deconstructive itch. J. Hillis
Miller, the preeminent American deconstructor, puts it this way: "De-
construction is not a dismanding of the structure of a text, but a
demonstration that it has already dismanded itself. Its apparendy solid
ground is no rock but thin air" ("Stevens' Rock" 341). To deconstruct a
304
WHAT IS DECONSTRUCTION? 305
text isn't to show that the high old themes aren't to be found in it.
Rather, it is to show that a text- not unlike DNA with its double
helix - can have intertwined, opposite "discourses" - strands of nar-
rative, threads of meaning.
Ultimately, of course, deconstruction refers to a larger and more
complex enterprise than the practice of demonstrating that a text means
contradictory things. The term refers to a way of reading texts practiced
by critics who have been influenced by the writings of the French
philosopher Jacques Derrida. It is important to gain some understand-
ing of Derrida's project and of the historical backgrounds of his work
before reading the deconstruction of The Scarlet Letter that follows, let
alone attempting to deconstruct a text. But it is important, too, to
approach deconstruction with anything but a scholar's sober and almost
worshipful respect for knowledge and truth. Deconstruction offers a
playful alternative to traditional scholarship, a confidently adversarial
alternative, and deserves to be approached in the spirit that animates it.
Derrida, a philosopher of language who coined the term "decon-
struction," argues that we tend to think and express our thoughts in
terms of opposites. Something is black but not white, masculine and
therefore not feminine, a cause rather than an effect, and so forth. These
mutually exclusive pairs or dichotomies are too numerous to list, but
would include qeginninglend, conscious/unconscious, presence/ab-
sence, speech/writing, and construction/destruction (the last being the
opposition that Derrida's word deconstruction tries to contain and
subvert). If we think hard about these dichotomies, Derrida suggests,
we will realize that they are not simply oppositions; they are also
hierarchies in miniature. In other words, they contain one term that our
culture views as being superior and one term viewed as negative or
inferior. Sometimes the superior term seems only subtly superior
(speech, masculine, cause), whereas sometimes we know immediately
which term is culturally preferable (presence and beginning and conscious-
ness are easy choices). But the hierarchy always exists.
Of particular interest to Derrida, perhaps because it involves the
language in which all the other dichotomies are expressed, is the
hierarchical opposition speech/writing. Derrida argues that the "privi-
leging'' of speech, that is, the tendency to regard speech in positive
terms and writing in negative terms, cannot be disentangled from the
privileging of presence. (Postcards are written by absent friends; we
read Plato because he cannot speak from beyond the grave.) Further-
more, according to Derrida, the tendency to privilege both speech and
presence is part of the Western tradition of logocentrism, the belief that in
306 DECONSfRUCTION
some ideal beginning were creative spoken words, words such as "Let
there be light," spoken by an ideal, present God. According to logocen-
tric tradition, these words can now only be represented in unoriginal
speech or writing (such as the written phrase in quotation marks above).
Derrida doesn't seek to reverse the hierarchized opposition between
speech and writing, or presence and absence, or early and late, for to do
so would be to fall into the trap of perpetuating the same forms of
thought and expression that he seeks to deconstruct. Rather, his goal is
to erase the boundary between oppositions such as speech and writing
and to do so in such a way as to throw the order and values implied by
the opposition into question.
Returning to the theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, who invented
the modern science of linguistics, Derrida reminds us that the associ-
ation of speech with present, obvious, and ideal meaning and writing
with absent, merely pictured, and therefore less reliable meaning is sus-
pect, to say the least. As Saussure demonstrated, words are not the
things they name and, indeed, they are only arbitrarily associated with
those things. Neither spoken nor written words have present, positive,
identifiable attributes themselves; they have meaning only by virture of
their difference from other words (red, read, reed). In a sense, meanings
emerge from the gaps or spaces between them. Take read as an example.
To know whether it is the present or past tense of the verb- whether
it rhymes with red or reed- we need to see it in relation to some other
word (e.g., yesterday).
Because the meanings of words lie in the differences between them
and in the differences between them and the things they name, Derrida
suggests that all language is constituted by dijjerance, a word he has
coined that puns on two French words meaning "to differ'' and "to
defer'': words are the deferred presences of the things they "mean," and
their meaning is grounded in difference. Derrida, by the way, changes
thee in the French word dijjerence to an a in his neologism dijjerance; the
change, which can be sc:;en in writing but cannot be heard in spoken
French, is itself a playful, witty challenge to the notion that writing is
inferior or "fallen" speech.
In De Ia grammatologie [Of Grammatology] ( 1967) and Dissemina-
tion (1972), Derrida begins to redefine writing by deconstructing some
old definitions. In Dissemination, he traces logocentrism back to Plato,
who in the Phaedrus has Socrates condemn writing and who, in all the
great dialogues, powerfully postulates that metaphysical longing for
origins and ideals that permeates Western thought. ''What Derrida does
WHAT IS DECONSTRUCTION? 307
For these reasons, Derrida and his poststructuralist followers reject the
very notion of"linguistic competence" introduced by Noam Chomsky,
a structural linguist. The idea that there is a competent reading "gives a
privileged status to a particular set of rules of reading, ... granting pre-
eminence to certain conventions and excluding from the realm of
language all the truly creative and productive violations of those rules"
(Culler, Structuralist Poetics 241).
Poststructuralism calls into question assumptions made about lit-
erature by formalist, as well as by structuralist, critics. Formalism, or
the New Criticism as it was once commonly called, assumes a work of
literature to be a freestanding, self-contained object, its meanings found
in the complex network of relations that constitute its parts (images,
sounds, rhythms, allusions, etc.). To be sure, deconstruction is some-
what like formalism in several ways. Both the formalist and the decon-
structor focus on the literary text; neither is likely to interpret a poem or
a novel by relating it to events in the author's life, letters, historical
period, or even culture. And•formalists, long before deconstructors,
discovered counterpatterns of meaning in the same text. Formalists
find ambiguity and irony, deconstructors find contradiction and
undecidability.
Here, though, the two groups part ways. Formalists believe a
complete understanding of a literary work is possible, an understanding
in which even the ambiguities will fulfill a definite, meaningful function.
Poststructuralists celebrate the apparently limitless possibilities for the
production of meaning that develop when the language of the critic
enters the language of the text. Such a view is in direct opposition to the
formalist view that a work of literary art has organic unity (therefore,
structuralists would say, a "center''), if only we could find it.
Poststructuralists break with formalists, too, over an issue they
have debated with structuralists. The issue involves metaphor and
metonymy, two terms for different kinds of rhetorical tropes, or figures
of speech. Metonymy refers to a figure that is chosen to stand for
something that it is commonly associated with, or with which it hap-
pens to be contiguous or juxtaposed. When said to a waitress, "I'll have
the cold plate today'' is a metonymic figure of speech for "I'll eat the cold
food you're serving today." We refer to the food we want as a plate
simply because plates are what food happens to be served on and
because everyone understands that by "plate" we mean food. A meta-
phor, on the other hand, is a figure of speech that invokes a special,
intrinsic, nonarbitrary relationship with what it represents. When you
say you are blue, if you believe that there is an intrinsic, timeless likeness
310 DECONSTRUCTION
even dog and cat, are understood to be figures. It's just that we have used
some of them so long that we have forgotten how arbitrary and
metonymic they are. And, just as literal and figurative can exchange
properties, criticism can exchange properties with literature, in the
process coming to be seen not merely as a supplement - the second,
negative, and inferior term in the binary opposition creative writing!
literary criticism - but rather as an equally creative form of work.
Would we write if there were no critics- intelligent readers motivated
and able to make sense of what is written? Who, then, depends on
whom?
"It is not difficult to see the attractions" of deconstructive reading,
Jonathan Culler has commented. "Given that there is no ultimate or
absolute justification for any system or for the interpretations from it,"
the critic is free to value "the activity of interpretation itself, ... rather
than any results which might be obtained" (Structuralist Poetics 248).
Not everyone, however, has so readily seen the attractions of decon-
struction. Two eminent critics, M. H. Abrams and Wayne Booth, have
observed that a deconstructive reading "is plainly and simply parasitical"
on what Abrams calls "the obvious or univocal meaning" (Abrams 457-
58). In other words, there would be no deconstructors if critics didn't
already exist who can see and show central and definite meanings in
texts. Miller responded in an essay entitled ''The Critic as Host," in
which he not only deconstructed the oppositional hierarchy (host/
parasite), but also the two terms themselves, showing that each derives
from two definitions meaning nearly opposite things. Host means "hos-
pitable welcomer'' and "military horde." Parasite originally had a posi-
tive connotation; in Greek, parasitos meant "beside the grain" and
referred to a friendly guest. Finally, Miller suggests, the words parasite
and host are inseparable, depending on one another for their meaning in
a given work, much as do hosts and parasites, authors and critics,
structuralists and poststructuralists.
DECONSTRUCTION:
A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Deconstnlction, Poststnlcturalism,
and Stnlcturalism: Introductions,
Guides, and Surveys
Arac, Jonathan, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin, eds. The Yale
Critics: Deconstruction inAmerica. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,
314 DECONSfRUCTION
MICHAEL RAGUSSIS
Silence, Family Discourse, and Fiction
in The Scarlet Letter
ing of each of the family members. In this light the entire narrative of
The Scarlet Letter depends on whatever hinders or hastens the central
issue from the start- "Speak out the name!" (68). In ''The Recogni-
tion" no names are spoken out, no recognitions are made public, and
even those recognitions that occur are unrealized in the deepest sense.
When Dimmesdale asks Hester to speak the name of Pearl's father, for
example, the power of his voice seems to give him away to his child, "for
it directed its hitherto vacant gaze towards Mr. Dimmesdale, and held
up its little arms" (67). But the blood-bond is not publicly recognized.
It is instead painfully pictured in the infant's helpless gesture toward her
hidden father. The child unable to speak is at the mercy of adult
hypocrisy, false words, and names. In fact, the chapter closes with a
silencing of the child that, with Hester's silence over Dimmesdale and
Chillingworth, brings all four family members under the same tragic
cover of silence: ''The infant ... pierced the air with its wailings and
screams; she [Hester] strove to hush it, mechanically, but seemed
scarcely to sympathize with its trouble" (68).
''The Recognition" ends with mother and child once again disap-
pearing behind the "iron-clamped portal" (68) of the Puritan jail, but
now we understand the way in which the self is incarcerated within the
walls of its own silence. In the next chapter, ''The Interview," Haw-
thorne explicitly connects silence and symbolic imprisonment by reveal-
ing that Chillingworth possesses "the lock and key of her [Hester's]
silence" ( lO l). Hester is now multiply imprisoned, for she takes an
"oath" (73) not to speak out the name of her husband or recognize him
publicly. In this way she and Chillingworth subvert the power of
speech, using it in the service of silence. In his interview with Hester in
prison, then, Chillingworth replaces the blood-bond with the "secret
bond" not to speak, so that the suffocating prison of silence is reconfig-
ured in Chillingworth's command, "Breathe not'' (73). The silence
Hester keeps in order to protect her lover now merges with the silence
that prevents him from discovering the identity of his worst "enemy''
( 130). The family drama of The Scarlet Letter is played out between the
subverted recognitions I have just described and the recognition scene
that occurs between child and father at the novel's end. But I will show
that because the child is consistently hushed and (mis)educated in
speaking out by her silent mother and the repressive Puritan authorities,
and because the father, even when he speaks the truth, transforms it into
falsehood, the denouement of the tale is delayed.
The crying infant hushed mechanically by its mother becomes, in
the course of the tale, the child learning to speak, but in this apparent
MICHAEL RAGUSSIS 319
progression we learn only how the methods of silence are refined. When
Mr. Wilson asks Pearl who she is, he seems to be rephrasing, without
the sharp edge of command, the earlier declaration that Hester speak.
We soon see that the apparently open question is a disguised command
to answer by the book. The question of the child's identity is persistently
reshaped by an inevitable corollary: Mr. Wilson first asks Pearl ''who art
thou" and then, "Canst thou tell me, my child, who made thee?" (95,
96). It is essentially the same question asked of Hester, but now the
Puritan authorities want a different answer- not the earthly father, but
the Heavenly Father. In this way Mr. Wilson inadvertently contributes
to Hester's hiding of the father. The child is viewed as the product of a
mysterious and contradictory process in which her maker is either
spiritual or biological, or - worse - indiscriminately both. In Pearl's
case, both answers are incomprehensible; both fathers arc absent, invis-
ible, bodiless.
Pearl's refusal to name "the Heavenly Father'' as her maker is,
stated baldly, a refusal to be complicitous in the crimes of obfuscation
that threaten and undermine her identity. In short, she refuses to name
Him, the unnameable source of her being, the "Creator of all flesh" (98)
who is fleshlcss himself. The Heavenly Father here seems at once an
idealized and ironic double of the nameless father who neglects to name
Pearl, and who, after engendering her, disappears from the flesh. She
might as well invent her identity, since she already seems an invention, a
fanciful unreality: "the child finally announced that she had not been
made at all, but had been plucked by her mother off the bush of wild
roses, that grew by the prison-door'' (97). The fatherless and lawless
child appropriately provides her own genealogy according to no law we
can understand, as if she were a freak of n turc, either plucked from a
rosebush or engendered by one parent alone: "I am mother's child"
(95).
The mother questions the child's origin by repeating the pattern of
Mr. Wilson's questions: ''Tell me, then, what thou art, and who sent
thee hither?" (88). The mother's puzzlement over who made the
child - Pearl's own identity is consistently displaced in the search for
another's - reaches its furthest point when Hester questions even the
immediate and visible bond that is the child's only certain knowledge:
"Child, what art thou? ... Art thou my child, in very truth?" (87).
Hester actually disowns Pearl "half playfully'' in what must be a bad
joke: ''Thou art not my child! Thou art no Pearl of mine!" (88). Both
father and mother, then, deny Pearl her source. For these reasons the
name the mother bestows, the child's other source of certain identity,
320 DECONSTRUCTION
ing that it is her prerogative to ask and the mother's duty to answer, to
explain the scarlet letter: "Tell me, mother! ... Do thou tell me! ... It is
thou that must tell me!" (88). When Hester answers that she wears the
scarlet letter "for the sake of its gold thread," the narrator marks one of
those turning points in the text where the ostensible crime (the sexual
transgression) shrinks beside a more profound one: "In all the seven
bygone years, Hester Prynne had never before been false to the symbol
on her bosom.... [S]ome new evil had crept into it [her heart], or
some old one had never been expelled" ( 145).
The lie about the letter is so serious because it breaks the bond
through which the mother teaches the child the alphabet that articulates
her identity and her place in the human community. Hester is, in the
educative system I am describing, the teacher of the mother tongue, as
Pearl herself acknowledges: "It is the great letter A. Thou hast taught it
me in the hom-book" ( 143). Hester's refusal to inform the child of the
letter's greater, or at least special, significance makes the child fail her
examination in the simplest of categories, the ABCs of who she is.
Hester's final answer to Pearl's questions is no answer at all, but a
command to be silent, like the enforced silence under which the mother
herself suffers: "Hold thy tongue ... else I shall shut thee into the dark
closet!" (145). Silencing the child is equal to incarcerating her, or
returning her to the dark unknown from which she came, denying her
here and now, refusing her any existence at all. Not allowed her own
questions, kept from the meaning of the letter A, Pearl is reduced either
to a perverse silence (self-hushed with a vengeance) or to an incompre-
hensible language unable to articulate the burden of her pain and rage: a
"perversity ... closed her lips, or impelled her to speak words amiss ...
putting her finger in her mouth" (97); "If spoken to, she would not
speak again," or would rush forth ''with shrill, incoherent exclamations
that made her mother tremble, because they had so much the sound of a
witch's anathemas in some unknown tongue" (85). The mother's mysti-
fying language lessons produce a child who is alienated from the
community by her inability to speak what Hawthorne calls a "human
language" (128).
The mother's lie about the letter teases Pearl to the quick because,
as Hawthorne insists, the child is in fact "the scarlet letter endowed with
life!" (90). Pearl is a baffling linguistic figure come alive: "She had been
offered to the world, these seven years past, as the living hieroglyPhic, in
which was revealed the secret they so darkly sought to hide, - all
written in this symbol, - all plainly manifest, - had there been a
prophet or magician skilled to read the character of flame!" (162). The
322 DECONSTRUCTION
parent thither!" (99). For the mother, however, Pearl is also a constant
reminder of her sin and shame; just as for the father who fears he will be
traced in his child's features, Pearl is the only visible clue that links him
to his crime. Because the child - like the scarlet letter - is the public
sign of their most private acts, the parents try to obscure its meaning by
hushing it or simply denying that it is their own. Such acts become
criminal when we realize the way in which signification becomes hu-
man, the way in which the child is the letter endowed with life.
Pearl's multiple reflections and her many voices lead the narrator to
remark, "in this one child there were many children" (82). I have already
suggested one basis for understanding such a remark: the child is
divided from herself. Now I wish to suggest that the child, the character
at the center of the text, is multiple insofar as she represents a reflection
of all the characters in The Scarlet Letter. For example, the child, reduced
to a mere ghostly symbol of itself (like the image of Pearl in the brook,
or the ghostly disembodiments that Dimmesdale and Hester undergo),
is a helpless creature in another's control- denied meaning by others,
mastered by another's master-words and silences, living in fear of the
incomprehensibility of another. At the same time, the process of conju-
ration, like that of engendering, shows us that the creator's magic
backfires, so that the child becomes a figure of frightening power. The
control we think we exert over another often produces a new, incompre-
hensible, and uncontrollable intelligence. Hence Pearl, a "deadly sym-
bol" (165), represents the letter that killeth. Pearl's mere gaze at the
letter on her mother's breast, for example, is "like the stroke of sudden
death" (87). In the person of the child the letter becomes a vengeful
literalism that strikes through guise and deceit. For the child, despite all
the methods of parental and societal control exerted over her, represents
an alien other to be feared, and one who - though we may deny it -
we in fact produce ourselves, but fail to control.
Moving from Pearl's fate to Dimmesdale's, we see the way in which
the child owns him as much as he owns her, for the father cannot be
himself until he acknowledges his child. Dimmesdale's identity, like
Pearl's, rests on a linguistic deadlock that accounts for the duration of
the tale. On the one hand, neither Pearl's nor Chillingworth's guesses,
nor Hester's betrayal of Dimmesdale's name, will solve the riddle of the
father's identity. The father must speak for himself. On the other hand,
as I will show, the fluctuation of Dimmesdale's life between two
extreme linguistic poles - between asking another to speak for him,
and speaking for another - makes solving the riddle impossible. I take
this characteristic of Dimmesdale's speech to be the central symptom of
DECONSTRUCTION
2 See Roman Jakobson's influential essay "Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Rus-
sian Verb," Selected Writings, vol. 2 (The Hague: Mouton, 1971) 130-47. Without using
the term "shifter," R. D. Laing suggests how a single member of the family, playing a
variety of roles, can be renamed as "granddaughter, daughter, sister, wife, mother,
grandmother, niece, cousin, etc. etc." The Politics of the Family and Other Essays (New
York: Vintage, 1972) 54.
328 DECONSTRUCTION
itself a historical artifact, not of the Puritan age that the novel describes,
but rather of the puritanical nineteenth-century period that Hawthorne
lived and wrote in. Conversely, the new historicist argues, the histories
of Boston that Hawthorne relied on- early nineteenth-century studies
such as Caleb Snow's History of Boston - are not without their own
fictional dimension, for they reflect the biases of the age and culture in
which they were written.
Thus, we might begin to define the new historicism by saying that
it is a critical movement interested in providing a "thick description" of
the historical contexts ofliterature. In situating a historical romance like
The Scarlet Letter historically, the critic needs to be aware of the history
of the period in which the novel is set, of the history of the period in
which the novel was produced, and even of the historical contexts in
which we now read and interpret it, for we are no less without historical
biases than were Hawthorne, Caleb Snow, or the Puritan John Wil-
son - who appears in The Scarlet Letter as a character.
To venture beyond the beginning of a definition of the new
historicism is to head down a path fraught with difficulties. One of the
most recent developments in contemporary theory, the new historicism
is still evolving. Enough of its contours have come into focus for us to
realize that it exists and deserves a name, but any definition of the new
historicism is bound to be somewhat fuzzy, like a partially developed
photographic image. Some individual critics that we may label new
historicist may also be deconstructors, or feminists, or Marxists. Some
would deny that the others are even writing the new kind of historical
criticism.
All of them, though, share the conviction that, somewhere along
the way, something important was lost from literary studies: historical
consciousness. Poems and novels came to be seen in isolation, as urnlike
objects of precious beauty. The new historicists, whatever their differ-
ences and however defined, want us to see that even the most urnlike
poems are caught in a web of historical conditions, relationships, and
influences. In an essay on "The Historical Necessity for- and Difficul-
ties with - New Historical Analysis in Introductory Literature
Courses" ( 1987), Brook Thomas suggests that discussions of Keats's
"Ode on a Grecian Urn" might begin with questions such as the
following: Where would Keats have seen such an urn? How did a
Grecian urn end up in a museum in England? Some very important
historical and political realities, Thomas suggests, lie behind and inform
Keats's definitions of art, truth, beauty, the past, and timelessness. They
332 THE NEW HISTORICISM
be purely and objectively known. They are less likely to see history as
linear and progressive, as something developing toward the present.
& the word "sociohistorical" also suggests, the new historicists
view history as a social science and the social sciences as being properly
historical. McGann most often alludes to sociology when discussing the
future of literary studies. "A sociological poetics must be recognized not
only as relevant to the analysis of poetry, but in fact as central to the
analysis" (Inflections 62). Lindenberger cites anthropology as particularly
useful in the new historical analysis of literature, especially anthropol-
ogy as practiced by Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz. Geertz, who has
related theatrical traditions in nineteenth-century Bali to forms of politi-
cal organization that developed during the same period, has influenced
some of the most important critics writing the new kind of historical
criticism. Due in large part to Geertz's influence, new historicists such as
Stephen Greenblatt have asserted that literature is not a sphere apart or
distinct from the history that is relevant to it. That is what old historical
criticism tended to do, to present history as information you needed to
know before you could fully appreciate the separate world of art. Thus
the new historicists have discarded old distinctions between literature,
history, and the social sciences, while blurring other boundaries. They
have erased the line dividing historical and literary materials, showing
that the production of one of Shakespeare's plays was a political act and
that the coronation of Elizabeth I was carried out with the same care for
staging and symbol lavished on a work of dramatic art.
In addition to breaking down barriers that separate literature and
history, history and the social sciences, new historicists have reminded
us that it is treacherously difficult to reconstruct the past as it really
was - rather than as we have been conditioned by our own place and
time to believe that it was. And they know that the job is utterly
impossible for anyone who is unaware of the difficulty and of the nature
of his or her own historical vantage point. "Historical criticism can no
longer make any part of [its] sweeping picture unselfconsciously, or
treat any of its details in an untheorized way," McGann wrote in 1985
(Historical Studies 11). "Unselfconsciously" and "untheorized" are key
words here; when the new historicist critics of literature describe a
historical change, they are highly conscious of, and even likely to
discuss, the theory of historical change that informs their account. They
know that the changes they happen to see and describe are the ones that
their theory of change allows or helps them to see and describe. And
they know, too, that their theory of change is historically determined.
They seek to minimize the distortion inherent in their perceptions and
334 THE NEW HISTORICISM
All three of the critics whose recent writings on the so-called back-
to-history movement have been quoted thus far - Hirsch, Linden-
berger, and McGann- mention the name of the late Michel Foucault.
As much an archaeologist as a historian and as much a philosopher as
either, Foucault in his writings brought together incidents and phe-
nomena from areas of inquiry and orders of life that we normally regard
as unconnected. As much as anyone, he encouraged the new historicist
critic of literature outwardly to redefine the bounqaries of historical
inquiry.
Foucault's views of history were influenced by Friedrich Nietz-
sche's concept of a wirkliche ("real" or "true") history that is neither
melioristic nor metaphysical. Foucault, like Nietzsche, didn't under-
stand history as development, as a forward movement toward the
present. Neither did he view history as an abstraction, idea, or ideal, as
something that began "In the beginning'' and that will come to THE
END, a moment of definite closure, a Day of Judgment. In his own
words, Foucault "abandoned [the old history's] attempts to understand
events in terms of . . . some great evolutionary process" (Discipline and
Punish 129). He warned new historians to be aware of the fact that
investigators are themselves "situated." It is difficult, he reminded them,
to see present cultural practices critically from within them, and on
account of the same cultural practices, it is almost impossible to enter
bygone ages. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975),
Foucault admitted that his own interest in the past was fueled by a
passion to write the history of the present.
Like Marx, Foucault saw history in terms of power, but his view of
power owed more perhaps to Nietzsche than to Marx. Foucault seldom
viewed power as a repressive force. Certainly, he did not view it as a tool
of conspiracy used by one specific individual or institution against
another. Rather, power represents a whole complex of forces; it is that
which produces what happens. Thus, even a tyrannical aristocrat does
not simply wield power, because he is formed and empowered by
discourses and practices that constitute power. Viewed by Foucault,
power is "positive and productive," not "represssive" and "prohibitive"
(Smart 63). Furthermore, no historical event, accordi~g to Foucault,
has a single cause; rather, it is intricately connected with a vast web of
economic, social, and political factors.
WHAT IS THE NEW HISTORICISM? 335
It is equally useful to suggest that the debate over the sources of the
movement, the differences of opinion about Foucault, and even my own
need to assert his importance may be historically contingent; that is to
say, they may all result from the very newness of the new historicism
itself. New intellectual movements often cannot be summed up or
represented by a key figure, any more than they can easily be summed
up or represented by an introduction or a single essay. They respond to
disparate influences and almost inevitably include thinkers who repre-
sent a wide range of backgrounds. Like movements that are disintegrat-
ing, new movements embrace a broad spectrum of opinions and
positions.
But just as differences within a new school of criticism cannot be
overl00ked, neither should they be exaggerated, since it is the similarity
among a number of different approaches that makes us aware of a new
movement under way. Greenblatt, Hirsch, McGann, and Thomas all
started with the assumption that works of literature are simultaneously
influenced by and influencing reality, broadly defined. Thus, whatever
their disagreements, they share a belief in referentiality - a belief that
literature refers to and is referred to by things outside itself- that is
fainter in the works of formalist, poststructuralist, and even reader-
response critics. They believe with Greenblatt that the "central con-
cerns" of criticism "should prevent it from permanently sealing off one
type of discourse from another or decisively separating works of art
from the minds and lives of their creators and their audiences" (5).
McGann, in his introduction to Historical Studies and Literary
Criticism, turns referentiality into a rallying cry:
What will not be found in these essays ... is the assumption, so
common in text-centered studies of every type, that literary works
are self-enclosed verbal constructs, or looped intertextual fields of
autonomous signifiers and signifieds. In these essays, the question
of referentiality is once again brought to the fore. (3)
In "Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism," he outlines
a program for those who have rallied to the cry. These procedures,
which he claims are "practical derivatives of the Bakhtin school," assume
that historicist critics, who must be interested in a work's point of origin
and in its point of reception, will understand the former by studying
biography and bibliography. (Did Hawthorne begin The Scarlet Letter
before or after being dismissed as Surveyor of the Salem Custom
House? Why did he publish his essay "The Custom-House" as the
introduction to The Scarlet Letter?) After mastering these details, the
THE NEW HISfORICISM
critic must then consider the expressed intentions of the author, be-
cause, if printed, these intentions have also modified the developing
history of the work. Next, the new historicist must learn the history of
the work's reception, as that body of opinion has become part of the
platform on which we are situated when we study the book. Finally,
Mt:Gann urges the new historicist critic to point toward the future,
toward his or her own audience, defining for its members the aims and
limits of the critical project and injecting the analysis with a degree of
self-consciousness that alone can give it credibility (Inflections 62).
Several of the critics who have analyzed The Scarlet Letter from a
new historicist perspective have focused on "romance," the term Haw-
thorne applied to The Scarlet Letter at what McGann would call its point
of origin. In fact, the 1850 edition was subtitled A Romance. Michael
Davitt Bell, in "Arts of Deception: Hawthorne, 'Romance,' and The
Scarlet Letter," takes issue with critics like Perry Miller, Joel Porte, and
Richard Chase- critics who in the 1950s and 1960s suggested rqat by
writing a romance, Hawthorne was placing himself in the mainstream
of American literary tradition, a tradition in which romance has always
figured prominently. First of all, Bell points out, the term "romance"
meant something different in Hawthorne's day from what it meant in
the mid-twentieth century; it was "less a neutral generic label than a
revolutionary, or at least antisocial slogan. To identify oneself as a
romancer was ... to set oneself in opposition to the most basic norms of
society: reason, fact, and 'real' business." Thus, a term that meant one
thing at the novel's point of origin meant something different at Chase's
point of reception. But Bell shows that the problem is even more
complex. Hawthorne was himself in the process of surreptitiously
redefining romance (even as critics like Bell are doing, openly and self-
consciously, today). Before we can analyze The Scarlet Letter as a
romance, Bell suggests, we first need to provide a thick description of
what that term meant, came to mean, and means to us now.
Most of the new historicist analyses of the novel, however, have
concentrated not on romance - what it means and meant - but more
generally on the historical period during which The Scarlet Letter was
produced. They have argued that the novel, though set in seventeenth-
century America, in fact reflects the concerns and biases - in short, the
dominant ideology - of the author's nineteenth-century American cul-
ture. The Puritan past in which the novel is set is thus a kind of disguise,
or screen, that hides the novel's true agenda. According to Jonathan
Arac's essay "The Politics of The Scarlet Letter' (1986), that agenda is to
WHAT IS THE NEW HISTORICISM? 339
When Hester Prynne is led from the prison by the beadle who cries,
"Make way, good people, make way, in the King's name," less than
a month has passed since Charles's Puritan Parliament had sent him
what amounted to a declaration of war .... By the final scenes of
the novel, when Arthur is deciding to die as a martyr, Charles I has
just been beheaded. (52-53)
Arguing that "a strong reactionary spirit underlies the work," Reynolds
proved The Scarlet Letter to be an antirevolutionary text: "when Hester
340 THE NEW HISTORICISM
Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Paul Rabinow. Michel Foucault: Beyond Struc-
turalism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.
Sheridan, Alan. Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth. New York: Tavis-
tock, 1980.
Smart, Barry. Michel Foucault. New York: Horwood and Tavistock,
1985.
SACVAN BERCOVITCH
Hawthorne's A-Morality of Compromise
the Puritan exodus to the New World, a revolution for liberty that
offered a model of progress by harnessing the energies of radicalism to
the process of settlement, expansion, and consolidation. The Old World
counterpart was the Puritan revolution ( 1642-49) that failed- a revo-
lution prefigured (in Hawthorne's view) by the "mobocracies" of the
past and itself a prefiguration of the failed continental upheavals of the
next two centuries, including those perpetrated by "the terrorists of
France" in 1789, 1830, and 1848 (The Scarlet Letter 59).
Hawthorne suggests the reasons for failure in an essay he wrote on
Oliver Cromwell. When Oliver was a child, he writes, a "huge ape,
which was kept in the family, snatched up little Noll in his fore-paws,
and clambered with him to the roof of the house .... The event was
afterwards considered an omen that Noll would reach a very elevated
station in the world" ("Oliver Cromwell" 252). It is a parable for the
embittered young radical whose clambering "enthusiasm of thought''
( 134) Hawthorne details midway through The Scarlet Letter (shortly
after his reference to the "terrorists of France"):
[This] was an age in which the human intellect, newly emanci-
pated, had taken a more active and a wider range than for many
centuries before. Men of the sword had overthrown nobles and
kings. Men bolder than these had overthrown and rearranged -
not actually, but within the sphere of theory, which was their most
real abode -the whole system of ancient prejudice, wherewith was
linked much of ancient principle. Hester Prynne imbibed this
spirit. She assumed a freedom of speculation, then common
enough on the other side of the Atlantic, but which our forefathers,
had they known of it, would have held to be a deadlier crime than
that stigmatized by the scarlet letter. In her lonesome cottage, by
the sea-shore, thoughts visited her, such as dared to enter no other
dwelling in New England; shadowy guests ... perilous as demons.
(133)
The key word is forefathers, which carries the entire force of the ideologi-
cal contrast I mentioned between upheaval in the Old World and
progress in the New. And it applies as such directly to what Hawthorne
recalled in 1852 as the era of ''The Compromise" (Hawthorne, Pierce
109-10). 1 His return to Puritan New England in The Scarlet Letter
joins two historical time frames: first, the fictional time frame,
1The most incisive use of the biography in this regard is Jonathan Arac, ''The Politics
of The Scarlet Letter," Ideology and Classic American Literature, cd. Sacvan Bercovitch and
Myra Jehlen (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986) 247-66. I am much indebted to Arac's
essay.
THE NEW HISTORICISM
1642-49, with its implied contrast between Cromwell's revolt and the
American Puritan venture in "Utopia" (53); second, the autho-
rial time frame, 1848-52, with its ominous explosion of conflict
at home and abroad.
The "red year Forty-Eight," as Melville termed it, brought "the
portent and the fact of war, I And terror that into hate subsides." He was
referring to the series of revolutions from which Europe's kings "fled
like the gods" (although by 1852 "even as the gods I ... return they
made; and sate I And fortified their strong abodes") (Melville, Claret
281, 157). But he might have been referring as well to what New
England conservatives considered an ominous tendency toward con-
frontation following the victory of the Whigs. Polk's presidency, 1844-
48, was a high point of Jacksonian chauvinism: Mexico had been
defeated, the Oregon Territory appropriated (along with Nevada, New
Mexico, Colorado, and parts of Utah), gold discovered in California,
and Florida, Texas, Iowa, and Wisconsin admitted to the Union. Then,
in 1848, the unexpected defeat of Young Hickory called attention to
long-festering internal divisions. We can see in retrospect how both
tendencies, toward expansion and toward conflict, expressed the same
process of ideological consolidation. But for a good many of the
disempowered Democrats the tendency toward conflict evoked what
newspapers called the "terrors of a European conflagration." It is no
accident that Hawthorne connected the revolutions abroad with his loss
of tenure at the Salem Custom House. As Larry J. Reynolds has recently
demonstrated, Hawthorne links both sets of events in the alternative
title that he offers for the novel, "PoSTHUMous PAPERS OF A DECAPI-
TATED SuRVEYoR" (52), and the political innuendos here are expanded
throughout ''The Custom-House" and the novel at large in recurrent
imagery of the 1848-49 revolutions, including allusions to scaffold and
guillotine. 2
Eighteen-forty-eight, then, opens the novel's authorial time frame.
Historians have called it the Year of the Red Scare: Chartist agitation in
England, the First Paris Commune, The Communist Manifesto, and
widespread revolt in Belgium, Germany, Poland, Austria, Italy, Czecho-
slovakia, and Hungary. After a brief period of euphoria, when it seemed
events were proving that "our country leads the world," public opinion
2 Reynolds first explored the relationship between The Scarlet Letter and European
revolutions in "The Scarlet Letter and Revolutions Abroad," an article published in
Amerium Literature 57 (1985): 44-67. He has recently expanded his research into a
valuable book-length study, European Ref'Olutions and the Amerium Literary RentU.sstmce
(New Haven: Yale UP, 1988).
SACVAN BERCOVITCH 349
turned decisively against the radicals. Those who did the turning ex-
pressed disillusionment in many ways, but common to all was the
contrast between Europe's class warfare and the war for American
independence. By fall 1848, Evert Duyckinck reported that New
Yorkers associated the "agitation"' with "recollections of Robespierre"
(Reynolds 49); shortly after, George Bancroft wrote that Boston was
"frightened out of its wits" (White 121); in Paris, Emerson wondered
whether the revolution was worth the trees it had cost to build the
barricades; by early 1849 American conservatives writing in the New
York Courier and Inquirer concluded that the European soil was not
encouraging to the growth of republics. Worse still, they had already
observed the incipient effect in America itself of European conflict -
"Communism, Socialism, Pillage, Murder, Anarchy, and the Guillotine
vs. Law and Order, Family and Property'' (14 July 1848: 1). George
Bancroft, who at first tried to calm his frightened Boston friends -
who in fact hoped (as he wrote to Secretary of State James Buchanan)
that "the echo of American Democracy ... from France, and Austria,
and Prussia and all Old Germany ... [would] stir up the hearts of the
American people to new achievement" - came increasingly to concede
that events were tending in just the opposite direction: geographically,
from the Old World to the New, and morally, from liberty to license
(Bancroft 31, 33).
License took many forms, as these antebellum Jeremiahs detailed
its invasion of America. Hawthorne may be said to condense their
complaints in his overview of Hester's nihilism, just before her forest
meeting with Dimmesdale:
The regions to which Hawthorne refers had long been open territory to
European radicals: "terrorists of France" as well as England (from
Puritan Ranters to the Chartists ofl848). Even there, however, women
had characteristically restrained themselves, because (Hawthorne ex-
plains) they intuited that to indulge such "tendency to speculation" -
350 THE NEW HISTORICISM
most radically American among them was also clearest about ideological
parameters. What made "European revolution" unfit for America, ac-
cording to Emerson, what made it antithetical to "true democracy," was
the threat it posed to the tenets of free enterprise. It was not so much the
violence that troubled Emerson, though he lamented that "in France,
'fraternity' [and] 'equality' ... are names for assassination" (Complete
Works 82). Nor was it the burdens of political engagement, though he
noted in April 1848, concerning talk of "a Chartist revolution on
Monday next, and an Irish revolution the following week," that the
scholar's "kingdom is at once over & under these perturbed regions"
(journals 310). Emerson's complaints struck through what he consid-
ered "these political masks" to reveal the "metaphysical evils" beyond:
This tin trumpet of a French Phalanstery [sounds] and the news-
boys throw up their caps & cry, Egotism is exploded; now for
Communism! But all that is valuable in the Phalanstery comes of
individualism.... For the matter of Socialism, there are no oracles.
The oracle is dumb. When we would pronounce anything truly of
man, we retreat instantly on the individual.
We are authorized to say much on the destinies of one,
nothing on those of many. In the question of Socialism ... one has
only this guidance. You shall not so arrange property as to remove
the motive to industry. If you refuse rent & interest, you make all
men idle & immoral. As to the poor, a vast proportion have made
themselves so, and in any new arrangement will only prove a
burden on the state ....
When men feel & say, "Those men occupy my place," the
revolution is near. But I never feel that any men occupy my place;
but that the reason I do not have what I wish is, that I want the
faculty which entitles. All spiritual or real power makes its own
place. Revolutions of violence then are scrambles merely. (journals
10: 154, 310, 312, 318).
Even Walt Whitman, Barnburner delegate, Chartist sympathizer,
and Free Soiler, joined in elaborating this symbolic opposition between
European and American revolutions. In 1847 Whitman had gone so far
as to defend the French republican Reign of Terror, but after 1849,
when the attack on property and individualism became an American
issue, he steadily "recoiled." All that remains in Leaves of Grass of the
Spirit of '48 (when "like lightning Europe le'pt forth") is
a Shape,
Vague as the night, draped interminably, head front and form,
in scarlet folds,
352 THE NEW HISTORICISM
were fragmenting the Union and subverting the fathers' legacy- and
in his Second Inaugural Address of 1865, reviewing the causes of the
Civil War, he described "American slavery" as "one of those offenses
which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having
continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove"
(Lincoln 8: 333).
The difference between Lincoln's counsel for reconciliation and
Hester's for patience is the turn of a certain circular symbolic logic. The
Northern rhetoric of the Civil War represents negation as affirmation,
the destined union made manifest in violence. Hawthorne's rhetoric
builds on affirmation by negation - manifest inaction justified by
national destiny. From this perspective, it is worth recalling the enor-
mous force of the negative imperative in The Scarlet Letter. Negation is
far more than a form of moral, political, and aesthetic control; it is the
very ground of Hawthorne's strategy of process as gradualism, the
antidialectic through which he absorbs the radical energies of history
into the polar oppositions of symbolic interpretation. ''The scarlet letter
had not done its office": negation leads us forward toward that deeper
significance which Hawthorne promises at the start - that comprehen-
sive "deep meaning ... most worthy of interpretation" (43)- pre-
cisely by evoking the fear of process run amuck, pluralism fragmenting
into diversity, disharmony, discontinuity, chaos.
That is the overt purpose of Hawthorne's imperative. But the effect
goes further than that. Hawthorne's mode of negation may almost be
said to take on a counterdynamic of its own, as though in equal and
opposite reaction to the fear of uncontrolled process. Negation gathers
such momentum in the course of the novel that it threatens the very
process it is designed to guide. Not doing its office nearly comes to
define the function of the symbol. When after "seven miserable years"
(176) Hester at last finds the strength to discard the A, it takes all of
Hawthorne's resources (providence, Pearl, Dimmesdale, nature itself)
to have her restore it against her will. And even so the restoration serves
at first to highlight the letter's negative effects. As she awaits her
moment of flight with Dimmesdale, Hester stands alone in the market-
place with a "frozen calmness" (176), her face a death mask, and because
ofthat with all the radical vitality for which we have come to admire her:
After sustaining the gaze of the multitude through seven miserable
years as a necessity, a penance, and something which it was a stem
religion to endure, she now, for one last time more, encountered
it freely and voluntarily, in order to convert what had so long
been agony into a kind of triumph. "Look your last on the scarlet
356 THE NEW HISTORICISM
letter and its wearer!"- the people's victim and life-long bond-
slave, as they fancied her, might say to them. "Yet a little while, and
she will be beyond your reach! A few hours longer, and the deep,
mysterious ocean will qJJench and hide for ever the symbol which
ye have caused to bum upon her bosom!" (176)
That is why Hawthorne must not only bring her back but also force
her to resume that A "freely and voluntarily." It is as though, under
pressure of her resistance, the letter were slipping out of his grasp,
losing its efficacy as an agent of reconciliation. In terms of what I have
called the novel's latent context, the impending Civil War, the antino-
mies in this passage ("people" and "victim," "freely" and "bond-slave")
assume an explosive force, an almost irrepressible tendency toward
confrontation that endangers both symbolic process and narrative clo-
sure. That tendency may be seen as the political aftereffect of the
rhetoric of liberty, in which "slavery" served ambiguously to denote all
forms of bondage, "private or public, civil or political" (Bailyn 232-
33). More directly, it is the rhetorical counterpart to what Edmund
Morgan, describing the tensions in antebellum politics, termed "Ameri-
can freedom/American slavery'' (passim). It is a testament to Haw-
thorne's sensitivity to those rhetorical-political tensions that he allowed
the danger to surface, that indeed he played it out almost to the point of
no return. It is a testament to the resilience of the ideology that it drew
on that he could nonetheless resume process and as it were rescue the
symbol from the ocean's depths, by simply, sweepingly, assuming an
interpretive consensus.
The silence surrounding Hester's final conversion to the letter is
clearly deliberate on Hawthorne's part. It mystifies Hester's choice by
forcing us to represent it through the act of interpretation. Having
given us ample directives about how to understand the ways in which
the letter had not done its office, Hawthorne now depends on us to
recognize- freely and voluntarily, for his method depends on his
seeming not to impose meaning (as in his remark that "the scarlet letter
had not done its office") - the need for Hester's return. In effect, he
invites us to participate in a free enterprise democracy of symbol
making. Its cultural model is the ambiguity universalized in the Declara-
tion of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident." The
silent problematic of "we" may be inferred from Pip's revelation of the
plural meanings of the doubloon in Moby Dick- "I look, you look, he
looks, we look, ye look, they look"- especially if we remember, as Pip
seems not to, that the grammatical declension masks a social hierarchy,
tkscending from the captain's I to the shipstokers' they. The silenced
SACVAN BERCOVITCH 357
WORKS CITED
Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.
Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard UP, 1967.
Bancroft, George. Life and Letters. Ed. Mark A. DeWolfe Howe. Vol. 2.
New York: Scribner's, 1908. 2 vols.
Bercovitch, Sacvan. ''The A-Politics of Ambiguity in The Scarlet Letter."
New Literary History 19 (1988): 629-54.
Douglas, Ann. The Feminization ofAmerican Culture. New York:
Knopf, 1977.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Complete Works. Ed. Edward Waldo Emerson.
Vol. 5. Boston: Houghton, 1903--04. 12 vols.
--.Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks. Ed. Merton M. Sealts, Jr.
Vol. 10. Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard UP, 1973. 16 vols.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. "Endicott and the Red Cross." Tales and
Sketches. Ed. Roy Harvey Pearce. New York: Library of America,
1982. 542-48.
--.Life ofFranklin Pierce. Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1852.
--."Oliver Cromwell." True Storiesfrom History and Biography. Ed.
William Charvat et al. Vol. 6 of the Centenary Edition. Columbus:
Ohio State UP, 1972. 251-60.
Lincoln, Abraham. "Second Inaugural Address." Collected Works. Ed.
Roy P. Basler. Vol. 8. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1953. 20 vols.
Matthiessen, F. 0. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age
ofEmerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford UP, 1941.
Melville, Herman. Clare/: A Poem and PilgrimatJe in the Holy Land. Ed.
Walter E. Bezanson. New York: Hendricks, 1960.
THE NEW HISfORICISM
Most terms have been glossed parenthetically where they first appear in the
text. Mainly, the glossary lists terms that are too complex to define in a phrase or
a sentence or two. A few of the terms listed are discussed at greater length
elsewhere ("deconstruction," for instance); these terms are defined succinctly
and a page reference to the longer discussion is provided.
sponse, the author's stated intentions, or parallels between the text and historical
contexts (such as the author's life), formalists concentrate on the relationships
within the text that give it its own distinctive character or form. Special attention
is paid to repetition, particularly of images or symbols, but also of sound effects
and rhythms in poetry.
Because of the importance placed on close analysis and the stress on the text
as a carefully crafted, orderly object containing observable formal patterns,
formalism has often been seen as an attack on Romanticism and impressionism,·
particularly impressionistic criticism. It has sometimes even been called an
"objective" approach to literature. Formalists are more likely than certain other
critics to believe and say that the meaning of a text can be known objectively.
For instance, reader-response critics see meaning as a function either of each
reader's experience or of the norms that govern a particular "interpretive
community'' and deconstructors argue that texts mean opposite things at the
same time.
Formalism was originally based on essays written during the 1920s and
1930s by T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, and William Empson. It was significantly
developed later by a group of American poets and critics, including R. P.
Blackmur, Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn
Warren, and William K. Wimsatt. Although we associate formalism with certain
principles and terms (such as the "Affective Fallacy'' and the "Intentional
Fallacy'' as defined by Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley), formalists were
trying to make a cultural statement rather than establish a critical dogma.
Generally Southern, religious, and culturally conservative, they advocated the
inherent value of literary works (particularly of literary works regarded as
beautiful art objects) because they were sick of the growing ugliness of modem
life and contemporary events. Some recent theorists even suggested that the
rising popularity of formalism after World War II was a feature of American
isolationism, the formalist tendency to isolate literature from biography and
history being a manifestation of the American fatigue with wider involvements.
See also: Affective Fallacy, Authorial Intention, Deconstruction, Reader-
Response Criticism, Symbol.
GAPS This term, used mainly by reader-response critics familiar with the
theories of Wolfgang Iser, refers to "blanks" in texts that must be filled in by
readers. A gap may be said to exist whenever a reader perceives something to be
missing between words, sentences, paragraphs, stanzas, or chapters. Readers
respond to gaps actively and creatively, explaining apparent inconsistencies in
point of view, accounting for jumps in chronology, speculatively supplying
information missing from plots, and resolving problems or is.;ues left ambigu-
ous or "indeterminate" in the text.
Critics sometimes speak as if a gap exists in a text; a gap is, of course, to
some extent a product of the reader's perceptions. Different readers may find
gaps in different texts and different gaps in the same text. Furthermore, they
may fill these gaps in different ways, which is why, a reader-response critic
might argue, works are interpreted in different ways.
Although the concept of the gap has been used mainly by reader-response
critics to explain what makes reading an active, interactive process, it has also
been used by critics who, though taking other theoretical approaches, are
GLOSSARY
work only emerges intertextually, that is, within the context provided by other
works. But there has been a reaction, too, against this type of intertextual
criticism. Some new historicist critics suggested that literary history is itself too
narrow a context and that works should be interpreted in light of a larger set of
cultural contexts.
There is, however, a broader definition of intertextuality, one that refers to
the relationship between works of literature and a wide range of narratives and
discourses that we don't usually consider literary. Thus defined, intertextuality
could be used by a new historicist to refer to the significant interconnectedness
between a literary text and nonliterary discussions of or discourses about
contemporary culture. Or it could be used by a poststructuralist to suggest
that a work can only be recognized and read within a vast field of signs and
tropes that is like a text and that makes any single text self-contradictory and
"undecidable."
See also: Discourse, Formalism, Narrative, New Historicism, Poststructur-
alism, Trope.
METAPHOR The representation of one thing by another related or
similar thing. The image (or activity or concept) used to represent or "figure"
something else is known as the ''vehicle" of the metaphor; the thing represented
is called the "tenor." In other words, the vehicle is what we substitute for the
tenor. The relationship between vehicle and tenor can provide much additional
meaning. Thus, instead of saying, "Last night I read a book," we might say,
"Last night I plowed through a book." "Plowed through" (or the activity of
plowing) is the vehicle of our metaphor; "read" (or the act of reading) is the
tenor, the thing being figured. The increment in meaning through metaphor is
fairly obvious. Our audience knows not only that we read but also how we read,
because to read a book in the way that a plow rips through earth is surely to read
in a relentless, unreflective way. Note that in the sentence above a new meta-
phor - "rips through" - has been used to explain an old one. This serves
(which is a metaphor) as an example of just how thick (another metaphor)
language is with metaphors!
Metaphor is a kind of"trope" (literally, a "turning," i.e., a figure that alters
or "turns" the meaning of a word or phrase). Other tropes include allegory,
conceit, metonymy, personification, simile, symbol, and synecdoche. Tradition-
ally, metaphor and symbol have been viewed as the principal tropes; minor
tropes have been categorized as types of these two major ones. Similes, for
instance, are usually defined as simple metaphors that usually employ "like" or
"as" and state the tenor outright, as in "My love is like a red, red rose."
Synecdoche involves a vehicle that is a part of the tenor, as in "I see a sail"
meaning "I see a boat." Metonymy is viewed as a metaphor involving two terms
commonly if arbitrarily associated with (but not fundamentally or intrinsically
related to) each other. Recently, however, deconstructors such as Paul de Man
and J. Hillis Miller have questioned the "privilege" granted to metaphor and the
metaphor/metonymy distinction or "opposition." They have suggested that all
metaphors are really metonyms and that all figuration is arbitrary.
See also: Deconstruction, Metonymy, Oppositions, Symbol.
METONYMY The representation of one thing by another that is com-
monly and often physically associated with it. To refer to a writer's handwriting
as his or her "hand" is to use a metonymic "figure" or "trope." The image or
GLOSSARY
thing used to represent something else is known as the ''vehicle" of the met-
onym; the thing represented is called the "tenor."
Like other tropes (such as metaphor), metonymy involves the replacement
of one word or phrase by another. Liquor may be referred to as "the bottle," a
monarch as "the crown." Narrowly defined, the vehicle of a metonym is
arbitrarily, not intrinsically, associated with the tenor. In other words, the bottle
just happens to be what liquor is stored in and poured from in our culture. The
hand may be involved in the production of handwriting, but so are the brain and
the pen. There is no special, intrinsic likeness between a crown and a monarch;
it's just that crowns traditionally sit on monarchs' heads and not on the heads of
university professors. More broadly, "metonym" and "metonymy'' have been
used by recent critics to refer to a wide range of figures and tropes. Deconstruc-
tors have questioned the distinction between metaphor and metonymy.
See also: Deconstruction, Metaphor, Trope.
NARRATIVE A story or a telling of a story, or an account of a situation
or of events. A novel and a biography of a novelist are both narratives, as are
Freud's case histories.
Some critics use the word "narrative" even more generally; Brook Thomas,
a new historicist, has critiqued "narratives of human history that neglect the role
human labor has played."
NEW CRITICISM See Formalism.
NEW HISTORICISM One of the most recent developments in con-
temporary critical theory, its practitioners share certain convictions, the major
ones being that literary critics need to develop a high degree of historical
consciousness and that literature should not be viewed apart from other human
creations, artistic or otherwise. See "What Is the New Historicism?" page 330.
OPPOSmONS A concept highly relevant to linguistics, since linguists
maintain that words (such as "black" and "death") have meaning not in them-
selves, but in relation to other words (''white" and "life"). Jacques Derrida, a
poststructuralist philosopher of language, has suggested that in the West we
think in terms of these "binary oppositions" or dichotomies, which on examina-
tion turn out to be evaluative hierarchies. In other words, each opposition -
beginning/end, presence/absence, or consciousness/unconsciousness - con-
tains one term that our culture views as superior and one term that we view as
negative or inferior.
Derrida has "deconstructed" a number of these binary oppositions, includ-
ing two - speech/writing and signifier/signified - that he believes to be cen-
tral to linguistics in particular and Western culture in general. He has concur-
rently critiqued the "law'' of noncontradiction, which is fundamental to
Western logic. He and other deconstructors have argued that a text can contain
opposed strands of discourse and, therefore, mean opposite things: reason and
passion, life and death, hope and despair, black and white. Traditionally,
criticism has involved choosing between opposed or contradictory meanings
and arguing that one is present in the text and the other absent.
French feminists have adopted the ideas of Derrida and other deconstruc-
tors, showing that we not only think in terms of such binary oppositions as
male/female, reason/emotion, and active/passive, but that we also associate
GLOSSARY
reason and activity with masculinity and emotion and passivity with feminin-
ity. Because of this, they have concluded that language is "phallocentric," or
masculine-dominated.
See also: Deconstruction, Discourse, Feminist Criticism, Poststructuralism.
POSTSTRUCTURALISM The general attempt to contest and subvert
structuralism initiated by deconstructors and certain other critics associated
with psychoanalytic, Marxist, and feminist theory. Structuralists, using linguis-
tics as a model and employing semiotic (sign) theory, posit the possibility of
knowing a text systematically and revealing the "grammar'' behind its form and
meaning. Poststructuralists argue against the possibility of such knowledge and
description. They counter that texts can be shown to contradict not only
structuralist accounts of them but also themselves. In making their adversarial
claims, they rely on close readings of texts and on the work of theorists such as
Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan.
Poststructuralists have suggested that structuralism rests on distinctions
between "signifier'' and "signified" (signs and the things they point toward),
"self" and "language" (or "text''), texts and other texts, and text and world that
are overly simplistic, if not patently inaccurate. Poststructuralists have shown
how all signifieds are also signifiers, and they have treated texts as "intertexts."
They have viewed the world as if it were a text (we desire a certain car because it
symbolizes achievement) and the self as the subject, as well as the user, of
language; for example, we may shape and speak through language, but it also
shapes and speaks through us.
See also: Deconstruction, Feminist Criticism, Intertextuality, Psychoana-
lytic Criticism, Semiotics, Structuralism.
PSYCHOANALITIC CRITICISM Grounded in the psychoanalytic
theories of Sigmund Freud, it is one of the oldest critical methodologies still in
use. Freud's view that works of literature, like dreams, express secret, uncon-
scious desires led to criticism that interpreted literary works as manifestations of
the author's neuroses. More recently, psychoanalytic critics have come to see
literary works as skillfully crafted artifacts that may appeal to our neuroses by
tapping into our repressed wishes and fantasies. Other forms of psychological
criticism that diverge from Freud, though they ultimately derive from his
insights, include those based on the theories of Carl Jung and Jacques Lacan.
See ''What Is Psychoanalytic Criticism?" page 223.
READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM An approach to literarure that,
as its name implies, considers the way readers respond to texts, as they read.
Stanley Fish describes the method by saying that it substitutes for one question,
''What does this sentence mean?" a more operational question, ''What does this
sentence do?" Reader-response criticism shares with deconstruction a strong
textual orientation and a reluctance to define the meaning of a work. Along with
psychoanalytic criticism, it shares an interest in the dynamics of mental response
to textual cues. See ''What Is Reader-Response Criticism?" page 252.
SEMIOLOGY, SEMIOTIC See Semiotics.
SEMIOTICS The study of signs and sign systems and the way meaning
is derived from them. Structuralist anthropologists, psychoanalysts, and literary
critics developed semiotics during the decades following 1950, but much of the
366 GLOSSARY
pioneering work had been done at the turn of the century by the founder of
modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, and the American philosopher
Charles Sanders Peirce.
Semiotics is based on several important distinctions, including the distinc-
tion between "signifier" and "signified" (the sign and what it points toward)
and the distinction between "langue" and "parole." Langue refers to the entire
system within which individual utterances or usages of language have meaning;
parole refers to the particular utterances or usages. A principal tenet of semiotics
is that signs, like words, .are not significant in themselves, but instead have
meaning only in relation to other signs and the entire system of signs, or langue.
The affinity between semiotics and structuralist literary criticism derives
from this emphasis placed on langue, or system. Structuralist critics, after all,
were reacting against formalists and their procedure of focusing on individual
works as if meanings didn't depend on anything external to the text.
Poststructuralists have used semiotics but questioned some of its underly-
ing assumptions, including the opposition between signifier and signified. The
feminist poststructuralist Julia Kristeva, for instance, has used the word "semi-
otic" to describe feminine language, a highly figurative, fluid form of discourse
that she sets in opposition to rigid, symbolic masculine language.
See also: Deconstruction, Feminist Criticism, Formalism, Poststructural-
ism, Oppositions, Structuralism, Symbol.
SIMILE See Metaphor.
SOCIOHISTORICAL CRITICISM See New Historicism.
STRUCTURALISM A science of humankind whose proponents at-
tempted to show that all elements of human culture, including literature, may be
understood as parts of a system of signs. Structuralism, according to Robert
Scholes, was a reaction to" 'modernist' alienation and despair."
Using Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic theory, European structuralists
such as Roman Jakobson, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes (before his
shift toward poststructuralism) attempted to develop a "semiology'' or "semiot-
ics" (science of signs). Barthes, among others, sought to recover literature and
even language from the isolation in which they had been studied and to show
that the laws that govern them govern all signs, from road signs to articles of
clothing.
Particularly useful to structuralists were two of Saussure's concepts: the
idea of"phoneme" in language and the idea that phonemes exist in two kinds of
relationships: "synchronic" and "diachronic." A phoneme is the smallest consis-
tently significant unit in language; thus, both "a" and "an" are phonemes, but
"n" is not. A diachronic relationship is that which a phoneme has with those that
have preceded it in time and those that will follow it. These "horizontal"
relationships produce what we might call discourse or narrative and what
Saussure called "parole." The synchronic relationship is the ''vertical" one that a
word has in a given instant with the entire system of language ("langue") in
which it may generate meaning. "An" means what it means in English because
those of us who speak the language are using it in the same way at a given time.
Following Saussure, Levi-Strauss studied hundreds of myths, break-
ing them into their smallest meaningful units, which he called "mythemes."
GLOSSARY
Removing each from its diachronic relations with other mythemes in a single
myth (such as the myth of Oedipus and his mother), he vertically aligned those
mythemes that he found to be homologous (structurally correspondent). He
then studied the relationships within as well as between vertically aligned
columns, in an attempt to understand scientifically, through ratios and propor-
tions, those thoughts and processes that humankind has shared, both at one
particular time and across time. One could say, then, that structuralists followed
Saussure in preferring to think about the overriding langue or language of
myth, in which each mytheme and mytheme-constituted myth fits meaningful-
ly, rather than about isolated individual paroles or narratives. Structuralists
followed Saussure's lead in believing what the poststructuralist Jacques Derrida
later decided he could not subscribe to - that sign systems must be understood
in terms of binary oppositions. In analyzing myths and texts to find basic
structures, structuralists tended to find that opposite terms modulate until they
are finally resolved or reconciled by some intermediary third term. Thus, a
structuralist reading of Paradise Lost would show that the war between God and
the bad angels becomes a rift between God and sinful, fallen man, the rift then
being healed by the Son of God, the mediating third term.
See also: Deconstruction, Discourse, Narrative, Poststructuralism, Semiotics.
SYMBOL A thing, image, or action that, though it is of interest in its
own right, stands for or suggests something larger and more complex - often
an idea or a whole range of interrelated ideas, attitudes, and practices.
Within a given culture, some things are understood to be symbols: the flag
of the United States is an obvious example. More subtle cultural symbols might
be the river as a symbol of time and the journey as a symbol of life and its
manifold experiences.
Instead of appropriating symbols generally used and understood within
their culture, writers often create symbols by setting up, in their works, a
complex but identifiable web of associations. As a result, one object, image, or
action suggests others, and often, ultimately, a range of ideas.
A symbol may thus be defined as a metaphor in which the ''vehicle," the
thing, image, or action used to represent something else, represents many
related things (or "tenors") or is broadly suggestive. The urn in Keats's "Ode on
a Grecian Um" suggests many interrelated concepts, including art, truth,
beauty, and timelessness.
Symbols have been of particular interest to formalists, who study how
meanings emerge from the complex, patterned relationships between images in
a work, and psychoanalytic critics, who are interested in how individual authors
and the larger culture both disguise and reveal unconscious fears and desires
through symbols. Recently, French feminists have also focused on the sym-
bolic. They have suggested that, as wide-ranging as it seems, symbolic
language is ultimately rigid and restrictive. They favor semiotic language
and writing, which, they contend, is at once more rhythmic, unifying, and
feminine.
See also: Feminist Criticism, Metaphor, Psychoanalytic Criticism, Trope.
SYNECDOCHE See Metaphor, Metonymy.
TENOR See Metaphor, Metonymy, Symbol.
368 GLOSSARY
THE EDITOR
Ross C Murfin, general editor of the Case Studies in Contempo-
rary Criticism and volume editor of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness
and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter in the series, is provost
and vice president for academic affairs at Southern Methodist Univer-
sity. He has taught at the University of Miami, Yale University, and the
University of Virginia, and has published scholarly studies of Joseph
Conrad, Thomas Hardy, and D. H. Lawrence.
THE CRITICS
Shari Benstock is professor of English at the University of Miami,
where she has served as director of the Women's Studies Program. She
is editor of a series on feminist criticism, Reading Women Writing,
published by Cornell University Press .• Her books include Women of
the Left Bank: Paris, 190D-1940 (1987) and Textualizing the Feminine:
On the Limits of Genre (1991 ). She is at work on a biography of Edith
Wharton.
Sacvan Bercovitch is Charles H. Carswell Professor of English at
Harvard University, where he teaches courses in American literature. A
369
370 ABOUT THE CONfRIBUTORS