Hester Prynne is punished for adultery and not revealing her lover’s name by being branded with a scarlet letter ‘A’. After Hester and her daughter Pearl are ostracized from society, she and her lover Arthur Dimmesdale are forced to live with their sin everyday. Hester responds by using the scarlet letter as a “passport into regions where other women dare not tread” (Hawthorne, 174), enabling her to speculate about her own self as well as society more boldly than anyone else.
The sinful guilt gives Dimmesdale “sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind that his heart vibrates in unison with theirs” (Hawthorne, 124). Hester’s good-heartedness, humility and charitable actions soon start to win back societal acceptance, which becomes total when Dimmesdale, just before his dramatic death, publicly confesses to being Pearl’s father. Hester and Pearl leave Boston for a long period. Hester returns to Boston just before her death, in order to be buried in the same grave as Dimmesdale, with ‘A’ inscribed on their tombstone.
The 17th century Puritan Boston society was narrow-minded and stagnant, with stern and black-browed Puritan elders stubbornly viewing sin as a danger to society that deserves the harshest and most enduring punishment to serve as penalty and deterrent. This led them to persecute Hester mercilessly and relentlessly for her sin, according no humanitarian allowances such as sympathy, understanding and forgiveness. The Puritan elders are guilty of not bothering to look deeper into her actions.
If they had, they would have realized that she could have averted societal condemnation either by secretly having an abortion, or by openly identifying her child’s father and demanding that he marry her; she did not indulge in either evasive action because of her staunch belief in Christianity which preaches anti-abortion, and because she did not want to besmirch the good reputation of her lover as a religious minister.
Secondly, the Puritan elders are guilty of indulging in what was a typical malady during those times – sex discrimination. Hester bore the full brunt of societal persecution because she was a woman; women were looked upon as secondary citizens not allowed to indulge in male activities like extramarital sex. Women were also barred from having abortions: a situation first attacked by the U.S First-Wave Feminists in the early 20th century and finally firmly rectified a few decades later when the U.S Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973.
The character of Prince Hamlet in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1990 film ‘Hamlet’ is similar to Arthur Dimmesdale in that both are tortured by personal thoughts and passions. Dimmesdale is burdened with guilt of his affair with Hester throughout the story, making his “thoughts and imagination so active, and his sensibility so intense” (Hawthorne, 109), that he even goes to the extent of having the scarlet letter scorched into the flesh of his chest as self-punishment.
Hamlet is tortured by a burning desire to punish his Uncle Claudius for murdering his own brother, and his mother Gertrude for her indecent haste in marrying immediately after the death of King Hamlet (Paul Scofield) – an action that incurs Hamlet’s wrath and anguish, leading him to brand her and all women as weak minded creatures easily swayed by emotions and bodily pleasures: “Frailty, thy name is woman!”
Like Hester, Gertrude cannot control her bodily desires. Much to her son’s anger and disgust, she marries Claudius in indecent haste after the death of King Hamlet. Hester has an affair with Dimmesdale even after being well ware of the possible fatal consequences. Like Hester, Ophelia remains faithful to her lover right until the end.
References
- Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “The Scarlet Letter.” New York, Penguin Classics. 2002.
- Zeffirelli, Franco. “Hamlet.” IMDB Movies. 1990.