In the fictional novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne, the story is told of a young Puritan woman who finds herself pregnant with the minister’s child at a time when she is married to a man who has been missing for seven years. As a punishment for her crime, the community determines that she should be doomed to always wear a scarlet letter A on her bodice to announce to all who see her that she is an adulteress. The only way they will allow her to remove the letter is if she names the father of her child. However, naming the father would mean bringing down the pillar of the community in the form of the minister, who has himself decided to remain silent. The story begins following the child’s birth and her mother’s incarceration period and ends well after this child is grown up and the woman has returned to her old community. Most of the story takes place while the child is still very young, though, as Hester’s true husband arrives in town, swears her to secrecy regarding his identity and begins tormenting the guilty man whom he’s already identified. The story was written in the nineteenth century, but there is a great deal of information provided within the text about the earlier lives of the author’s ancestors, making it a somewhat historical novel in that it reveals something truthful about the past. However, it can also be considered a psychological novel because it explores the deeper motivations and ideas of the characters who struggle with their beliefs and the rigid constraints of their community. However, it is perhaps most interesting to read the book from a feminist perspective as Hawthorne reveals the particular constraints and impossible standards that have been traditionally imposed upon women as he centers his story upon the main character of Hester Prynne. The incredible complexity of this book thus provides something for everyone whether they tend to be more inclined to read from the historical, psychological or feminist perspective.
Historical perspective
It is commonly assumed that the Puritans kept a very strict social order that infiltrated every element of their lives and was supposed to reflect on the level of their individual spiritual righteousness. People who were considered closer to God, such as those who served within the church, were automatically assigned a higher social status than individuals who were considered closer to sins, such as those who were diseased or women. The story of Adam and Eve was justification enough to adopt a social position that women were naturally closer to evil than men while the idea that the farmer had to divide his attentions between God and field meant he was not as close to God as men who spent more time serving the church. This strict hierarchy was considered to be an important moral obligation. “These Puritans insisted that they, as God’s elect, had the duty to direct national affairs according to God’s will as revealed in the Bible. This union of church and state to form a holy commonwealth gave Puritanism direct and exclusive control over most colonial activity until commercial and political changes forced them to relinquish it at the end of the 17th century” (Noll, 2004). Understanding the depth of this concept makes it easier to understand why Reverend Dimmesdale could not continue to associate himself to any degree with Hester after Pearl was born. Hester was already impure simply because she was a woman, but she is greatly more so because of her highly public fall. The Reverend can’t even spend much time with the child he knew was his daughter because Pearl is also doubly defiled. She is female and she is a child born without a father in violation of her mother’s marriage vows and the laws of God. All of this is completely in keeping with the historical facts of life within a Puritan town.
Although people living today have an easy time just picking up and moving to a new location when things get bad, this wasn’t as easy for people living in Hester’s time. Hester’s story takes place when the European living sites of people were still termed colonies and were slowly making their way into the forests. Not only were these colonies still very close to the untamed wilderness, but they were infringing on the traditional lands of the indigenous people, the Indians. Although Hester could have made it from her village to another one, and there are hints in the story that she did just that through the many lonely years that she served the sick and dying in her own quiet way, it is unlikely that she could have escaped the persecution of her community simply because they did all depend upon one another and thus her story was known throughout the New England area already. “New Englanders evolved an intricate web of interdependence to meet the demand for labor, working for neighbors who sold their labor in return” (Jones, 1853). More than this, though, would have been the practical problem of finding a place to live. “Building homes and establishing farms required intensive and often backbreaking toil” (Jones, 1853) in the days before ready apartment complexes and were activities only undertaken by men. Women were constantly under the care and guidance of men unless they were somehow disgraced, leaving Hester with no real choice other than to stay where she was and learn to accept her neighbors’ judgment. The same factors that kept Hester in place though are the factors that kept her alive and relatively free to move about her community. The early colonies needed all the people they could get in order to maintain their populations and perhaps grow, even when that person had sinned. At the same time, everyone who lived there needed to contribute in some way to the overall welfare of the colony. Hester was allowed to live because she was contributing to the preservation of the group, even if they didn’t approve of the way she was doing this and was left free both because she couldn’t go anywhere anyway and that way she could contribute to the community.
Psychological perspective
With an idea of the historical perspective of the story, it is possible to discover a deeper psychological understanding of characters such as Reverend Dimmesdale as he reacts to the psychological manipulations of Roger Chillingsworth. Hawthorne takes time to let Chillingsworth inform Hester all about his vast knowledge of the workings of the human mind. Looking at his eyes, Hester remembers that “those same bleared optics had a strange, penetrating power, when it was their owner’s purpose to read the human soul” (Ch. 2, at the end). When the two of them are sitting in Hester’s jail cell and Hester refuses to tell him who the father of her child is, he tells her he will be able to find the answer himself. “Believe me, Hester, there are few things whether in the outward world, or, to a certain depth, in the invisible sphere of thought–few things hidden from the man who devotes himself earnestly and unreservedly to the solution of a mystery … There is a sympathy that will make me conscious of him … Sooner or later, he must needs be mine” (Ch. 4, toward the end). Almost immediately Chillingsworth recognizes the minister’s guilty actions for what they are and he designs a way to put himself into constant association with the weaker man with the express intention of slowly torturing him for his transgressions. He does this in a very indirect way in which he constantly wages psychological warfare on Dimmesdale by feeding him a regular diet of vague accusations, supposedly innocent teasing and dropped hints that never fully reveal whether the doctor knows the secret or not. These eventually drive Dimmesdale to his death.
The terms used to describe the reverend when he first appears in the story do not sound overly strong or as capable of withstanding the kind of treatment Hester receives at this time. “Notwithstanding 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” (Ch. 3, near the end). Although Hester has no choice but to accept the judgment of her neighbors, being unable to keep her child hidden forever and obviously without her husband since her arrival many years earlier, Dimmesdale can escape human judgment as long as both he and Hester keep quiet. However, this attempt to hide his secret inside himself eats away at his conscience until he is no longer able to survive. Throughout the seven years that pass between Hester’s trial at the opening of the story and his own death, the reverend is afflicted with a number of mysterious ailments in his chest region forcing the constant attendance of a personal physician and tormentor, Roger Chillingsworth, the secret husband of Hester. Even when he finally gives up and wants to admit to his sins, he is unable to do so all alone and calls on Hester to lend him the strength he needs to make his final confession. “Hester Prynne … 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!” (Ch. 23, toward the end). Even in this statement, Dimmesdale recognizes that Hester may still choose not to acknowledge him the way he chose not to defend her so many years ago, understanding that her strength is much greater than his own.
Feminist perspective
This finally brings the reader to the feminist perspective as Hester emerges as the strongest, most righteous character in the story. Although she is described in her younger days to have had “an impulsive and passionate nature” (Ch. 2, near the end), Hester is never given a great deal of control over her own life and the decisions that will most closely affect her. In spite of this, she somehow manages to seem to be in control of everything she does within the story. An early example of this is the revelation that she never had any say in determining who or even whether she would marry. She didn’t want to marry the old doctor and never loved him, yet she was forced to marry him anyway and was shipped away to the colonies to prepare their home for him. She makes all this clear as she speaks with Chillingsworth in her jail cell: “’Thou knowest,’ said Hester – for, depressed as she was, she could not endure this last quiet stab at the token of her shame – ‘thou knowest that I was frank with thee. I felt no love, nor feigned any’” (Ch. 4, just past halfway). Her wild nature is shown in her father’s apparent decision to get her married before she brought disgrace to the family as well as her affair with the town’s leading minister when she risked getting pregnant. However, the events of the novel serve to tame this nature into something still strong yet more thoughtful and compassionate for her fellow man.
Hester reveals her strength and independence from her first appearance in the novel as she acknowledges the changes that have taken place in her. Although she is offered a chance to remove the letter by naming the father, Hester informs the town that the steel has already entered her soul and nothing, not even removing the letter, will ever take that away. She says, “It is too deeply branded. Ye cannot take it off. And would that I might endure his [the father’s] agony as well as mine!” (Ch. 3, near the end). In making this statement, looking directly at the father, Hester is also admitting that she has more strength than the reverend and expresses her first sense of compassion for the trials he has ahead of him. She refuses to allow the censorship of the town to break her and simply finds a way of living within herself and the part of her society that has been left open to her. She chooses to remain where she is in order to stay close to the man that she loves even though she knows she can never be intimate with him again in spite of the way her neighbors vilify her again proving a great strength and determination (Ch. 5). She proves to be quite capable of supporting herself and her daughter by hiring out her sewing abilities and compassionately provides public assistance to those most sorely in need of it, all while keeping her deep secrets and maintaining rigid control over her internal wild spirit that still shines forward when called forth at Dimmesdale’s death.
Conclusion
Beginning with a historical perspective of the book, the reader is able to gain a deeper understanding of how the characters in Hawthorne’s book viewed the world around them. It provides an idea of the types of social restrictions that might have forced these characters to act as they do. This leads one into a psychological perspective in which one begins to analyze behavior and what the characters are doing to each other intentionally or unintentionally on a mental or spiritual level. This type of analysis reveals the great weaknesses found in the men of the story and the tremendous resilience and strength of the ‘weaker’ sex represented by Hester. The feminist perspective this calls forth begins to reveal the degree to which Hawthorne can be associated with the proto-feminists who were attempting to call attention to the often-no-win situation women were placed in even in his own time. While there is no hope for any other outcome given the restrictions of the society and the psychology of the individual characters, Hester stands as a constant signal of truth to her heart and her strength of character is always acting on her beliefs regardless of what society thought.
References
- Hawthorne, Nathaniel. (1992). The Scarlet Letter. New York: Alfred P. Knopf.
- Jones, Abner Dumont. (1853). “Cotton Mather.” The Illustrated American Biography. New York: J. Milton and Company.
- Noll, Mark A. (2001). “Puritanism.” Evangelical Dictionary of Theology (2nd Ed.). Walter A. Elwell (Ed.). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House Company.