The Scarlet Letter

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

In Boston, a crowd of somber Puritans gathers before the prison door to witness the public shaming of Hester Prynne, a young woman convicted of adultery. She emerges carrying her infant daughter and wearing a scarlet letter "A," elaborately embroidered in gold thread upon her breast, and is led to the marketplace scaffold, where she must stand exposed for three hours. Among the onlookers she recognizes, with private horror, a deformed, scholarly stranger recently arrived from the wilderness. From the balcony above, the town's ministers, including the young, revered Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, publicly urge her to name her child's father; she refuses. Returned to prison, Hester is attended by the stranger, who is a physician skilled in both European and Native medicine. He reveals to her privately that he is her long-absent husband, now calling himself Roger Chillingworth. He bears her no anger for her sin but vows to discover and secretly torment the man who wronged him, extracting from Hester an oath never to reveal their true relationship. Released from prison, Hester settles in a small isolated cottage at the edge of town with her daughter, whom she names Pearl. She supports them by needlework, prized for public ceremonies though never for bridal veils, while quietly giving much of her earnings to the poor, who often revile her. She endures years of social isolation and the perpetual sting of the scarlet letter, developing a painful, almost supernatural sensitivity to hidden sin in others. Pearl grows into a beautiful but wild, ungovernable child, fascinated from infancy by the scarlet letter itself, and shunned by other children as an outcast. Fearing the authorities may take Pearl from her, Hester visits Governor Bellingham to plead her case, delivering embroidered gloves. There she encounters Bellingham, the elder minister John Wilson, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth. Pearl's odd answers to religious questioning nearly cause the magistrates to remove her, but Dimmesdale passionately argues that Pearl is both Hester's punishment and salvation, and the child is left in her mother's care. Meanwhile, Chillingworth has insinuated himself as Dimmesdale's physician and, later, housemate, ostensibly to treat the minister's mysterious wasting illness. In fact he is probing for the secret guilt he suspects lies behind it, and psychologically tormenting Dimmesdale under the guise of friendship. Dimmesdale grows increasingly emaciated and tortured by concealed guilt, practicing secret penances—scourging himself, fasting, and holding nightlong vigils—while his public sermons, fueled by this very anguish, win him extraordinary reverence. One night Chillingworth glimpses something on the sleeping minister's bared chest that fills him with ecstatic, horrified certainty. Driven by guilt, Dimmesdale climbs the pillory scaffold alone at midnight, imagining public exposure, and is joined there by chance by Hester and Pearl; the three join hands as a meteor illuminates the sky in the shape of an "A." Chillingworth appears and leads the shaken minister home. Years later, Hester—now regarded by many townspeople with grudging respect for her charity, the scarlet letter reinterpreted by some as meaning "Able"—resolves to break her oath to Chillingworth and warn Dimmesdale of his tormentor's true identity. Confronting Chillingworth directly, she recognizes how thoroughly hatred and revenge have degraded him from the just, gentle scholar he once was, and admits her own hatred of him in return. He acknowledges his transformation as a fated necessity and refuses to relent. Hester sets out to find Dimmesdale in the forest to reveal the truth, with Pearl accompanying her.

By Nathaniel Hawthorne · Genre: Romance, Historical Fiction, Drama · 24 chapters · 68,035 words

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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.

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1600-1775 · Adultery · Boston (Mass · Boston (Mass.) · Clergy · Colonial period · Colonial period, ca · Fiction · Harvard Classics · Historical Novel · Historical fiction · History

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