The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne — Read

Hester Prynne’s prison sentence was over. The prison door was thrown open, and she walked out into the sunshine. Although the light fell equally on everyone, to Hester it seemed designed to show off the scarlet letter on her breast. Those first steps out of the prison may have been a greater torture than the elaborate public humiliation described before, when the entire town gathered to point its finger at her. At least then, her concentration and fierce combativeness allowed her to transform the scene into a sort of grotesque victory. And that was just a one-time event—the kind that happens only once in a lifetime—so she could expend several years’ worth of energy to endure it. The law that condemned her was like an iron-fisted giant, and it had the strength to either support or destroy her. It had held her up throughout that terrible ordeal. But now, with this lonely walk from the prison door, her new reality began. This would be her everyday life, and she could use only everyday resources to endure it, or else she would be crushed by it. Tomorrow would bring its own struggle, and the next day, and the day after that—every day its own struggle, just like the one that was so unbearable today. The days in the distant future would arrive with the same burden for her to bear and to never put down. The accumulating days and years would pile up their misery upon the heap of shame. Through them all, she would be a symbol for the preacher and the moralist to point at: the symbol of feminine frailty and lust. The young and pure would be taught to look at Hester and the scarlet letter burning on her breast. She was the child of good parents, the mother of a baby that would grow to womanhood; she had once been innocent herself. But now she would become the embodiment of sin, and her infamy would be the only monument over her grave.

It may seem unbelievable that, with the whole world open to her, this woman would remain in the one and only place where she would face this shame. The conditions of her sentence didn’t force her to stay in that remote and obscure Puritan settlement. She was free to return to her birthplace— or anywhere else in Europe—where she could hide under a new identity, as though she had become a new person. Or she could have simply fled to the forest, where her wild nature would be a good fit among Indians unfamiliar with the laws that had condemned her. But an irresistible fatalism exists that forces people to haunt the place where some dramatic event shaped their lives. And the sadder the event, the greater the bond. Hester’s sin and shame rooted her in that soil. It was as if the birth of her child had turned the harsh wilderness of New England into her lifelong home. Every other place on Earth—even the English village where she had been a happy child and a sinless young woman—was now foreign to her. The chain that bound her to this place was made of iron, and though it troubled her soul, it could not be broken.