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Nathaniel Hawthorne is certainly at his best when writing about sin, the supernatural and the New England past. Among all his works dealing with sin, The Scarlet Letter is unanimously considered to be his most successful attempt. In this nineteenth-century American classic, the author is predominantly concerned with the moral, emotional and psychological effect of sin on the people in general and those complicated in it in particular. What baffles my best understanding is how the writer is trying to interpret the sin in this tragedy. Is sin degrading or can it occasionally be elevating? To explore the different roles that sin plays on the three major characters of the love affair, we then need to take a look at the interpersonal relationships between them.
Legal is the marriage between Hester Prynne and Roger Chillingworth, but it is not a happy one. While the aged man deludes himself with the idea that intellectual talents might shade his uninviting appearance in a young girls fantasy, Hester declares that she feels no love, nor feigns any. If at the very beginning the matrimonial scale is thus unbalanced, it is not at all surprising for us to observe the hatred blazing at the bosom of the husband towards the two culprits who have inflicted upon him the deepest and most irreparable injury. Hester and Dimmesdale, having committed adultery, share true love. Yet, the Puritan society of that time can not bear such a transgression of a married woman, hence her subsequent life of public ignominy. Neither can Dimmesdale enjoy peace after the adultery is committed.
At least his own conscience, being a clergyman, will not leave him alone. Their story is sad to such a degree that one cannot help sympathizing or even respecting them just as Hawthorne comments in the book: Love, whether newly born, or aroused from a death-like slumber, must always create a sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world. (P. 243) At the bottom of the triangle, Chillingworth and Dimmesdale, the two rivals in love, consciously and unconsciously destroy each other. According to Richard Chase, They are the two aspects of the will which confused Puritan thought in New England the active and the inactive. (P. 77) When Chillingworth unites intellect with will and coldly with sinister motives analyses Dimmesdale, the latter is totally blinded about his true character, and continues to receive him as the most intimate friend! Finishing the book from cover to cover, one can easily realize that instead of unfolding the love as well as the sin of the story, Hawthorne seems to be obsessed with the moral and psychological results of site isolation and morbidity, the distortion and thwarting of the emotional life. Yet, besides these, can sin also create something good, something desirable in people?
In the opening chapters the scarlet A is the object of hundreds of eyes. The absolute morality of the Puritan community demands Hester's perpetual penance in the wearing of the letter. Nevertheless, the very way she makes the symbol betrays her: It was so artistically done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore; and which was a splendor in accordance with the taste of the age, but greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony. It had the effect of a spell taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself. (P. 73 - 74) By now, we see in front of us a woman with state and dignity, a woman in the desperate recklessness of her mood, make a pride out of what the authority meant for a punishment. Is she really guilty? Is it really right to condemn a woman for her sincere love towards an individual other than her husband who she doesnt love and who is believed to be lying at the bottom of the ocean after their two years departure?
Sadly enough, the seventeenth century New England says Yes. Then, looking down at her bosom and touching it with her finger, she feels that this hostile society and its judgment upon her are her realities, which she begins to face readily and bravely hereafter. Although she feels her very birth is too much a torture for her, she sustains herself as best a woman might, being the focus of a thousand merciless eyes. During her life-long ordeal, her beauty has undergone a sad transformation. Her rich and luxuriant hair has been completely hidden by a gray cap. There is deliberate austerity in her dress, and lack of demonstration in her manners.
How can she do otherwise when the surrounding human sphere is but a darker world for a womans beauty? Yet, when at the beginning of the story Hester conquers her apparent impulse to conceal the scarlet A by clasping the infant closely to her bosom, wisely judging that one token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide another (P. 73), we know she is going to face her destiny gracefully. Although she is totally aware of the fact that the shame accompanied with the accumulating days and added years would be biting her nerve, she is not going to flee. She chooses to continue a resident of New England, as she convinces herself that it is the scene of her guilt, and should be the scene of her earthly punishment.
Luxurious might the hope be, she cant help dreaming that in return for her martyrdom, she would at length achieve certain saint-like purity in her soul. Thanks to this perception, Hester Prynne's behavioral response to the scarlet A is a positive one. Though abandoned by the community of her fellow citizens, she doesnt abandon herself from it. Instead, she does her best to regain their fellowship on a new honest basis: None so ready as she to give of her little substance to every demand of poverty one 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 She was self-ordained a Sister of Mercy much helpfulness was found in here much power to do, and power to sympathize that many people refused to interpret the scarlet A by its original significance.
They said that it meant Able. (P. 195 - 196) Here lies the eternal woman, perhaps indeed, the eternal human. About her, there is something queenly, imperious and barbaric, as well as fallible, appealing and enduring. The moment when Hester puts on her gray cap and becomes a kind of social worker, controlling her color and passion, her indeterminate, instinctual being, she is unconsciously imparting the letter on her bosom a new meaning. Is the author revealing by this characterization why not only he but all men must love Hester? Is he really indicating that sin, through public and constant confession, can be a doorway to virtue? The effect of the adultery on Hester's mind is, however, not one in favour of the Puritan morality.
Her life has turned in a great measure, from passion and feeling, to thought. In an age when the human intellect is newly liberated, she assumes a freedom of meditation. This, had her Puritan judges known it, would have been held to a deadlier crime than that denounced by the scarlet letter. With no longer any faith in the God who frowns on her in such a rigid way, Hester Prynne begins to wander in a moral wilderness far away from the conventional Puritan orthodox discipline. The scarlet letter, beyond everyones expectation, enables her to escape the Puritan world, extending the lawlessness of adultery into all her habits of thought, and reshaping conventional values into her own reality. With this regard, it seems to us just natural when we hear Hester, instinctively exercising a magnetic power, urge Dimmesdale to leave America with her.
We simply cant help marveling at the rightness of the authors remark in the case of Hester Prynne: The whole seven years of outlaw and ignominy had been little other than a preparation for this very hour. (P. 240) What a mockery those godly magistrates in the puritan settlement have made themselves of by such a contrivance as confining a womans passion beneath a symbol of infamy! Deep inward, does Hester really repent of her sin, or even does she consider herself guilty? Dimmesdale: Being true is the only thing that the sin teaches him While Hester is able to reconstruct her life and win a moral victory, Dimmesdale, on the other hand, undergoes the tragic experience of physical and spiritual disintegration. The result of the scarlet letter on him, therefore, is turning his life into an obsessive dilemma to speak out the truth or not. Dimmesdale wishes he could confess and share her punishment but does not have the courage to proclaim his shame.
Every time he mounts the pulpit he longs to tell the congregation the shocking truth but he is never brave enough to do so. His mental conflict is so intolerable that he penalizes himself in the forms of constant fast and vigil, which eventually leads to his breakdown and death. With this acknowledged, it would be safe to judge that the agony inflicted by the adultery on the minister is much more intense than it is on the wearer of the scarlet A, whose ordeal of public ignominy, though bitter indeed, brings her a retribution. When Dimmesdale admires Hester for wearing the scarlet letter openly upon her bosom, he is fully aware of his moral degeneration in keeping his part in the sin as a secret while appearing to the world as a spiritual leader. Yet he is so remorsefully hypocritical that it is beyond his power to repent in front of his congregation. Consequently, the symbol in Dimmesdale is diverted from its normal course and emerges obliquely as the psychosomatic mark on his breast.
If he is to win back his spiritual quietude, he has to comply with either one wing of the two conflicting morals and stick to it hereafter. For this, Hawthorne illustrates: 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. (P. 258) Dimmesdale doesnt have the courage to confess his sin until the last moment of his life. After lamenting over the short life of the beloved minister we feel compelled to assert that late as his revelation is, it is better than never. Although he makes his way to salvation at such a dear cost as his life, he finally achieves a moral purification.
Between him and Hester they point to a moral that...
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