The Scarlet Letter

A romance of guilt in Puritan Boston

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne came out in 1850 and made him famous. Hawthorne called it a romance, not a novel: a story that allows itself mystery and symbols rather than strict realism. It is set in the Puritan colony of Boston in the 1640s, about two hundred years before Hawthorne wrote. Hawthorne was descended from Puritans; one ancestor, John Hathorne, was a judge in the Salem witch trials, and Hawthorne added a w to his name to separate himself from that past.

The book is short, with twenty-four chapters. It is built around three scenes on the town scaffold, the platform where offenders are publicly shamed: one at the beginning, one in the middle and one at the end. The main themes are sin and guilt, public shame and private hypocrisy, the harshness of Puritan law, and the strength that can come from suffering.

The Custom-House

The book opens with a long introduction, The Custom-House. Hawthorne describes his years as surveyor of the customs house in Salem, Massachusetts, and pokes fun at its sleepy old officials. He then claims that in an upstairs room he found a faded piece of red cloth shaped like the letter A, with a manuscript by a former surveyor, Jonathan Pue, telling the story of a woman named Hester Prynne. When he lays the letter on his chest, he feels a burning heat. He says the novel is his version of that story. The frame is fiction, but it lets Hawthorne link the Puritan past to his own town.

The scaffold and the stranger

A crowd waits outside the Boston prison. The door opens and Hester Prynne walks out with her three-month-old baby. On her dress is a scarlet A, for adultery, beautifully embroidered in gold thread. The women in the crowd say she deserves worse: a brand on her forehead or death. Hester stands on the scaffold for three hours with her head high.

At the edge of the crowd, Hester sees a small, slightly deformed older man in a mix of European and Native American dress. He is her husband. He sent her ahead from Amsterdam to Boston two years before and was held captive by Native Americans on his way. He asks a townsman about her and learns that she will not name the father.

The Reverend John Wilson and the young minister Arthur Dimmesdale, Hester's pastor, urge her to name her partner. Dimmesdale speaks with deep emotion and tells her not to protect the man out of pity, because he may lack the courage to confess on his own. Hester refuses: "I will not speak."

In the prison that night, the stranger visits her as a physician. He calls himself Roger Chillingworth. He admits he was wrong to marry a young woman when he was old and bookish, and he does not seek revenge on her. He will find the man instead. He makes her swear never to reveal that he is her husband.

Hester and Pearl

After her release, Hester could leave the colony, but she stays. She lives in a small cottage at the edge of town, near the sea and the forest. She supports herself and her daughter with fine needlework, which the town buys for its officials' collars, its babies and its dead, but never for a bride's veil. She gives most of her earnings to the poor, who often insult her. She keeps her hair under a cap and dresses plainly. The letter isolates her, and she feels it gives her a strange sense of other people's hidden sins.

Hester names her daughter Pearl, because she was bought at great price. Pearl is beautiful, wild and clever, and dressed by her mother in bright red, like a living scarlet letter. The town children shun her. Pearl is fascinated by the A and throws flowers at it. Hester sometimes wonders if her child is a demon.

The town leaders consider taking Pearl from Hester to give her a proper Christian upbringing. Hester goes to the mansion of Governor Bellingham to plead. When an old minister questions Pearl, she claims that her mother plucked her from the wild rose bush by the prison door. Hester begs Dimmesdale to speak for her. He argues, trembling, that God gave Hester the child as both a blessing and a punishment, to keep her soul alive. The governor lets her keep Pearl.

The leech and his patient

Dimmesdale's health is failing. He is pale and thin and often presses his hand over his heart. His congregation thinks he is too holy for this world, and they love him more for his suffering and his powerful sermons.

Chillingworth, now known as a skilled doctor, becomes Dimmesdale's medical adviser. The two men move into the same house. Hawthorne calls Chillingworth a leech, the old word for a doctor and also for a bloodsucker. He studies his patient closely and suspects that his illness comes from a hidden sin. One day, while Dimmesdale sleeps, Chillingworth opens his shirt and sees something on his chest. He reacts with wild joy. Hawthorne compares it to Satan's joy at winning a soul.

Dimmesdale knows nothing of Chillingworth's identity, but he feels uneasy around him. In secret, he whips himself with a scourge, fasts and stays awake all night staring into a mirror. He tries many times to confess from the pulpit. Each time he calls himself the worst of sinners, and each time the congregation admires his humility more.

The midnight scaffold

One night in May, Dimmesdale climbs the scaffold alone in the dark and cries out. No one wakes. Hester and Pearl pass on their way from the deathbed of Governor Winthrop, and he calls them up. Holding hands with them, he feels new life rush through him. Pearl asks him to stand with them there tomorrow at noon. He says he will, but on the great judgment day, not before.

A meteor lights the sky. Dimmesdale sees in it a huge letter A. Pearl points to Chillingworth, standing nearby, watching. The next morning, the church sexton tells Dimmesdale that others saw an A in the sky and took it to mean Angel, for the governor who died that night.

Seven years later: the forest

Seven years have passed since the first scaffold scene. Hester's patience and charity during an epidemic have changed the town's view of her. Many people now say the A stands for Able. She has become a thoughtful, independent woman who quietly questions the rules of her society.

Shocked by Dimmesdale's state, Hester decides to break her promise to Chillingworth. She first confronts the old man on the beach. He has changed from a scholar into something like a fiend, living only to torment his victim. She tells him she will reveal his identity.

Hester meets Dimmesdale in the forest while Pearl plays by a brook. She tells him that Chillingworth is her husband. Dimmesdale is horrified and then forgives her. She urges him to leave with her for Europe, where they can live as a family. He agrees. A ship is in the harbor. Hester takes off the scarlet letter and throws it away, then removes her cap and lets down her hair. Sunshine floods the forest.

Pearl will not cross the brook to them. She stamps her foot and screams, pointing at her mother's bare chest, until Hester puts the letter back on. When Dimmesdale kisses Pearl's forehead, she runs to the brook and washes the kiss away.

On his way back to town, Dimmesdale feels wild urges to shock his parishioners with wicked words. He returns home and writes a new sermon with great energy.