The Scarlet Letter (Barnes & Noble Signature Editions)

By Anissa Marlene Graham and Nathaniel Hawthorne

It is 1642 in Boston. Hester Prynne, dignified and silent, is led through prison doors to her public shaming by members of the Puritan town. Holding her illegitimate child to her breast, and bearing a bright scarlet letter “A” embroidered on her bodice, Hester must now struggle to create a new life for herself and her child within this censorious community.

     Though her husband is assumed dead, Hester’s relationship with the father of her child is considered illicit. She is trulypenitent, but her real crime seems to be her unwillingness to disclose the identity of her lover. When her missing spouse reappears, reveals himself to her, and takes up residence in town under an assumed identity, Hester, her daughter, her disguised husband, and her clandestine lover are forced to abide in close quarters—leading quiet, anguished lives. But the secrets eat away at their keepers, and only the most resolute of this forsaken foursome will thrive.

     The Scarlet Letter met with widespread acclaim when it was published in 1850.

The novel explores the emerging transcendental movement and its core belief in a personal relationship with God, transplanted in the context of seventeenth-century Puritan society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Nov 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781435141254

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

A YOUNG WOMAN STEPS THROUGH A DOORWAY CLUTCHING HER newborn to her chest. The image seems innocent enough, and yet this vision of mother and child is one fraught with tension and menace when it appears in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter. For the Puritans of Hawthorne’s Boston, Hester Prynne and her daughter, Pearl, represent a threat to the community. Hester, who became pregnant after waiting two years for her husband to join her in Boston, refuses to name the father of her child—and that denial coupled with her adultery threatens the fabric of the community. For the Puritans, the answer to the question of Pearl’s paternity can only spell doom for their ideals; either one of their own has succumbed to his lesser self, or the Devil—whom they fear inhabits the surrounding woods—is now running abroad in their town.

The Scarlet Letter draws on the traditions of both Hawthorne’s ancestors and his contemporaries, and as such should now feel dated, like a relic from some forgotten shipwreck. However, the work continues to be read by modern audiences—and not just because it appears on high school required reading lists. Its continuing popularity, as well as the continuing popularity of Nathaniel Hawthorne, can be attributed to the author’s clear style and his focus on the interior landscape of his characters, which anticipates the work of Sigmund Freud and of such modern authors as Henry James. Hester Prynne’s affair and all the complications it creates for her, her spiritual advisor, and the community tap into basic human concerns about sin, faith, and identity. Hawthorne’s compelling major characters and his narrator’s tendency to question his audience without offering direct answers encourage readers to move through the dark world of seventeenth-century Puritan Boston.

Born Nathaniel Hathorne (he would add the w to his last name sometime between 1825 and 1827) in Salem, Massachusetts, on July 4, 1804, the author was the second child of Nathaniel Hathorne Sr. and Elizabeth Clarke Manning Hathorne. Nathaniel’s father, a ship’s captain, was away much of the time, missing out on the birth of all three of his children. He died of yellow fever while en route to Suriname in 1808. Upon Captain Hathorne’s death, the family moved in with their Manning relatives. At the age of nine, Nathaniel was injured and bedridden for a time. His reading during this period of convalescence would inform both the style and content of his future works. He read John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and William Shakespeare’s plays. He would later expand his reading to include gothic writers, such as Ann Radcliffe, and historical writers, such as Sir Walter Scott. By the age of fourteen, Hawthorne began working for his Manning uncles to help support his family. In 1821, his relatives sent him to Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where he became the first member of the family to receive a college education. While at Bowdoin, Hawthorne became friends with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Horatio Bridge, and Franklin Pierce. Each of these men in one way or another would help Hawthorne to advance his career as a writer. He graduated eighteenth in his class of thirty-eight in 1825.

After graduation, Hawthorne struggled with the problem common to all authors during the nineteenth century—how to make a living. He took various bookkeeping jobs throughout his career as a writer in an attempt to create some stability. In 1828, Hawthorne published at his own expense his first novel, Fanshawe. It was not a critical or commercial success. A number of biographers, including Franklin Preston Stearns and Terence Martin, relate the story of the ultimate fate of Fanshawe: the author collected as many of the novels in existence as he could and burned them. The 1830s and 1840s found Hawthorne writing for a number of publications, and his collection Twice-Told Tales (1837) received praise from both Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In the same year as the publication of Twice-Told Tales, Hawthorne met the Peabody sisters—Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia. With the aid of Elizabeth Peabody, he secured a position in the Boston Custom House. Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody in 1842 after a four-year engagement, and the couple moved into the Old Manse, a house owned by the Emerson family, in Concord, Massachusetts. His writing career was placed on hold when, in April of 1846, he was made the surveyor of customs in Salem; this appointment, largely political in nature, would last three years. His dismissal inspired The Scarlet Letter’s introductory essay, The Custom-House. With the publication of The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne’s career as a writer took off. He published two more long romances within two years, as well as a campaign biography of his friend Franklin Pierce; one of those romances, The House of the Seven Gables (1851), also explored Hawthorne’s Puritan past. President Pierce appointed Hawthorne consul in Liverpool, England, a position Hawthorne held from 1853 until 1857. Hawthorne’s time in England and his travels in Europe led to his final romance, The Marble Faun (1860). When he died in 1864, he was well respected both at home and in Europe; he was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord in a section that would become known as Author’s Ridge; other literary figures buried there include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, and Louisa May Alcott.

The plot of The Scarlet Letter revolves around an affair that took place long before the events of the story begin. Hester Prynne, the romance’s protagonist, was sent to the colonies ahead of her much older husband, who remained in Amsterdam to settle his affairs. Two years after her arrival, with her husband still absent, Hester became pregnant, in clear violation of the laws of 1640s Boston, which fused both secular and religious codes of behavior. Since adultery broke the biblical seventh commandment, it also broke the law of the land according to the Body of Liberties adopted in 1641. Anyone convicted of having committed adultery was sentenced to death; however, the leaders of Boston granted Hester a partial pardon so that she could name her lover, which she had refused to do at the trial which takes place before the beginning of the story. The alternative punishment devised by the elders of the community is a variation of another common seventeenth-century punishment: branding. Instead of having an A physically branded onto her skin, she has been forced to wear a cloth A on her attire. In addition to being condemned to do this for the rest of her life, Hester also has to stand upon the pillory with her newborn daughter, Pearl, on display for public ridicule. Both her minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, and her husband, Roger Chillingworth, witness this humiliation, but neither man offers comfort to the woman and her child. The initial sin (adultery) and the sins that grow from it (wrath, hypocrisy, deceit) consume these characters throughout the story and significantly alter who they are and who they will become.

The publication of The Scarlet Letter in 1850 marked a turning point in Hawthorne’s career as he moved from being a writer of short stories and sketches to what we would call a novelist. Prior to The Scarlet Letter, much of Hawthorne’s reputation rested on his short fiction printed individually in popular magazines, like the Token, or collected in volumes, such as Mosses from an Old Manse (1846). Writing for Graham’s Magazine, Edgar Allan Poe praised Twice-Told Tales (1837) and its author on two scores—originality and intensity. Poe linked Hawthorne with Washington Irving as one of the first truly American writers.¹ Many of these earlier stories include examinations of Puritan life (Young Goodman Brown, for instance) and faith (such as The Celestial Railroad); these themes reappear in The Scarlet Letter. Young Goodman Brown, which was originally published in 1835 in New-England Magazine, explores the possible double lives led by a Puritan community. On the one hand, the community appears to be pious and righteous; on the other, those same pillars of the community may be consorting with the devil. The dual nature of communal life will reappear as Hester Prynne struggles with her own community in The Scarlet Letter. The Celestial Railroad (1843) takes its structure from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. Hawthorne uses the allegorical structure of Bunyan’s work to comment on the nineteenth-century mania regarding scientific innovation and the resulting obsession with reason over feeling. Based on the success of those early collections, Hawthorne initially intended to include The Scarlet Letter as part of a larger collection. However, his publisher, James Fields, encouraged him to publish the story, along with its introductory essay The Custom-House, on its own. The Scarlet Letter was a best seller, going through three printings in the United States in a little under a year.

While modern readers use the word novel to describe the text, Hawthorne referred to his longer works as romances instead. In nineteenth-century America, the romance was a story that focused on larger-than-life or fantastical circumstances faced by ordinary people; our modern notions of a love story did often come into play in the nineteenth-century romance, but the happily ever after element was not a given. By labeling his work a romance, the author gave himself a certain kind of freedom. While the novel often tried to re-create experience as it was, the romance offered nineteenth-century authors the opportunity to explore essential truths about human nature by blending the fantastic with the mundane.² Some literary scholars divide the romance into three categories—the historical, the sensational, and the philosophical. The Scarlet Letter falls into the last category. The philosophical romance concerns itself with the feelings of the characters rather than with their actions. These stories tend to examine motives, but they do not necessarily pass judgment upon those motives or on the actions that result from them.³ In The Scarlet Letter, for instance, Hawthorne’s narrator asks the audience to consider the nature of Hester’s sin and the public’s response to it, but he never definitively guides the reader to the answers to those questions; it is left to the reader to come to his or her own conclusions.

While he did not refer to his work as a novel, Hawthorne does utilize a technique employed by novelists to establish the credibility of their tales. In his prefatory essay, The Custom-House, he makes the claim that the story he relates is not entirely a work of fiction, but rather his vision of the events as informed by the notes of a predecessor in the Salem Custom-House, a Jonathan Pue. Hawthorne credits Mr. Surveyor Pue with much of the facts of the story: it should be borne carefully in mind, that the main facts of that story are authorized and authenticated by the document of Mr. Surveyor Pue. By transferring credit from himself to Pue, Hawthorne deflects potential criticism; he has become the messenger, not the originator of the tale. Interestingly, it was the more autobiographical elements of The Custom-House that drew criticism from Hawthorne’s contemporaries. The reviewer for the Salem Register, for example, claimed to have been tempted to throw away the book based on the introductory matter, finding it mean-spirited and insulting both to the men of the Custom-House and to the city of Salem.⁴ These fictional documents of Pue bring the reliability of the narrator into question; it raises the possibility that the discovery of the tale of Hester Prynne is not the only fiction in The Custom-House. While some critics disapproved of the introduction to the romance, others found the subject matter of the tale of questionable merit. Orestes Brownson, a noted political activist, preacher, and literary critic, condemned the romance with faint praise, claiming that [t]he story is told with great naturalness, ease, grace, and delicacy, but it is a story that should not have been told.⁵ Nineteenth-century reviewers worried that any discussion of adultery, even one painting a less than positive picture of the consequences of sin, would encourage others to transgress.

In spite of its intense focus on the feelings of a pair of adulterous lovers, The Scarlet Letter does not glamorize the experience. Instead, through a series of symbols, Hawthorne directs the reader’s attention to the emotional fallout that results from compounded lies. The scarlet A Hester wears upon her chest is the dominant symbol within a text filled with symbols. The letter A itself would be connected with sin for Hester’s Puritan neighbors who would have learned to read with the help of early versions of books such as The New England Primer. Such texts used rhymes based on biblical events to teach the alphabet. The letter A was accompanied by the following rhyme: In Adam’s fall, We sinned all. This allusion to original sin would connect Hester to her neighbors, who as Puritans believed in their own total depravity as a result of Adam’s choice. Additionally, like the T branded onto a thief’s flesh, the A stands for Hester’s crime, adultery. For the Puritan magistrates, this symbol would ensure that, should Hester commit this or any crime again, she would be put to death. However, the letter also comes to symbolize Hester’s role as mother in the eyes of her daughter, Pearl. When Hester chooses to throw off the mark as a declaration of her freedom from society’s restrictive definitions, Pearl refuses to return to her mother until the letter is returned to its original position. In the child’s mind, the exquisitely embroidered scarlet and gold letter means mother. Once the A is back in place, Pearl says, Now thou art my mother indeed! Even Pearl herself becomes inextricably linked with the scarlet letter: But it was a remarkable attribute of this garb, and, indeed, of the child’s whole appearance, that it irresistibly and inevitably reminded the beholder of the token which Hester Prynne was doomed to wear upon her bosom. It was the scarlet letter in another form; the scarlet letter endowed with life! Pearl’s close association with the mark of shame affects the townspeople’s and her own mother’s responses to her. Finally, Hester’s good works within her community alter the meaning of the A by the story’s end: They [the people of Boston] said that it meant Able; so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman’s strength. Her good works change how she is perceived by others, but according to Puritan tradition, those same good works would not lead to her salvation, as God alone would decide who would be saved.

While Hawthorne took his cues for how to use allegorical symbols from writers like Bunyan and Spenser, his use of historical figures grounds the text in the real world. The picture of Puritan life created by Hawthorne is colored by his study of his own Puritan ancestors. Major William Hathorne, Hawthorne’s great-great-great-grandfather, was the first of Hawthorne’s ancestors to travel to the New World and earned a reputation as a persecutor of Quakers. John Hathorne, his great-great-grandfather, served as one of the judges in the Salem witch trials; while most of the other judges later apologized for their part in the witch hysteria, Hathorne never recanted his position on the witches. Both of these men provide background for Hawthorne’s many Puritan authority figures. In addition to infusing characters of his own creation with elements of his relatives, Hawthorne makes references to specific historical individuals in The Scarlet Letter. One, Anne Hutchinson, was banished for her claims that women could be called to the ministry just as men were, as well as for her connections to the Antinomian movement, which claimed that following religious law or performing good works were not outward expressions of God’s grace and therefore had little to do with salvation. Another, Ann Hibbins—Mistress Hibbins in the novel—was tried and executed for witchcraft. The fates of both of these women remind readers of the precarious position of Hester Prynne. As a person on the edge of normal society, Hester cannot afford to cross the magistrates or the townsfolk lest she lose her daughter or, perhaps, her life. Through her fine craftsmanship, which makes her useful to the community, and her good works among the poor, which become a mark of humility, Hester creates a self that does not transgress Puritan ideals of womanhood. Still, she eventually comes to see her sin as having a consecration of its own, as she tells Dimmesdale at one point. This notion of a consecrated sin would be a more heretical thought than Anne Hutchinson’s notions regarding salvation. Mistress Hibbins’ appearance in the romance pulls to the foreground the seventeenth-century belief that the Devil walks the Earth in search of followers. Hibbins links not just the sinner Hester Prynne with the Devil but the Reverend Dimmesdale as well. Roger Chillingworth is called the Black Man, one of the Devil’s many aliases, several times throughout the novel. The severe magistrates and the women who challenge them, whether historical or fictional, serve as a contrast to The Scarlet Letter’s triangle of wife, lover, and husband. One group (the magistrates) follows a strict code of laws based on tradition; the other group (the transgressive women) follows the dictates mandated by their own ideas and desires. Hester, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth spend the romance looking for a way to navigate the gulf between these two modes of thought.

The origin of The Scarlet Letter’s struggle between tradition and desire can be seen in the two philosophies that underpin the romance. Of the basic ideals of Puritanism, Hawthorne focuses on the belief that all people are born sinners as a result of Adam and Eve’s fall, that Christ’s sacrifice was for the chosen only, and that constant self-examination is required of all believers to keep from sinning. Added to those Puritan beliefs are the ideas of the transcendentalists, in particular the notions that the divine permeates everything and that sin is not necessarily an act of evil but rather one of ignorance. Puritanism and transcendentalism drive the characters in The Scarlet Letter. Dimmesdale is, for the most part, a model Puritan; his continual self-reflection should prevent him from sinning and yet it does not. Since he cannot embrace the notion that sin does not exist, Dimmesdale will find it difficult to adopt transcendental ideals. Hester, on the other hand, with her focus on survival in the present, leaves Puritan ideals behind in favor of a more transcendental way of viewing the world: she looks within herself for the divine, as the community around her does not seem to embody it. Like Dimmesdale, though, she does not completely transcend her condition, as she is still driven by her desires.

The legacy of The Scarlet Letter then rests on Hawthorne’s ability to navigate his own past and infuse it with the present (both his own and that of his readers). The philosophical romance examines what can be seen as the human condition. In this case, Hester Prynne provides the reader with a means for exploring the nature of sin, faith, and identity. While she may exist in a seventeenth-century Boston setting, and her isolation is a result of that time and place, Hester is also a character who speaks to the modern world, as people continue to create their own identities while balancing the desires of conflicting authorities with their own needs. Hester must create an identity separate from family, church, and state, and in doing so, she becomes an icon for her community, someone to confide in and look up to. Her notions of sin and faith resonate with many modern readers, for they center on the self. Ultimately, she must become the beginning and ending of her own universe, for those around her are not dependable. This independence creates a character that, more so than any other in the text, embodies the consistent American ideal of the outsider who perseveres through hard work.

Anissa M. Graham is an instructor of English at the University of North Alabama where she teaches composition and introduction to literature courses. Her work as a scholar includes examinations of eighteenth- and nineteeth-century Gothic literature and popular culture.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

MUCH TO THE AUTHOR’S SURPRISE (IF HE MAY SAY SO WITHOUT additional offence) considerably to his amusement, he finds that his sketch of official life, introductory to The Scarlet Letter, has created an unprecedented excitement in the respectable community around him. It could hardly have been more violent, indeed, had he burned down the Custom-House, and quenched its last smoking ember in the blood of a certain venerable personage, against whom he is supposed to cherish a particular malevolence. As the public disapprobation would weigh heavily on him, were he to be conscious of deserving it, the author begs to say, that he has carefully read over the introductory pages, with a purpose to alter or expunge whatever might be found to be amiss, and to make the best reparation in his power for the atrocities of which he has been adjudged guilty. But it appears to him, that the only remarkable features of the sketch are its frank and genuine good-humor, and the general accuracy with which he has conveyed his sincere impressions of the characters therein described. As to enmity, or ill-feeling of any kind, personal, or political, he utterly disclaims such motives. The sketch might, perhaps, have been wholly omitted, without loss to the public, or detriment to the book; but, having undertaken to write it, he conceives that it could not have been done in a better or a kindlier spirit, nor, so far as his abilities availed, with a livelier effect of the truth.

The author is constrained, therefore, to republish his introductory sketch without the change of a word.

SALEM, MARCH 30, 1850

THE CUSTOM-HOUSE

INTRODUCTORY TO THE SCARLET LETTER

IT IS A LITTLE REMARKABLE, THAT—THOUGH DISINCLINED TO TALK overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends—an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me, in addressing the public. The first time was three or four years since, when I favored the reader—inexcusably, and for no earthly reason, that either the indulgent reader or the intrusive author could imagine—with a description of my way of life in the deep quietude of an Old Manse. And now—because, beyond my deserts, I was happy enough to find a listener or two on the former occasion— I again seize the public by the button, and talk of my three years’ experience in a Custom-House. The example of the famous P. P., Clerk of this Parish, was never more faithfully followed. The truth seems to be, however, that, when he casts his leaves forth upon the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him, better than most of his schoolmates and lifemates. Some authors, indeed, do far more than this, and indulge themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as could fittingly be addressed, only and exclusively, to the one heart and mind of perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at large on the wide world, were certain to find out the divided segment of the writer’s own nature, and complete his circle of existence by bringing him into communion with it. It is scarcely decorous, however, to speak all, even where we speak impersonally. But—as thoughts are frozen and utterance benumbed, unless the speaker stand in some true relation with his audience—it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a kind and apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening to our talk; and then, a native reserve being thawed by this genial consciousness, we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind its veil. To this extent and within these limits, an author, methinks, may be autobiographical, without violating either the reader’s rights or his own.

It will be seen, likewise, that this Custom-House sketch has a certain propriety, of a kind always recognized in literature, as explaining how a large portion of the following pages came into my possession, and as offering proofs of the authenticity of a narrative therein contained. This, in fact, a desire to put myself in my true position as editor, or very little more, of the most prolix among the tales that make up my volume, this, and no other, is my true reason for assuming a personal relation with the public. In accomplishing the main purpose, it has appeared allowable, by a few extra touches, to give a faint representation of a mode of life not heretofore described, together with some of the characters that move in it, among whom the author happened to make one.

In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century ago, in the days of old King Derby was a bustling wharf, but which is now burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial life; except, perhaps, a bark or brig, half-way down its melancholy length, discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out her cargo of firewood, at the head, I say, of this dilapidated wharf, which the tide often overflows, and along which, at the base and in the rear of the row of buildings, the track of many languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty grass, here, with a view from its front windows adown this not very enlivening prospect, and thence across the harbour, stands a spacious edifice of brick. From the loftiest point of its roof, during precisely three and a half hours of each forenoon, floats or droops, in breeze or calm, the banner of the republic; but with the thirteen stripes turned vertically, instead of horizontally, and thus indicating that a civil, and not a military post of Uncle Sam’s government, is here established. Its front is ornamented with a portico of half a dozen wooden pillars, supporting a balcony, beneath which a flight of wide granite steps descends towards the street. Over the entrance hovers an enormous specimen of the American eagle, with outspread wings, a shield before her breast, and, if I recollect aright, a bunch of intermingled thunderbolts and barbed arrows in each claw. With the customary infirmity of temper that characterizes this unhappy fowl, she appears, by the fierceness of her beak and eye and the general truculency of her attitude, to threaten mischief to the inoffensive community; and especially to warn all citizens, careful of their safety, against intruding on the premises which she overshadows with her wings. Nevertheless, vixenly as she looks, many people are seeking, at this very moment, to shelter themselves under the wing of the federal eagle; imagining, I presume, that her bosom has all the softness and snugness of an eider-down pillow. But she has no great tenderness, even in her best of moods, and, sooner or later, oftener soon than late, is apt to fling off her nestlings with a scratch of