- Quaker
- member of the Religious Society of Friends, founded by George
Fox. Considered heretic by the Puritans--when they first entered
Massachusetts in 1656 (after the date of this story) some were
expelled, and then hung on Boston Common if they returned--a statue
of one such Quaker, Mary Dyer (1659), now sits in front of the
Massachusetts State House. See Hawthorne's story, "The Gentle Boy" (1832). Note
that Quakers today sometimes still use the terms "thee"
and "thou" for other people, but in Puritan times these
were familiar pronouns, used for children, loved ones, servants, or
in church, while the formal "you" was reserved for
non-family members or those higher in rank.
- religion and law were almost
identical
- the first governments of the Pilgrim colonies were really
theocracies--government by elders who had both religious and
political power--only adult male church members could vote. (Though
you can see from this chapter that women exercised considerable
power behind the scenes and in their family and small societies.)
Direct royal power and law was not asserted over these chartered
corporations until later. Popular perception of the Puritans today
is that they were too stern in punishments, anti-women and
anti-Native American, bigoted, completely unfair in trials of
people for witchcraft and others they persecuted, superstitious,
hypocritical, carnivores of turkey meat and deer for
Thanksgiving--and basically were unfit to be the forefathers of our
politically correct generation. One of your jobs in reading this
book might be to examine it critically to see if it really backs up
those preconceptions.
One of the themes of this novel is the relationship of the
individual with society, the community around one. This theme
is complicated here because the church and the civil town
were so close.
- Is there no law for it?
- The Bible used by the Puritans states, "Thou shalt not
commit adultery." (Exodus 20:14). Leviticus 20:10 states,
"If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both
the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death." A
1641 Boston law provided for death as punishment (the scaffold then
was used only for executions, not the pillory). English law at the
time provided for only a small fine. In Boston in 1644, one Mary
Latham and her partner James Britton were reported in John
Winthrop's journal to have been put to death for adultery. More
usually, public whipping was the punishment in Puritan
Massachusetts. Hawthorne's ancestor Major John Hathorne in 1688
was magistrate in Salem and ordered Hester Craford to be severely
whipped in public after she gave birth to an illegitimate child. A
Plymouth law of 1694 called for the display of an A on the dress.
Hawthorne recorded this in his journal of about 1844 and had
written a story in 1837,
"Endicott and the Red Cross," in which a Salem woman,
required to wear the red letter A, had fantastically embroidered
it. It is important to understand that Hester Prynne here is
let off with what some think is a comparatively light punishment,
and that the Puritan elders felt they needed to find out who
the father was, not so much to punish Hester, as to help take
proper care of the child and single mother. Women and children
should not be taken advantage of by selfish men, they thought.
One theme of the book is that of "law"--the Old Law
as in the Old Testament, where the text was engraved by God on
tablets, and the New Law, as in the New Testament, where the law
must be interpreted in the hearts of men. In the New Testament,
Jesus says to those who would kill an adulteress, "Let him who
is without sin cast the first stone," thus suggesting an
interpretation of the law based on love, even for sinners. How does
this story present the conflict between the two laws, for the
Puritans and the characters? Adultery might be technically against
the law in the modern Western world but such laws are only rarely
enforced now, and such laws seem to modify human sexual behavior
very little anyway. Often they are used to oppress female sexual
behavior and allow men to philander in secret--the "double
standard"--since pregnancy and childbirth are more difficult
to conceal. Criminalizing female adultery makes the child an
outcast and burdens the mother with raising the child herself.
- sumptuary regulations
- laws governing personal or moral behavior, usually excessive
spending or clothing, both religious and to preserve class
distinctions. The significance of all this is made clearer later,
when we see that Hester works at embroidery, and her customers are
the Puritan leaders who were allowed to wear such finery. Also, we
see that Hester is already recognized as an artist with her
needlework--perhaps she is separated from people around her just as
Hawthorne the novelist was in the Custom House.
- show your scarlet letter
- scarlet is a bright red, usually red-orange. The significance
here is that the punishment would be effective only if the shame of
appearing in public with the letter on her chest caused Hester to
repent and name the father of her illegitimate child. Since she
refuses to do that in the next few chapters, the letter starts
losing this first significance. Hester's fancy embroidery of the
letter is referred to, but Hawthorne does not explain whether
it is to conceal and camouflage the letter, or to defiantly
make it more visible and personal.
- the image of Divine Maternity
- i.e., Mary, mother of Jesus. Critics such as Nina Baym have
pointed out that Hawthorne wrote these words not long after his
mother died, and that the passion through the book is surely that
of a son justifying his mother (who was not accepted by her in-laws
after her husband died--and perhaps because her first child was
born earlier than nine months after marriage) and not so much that
of a Salem son rejecting his Puritan forefathers. It should be
pointed out, however, that the Virgin Mary as an icon was a subject
of violent Puritan attack. Hawthorne through his life seemed to be
fascinated by Roman Catholic imagery (his daughter became a nun).
In England the pre-Raphaelite artists and writers a little later
used such imagery to challenge the commercial Victorian
intellectual world around them.
- shield of arms
- The flashback to Hester's home and parents is matched at
the end of the story by this device of a coat-of-arms (and so
making what is called a 'frame' This shows that Hester is
a lady, a noble person by both birth and character. We can identify
with her--the author has placed her in a time distant from
today's republican society, but given us this hint that she is
admirable, not too rich--and we are allowed to transfer our
emotions as in a proper Romance. But the flashback also lets us see
that Hester is really a young girl (women married young then) and
not long away from home. Her husband might be looked at in the
light of psychology as her old father more than a husband toward
which she might have ambiguous feelings. So in that sense the role
that Hester plays for today's high school girls is really much
closer than one would think by counting the years.
Summary. Hester here, on the scaffold (the first of three
times in the book), is contrasted to the women of the town, who
take various views of the situation, but also she is contrasted
with Hester as a child, and some of the background of how she got
here is filled in. Even if the author hadn't told us so, the
situation is a bit hard to believe, and the scarlet letter becomes
a focus for determining what is real. This physical letter is
interpreted by those who see it from their own viewpoints, just as
what it symbolizes is. (The French painter Degas said that to draw
a crowd you draw five heads, not fifty--Hawthorne here allows five
women to talk.) The other person Hester is thinking about we will
learn later is her husband, the misshapen scholar. We conclude that
Hester is being shamed and made to wear this red A, but we are not
told why, we are held in suspense and we are forced to guess at
what is going on as the scene unfolds. The use of a lot of archaic
words here adds some historical color and contributes to the sense
of awe in the scene that the author describes. Anyway, it seems
that Hester appears as a beautiful, pale damsel in distress.
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