Notes from the Reading Table: The Scarlet Letter

In recent times I have read The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in 1850. It is an interesting book, and very quotable. I intend to quote it a lot. Click below at your peril, O reader; there is a lot of text.

The book is about guilt, secrets and sin; and specifically, the sin of adultery, which Hester Prynne (the heroine) has committed. For this, she is sentenced, by the stern puritan elders, to wear the Scarlet Letter of the title, a red "A" embroidered on her clothes, for the rest of her days. (Her youth and pregnancy save her from simply being executed.) Hawthorne does a very good job of emphasising the seriousness of such matters in puritan society, and in general of evoking the grimness and strictness of the early American puritans, who having sailed the Atlantic to escape persecution for their faith proceeded to persecute anyone who disagreed with them while passing laws against such dangerous practices as wearing colourful clothing. However, he generally delegates judgement of both the puritans' harshness and Hester's sin to the reader (despite his continuous authorial moralising), which I account a wise decision. Because Hawthorne sketches the puritans with enough respect and even sympathy to make them believable, I found myself getting very angry with puritan society; whereas most modern depictions of judgemental religious types just make me angry at the writer for their self-righteous reduction of anything they disapprove of to crude cartoonish stereotypes.

The Scarlet Letter, as said, is a study in guilt and secrets, and one of its fundamental arguments (as the book itself declares) is "Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!" This is in relation to the puritan priest, Arthur Dimmesdale, who has secrets of his own to keep; and whose guilt is made more poisonous than Hester's for being kept bottled up inside. Hester has her life made thoroughly miserable by the long penance of the Scarlet Letter, which makes her an outcast and a pariah for many years, but it's made clear that the Reverend has it worse - his guilt festers, and being a tender-hearted spiritual type, his life is made hell by the total disconnect between guilt and outward appearance. He can't properly confess for fear of scandalising his flock, who are devoted to him but who would be utterly horrified to know what he's done; so he tries telling them how evil he is, without going into the details:

More than once, Mr. Dimmesdale had gone into the pulpit... cleared his throat and drawn in the long, deep, and tremulous breath, which, when sent forth again, would come burdened with the black secret of his soul. More than once - nay, more than a hundred times - he had actually spoken! Spoken! But how? He had told his hearers that he was altogether vile, a viler companion of the vilest, the worst of sinners, an abomination, a thing of unimaginable iniquity; and that the only wonder was that they did not see his wretched body shrivelled up before their eyes by the burning wrath of the Almighty!

Unfortunately, his half-confessions are worse than none at all:

They heard it all, and did but reverence him the more... "The godly youth!" said they among themselves. "The saint on earth! Alas, if he discern such sinfulness in his own white soul, what horrid spectacle would be behold in thine or mine!"... He had spoken the very truth, and transformed it into the veriest falsehood.

These were (technically) believers in Utter Depravity, but still, could not be brought to see their minister as Utterly Depraved in the absence of knowing the details by which his Utter Depravity should manifest itself.

On that issue, though - and on others - I have my doubts on how accurately Hawthorne captures his puritan ancestors' religious attitudes. One would expect puritans, at some point, to refer to the Biblical account of the woman taken in adultery, or maybe (being, y'know, Christians) to refer to Christ once or twice in a novel which focuses on issues of guilt and sin. But they don't. The only mention of Christ (that I remember) is near the beginning, when Hester comes out of prison with a baby in her arms and the Scarlet Letter on her breast, to stand before the public for three hours as part of her punishment: Hawthorne writes that if there had been a Papist among the Puritans, he would have seen in Hester & sprog an inverted reminder of the BVM and the infant Christ, working such effect that the world was only the darker for this woman's beauty, and the more lost for the infant that she had borne.

However, even if Christ isn't too big a deal to Hawthorne's puritans (and in fairness, talking about Christ would have immediately gotten Hawthorne into serious theologising, which he may have felt uninclined to do, or felt unnecessary or inappropriate to the novel, or felt himself inadequate to), the spiritual universe assumed by the book is Christian, and very real - especially the Devil. There's a town witch, a relative of the governor, burnt (according to the author) some years after the events of the book, and she speaks as an emissary of the Devil (or the Black Man, as she refers to him) on several occasions. Once, she asks Hester, "Wilt thou go with us tonight? There will be a merry company in the forest; and I well-nigh promised the Black Man that comely Hester Prynne should make one", and later she invites the Reverend Dimmesdale along. On both occasions the author himself casts doubt on whether this explicitly happened or was just a parable of spiritual conflict, however (the story being framed as based on old documents he'd dug up, he can do this). When the Reverend Dimmesdale decides to undergo primal scream therapy in the marketplace at midnight, the witch sticks her head out of her window, mistaking it for the clamour of the fiends and night-hags, with whom she was well known to make excursions into the forest.

Although this is in the background rather than the foreground, the first half of the novel is somewhat oppressive and bleak due to this lopsided cosmology - the world of men is constricting and cruel, the Devil's ambassadors walk freely and fly with night-hags in the forest, and God is silent, having left the world to its own devices. Then, however, the story has a scene actually in the forest, and the novel suddenly changes tone - somewhat disconcertingly - from the constricted society of men to the airy spaces of nature, and suggestions of anarchy and freedom and escape. Out from under the thumb of society the soul can breathe more freely, and forget about the weight of conscience and obligation a minute, and become more amoral and pagan (or at least, more as we imagine the pagans to be). The overtones of the Devil's presence also change significantly: in the setting of the town, through the filter of puritan society, he's Satan the devourer, the seeker of damnation and destroyed of all good things; but in the forest, conditioning and morality drop away, and he becomes a more pan-like figure. Hester's daughter Pearl (wild and elf-life herself) requests of her mother a story of the Black Man, how he haunts this forest, and carries a book with him - a big, heavy book with iron clasps; and how this ugly Black Man offers his book and an iron pen to everybody that meets him here among the trees; and they are to write their names with their own blood. And then he sets his mark on their bosoms! She also requests, given that they're in the forest, that if the Black Man comes along, her mother will let her stay a moment, and look at him, with his big book under his arm? (Pearl hasn't quite grasped that the Devil is supposed to be bad news, or indeed many other things that good puritan children should know.)

The anarchic effect of the forest also causes renewed temptations to burn within the breast of the poor minister, who (on walking back from it) feels the sudden urge to speak horrible blasphemies into the ear of everyone he meets, or teach the young children swearwords. The narrator speaks of his being tempted by Satan, but the impression isn't of Satan the roaring lion, the malice of the alien in Independence Day ("What do you want us to do?" "DIEEEEE!"), but of a Puck-like, mischievous, Elberry-style Satan.

The witch's nocturnal cavortings also take on a less demonic tone: Many a church member saw I, walking behind the [processional] music, that has danced in the same measure with me, when Somebody was fiddler, and, it might be, an Indian powwow or a Lapland wizard changing hands with us! ...Dost thou think I have been to the forest so many times, and have yet no skill to judge who else has been there? Yea, though no leaf of the wild garlands, which they wore while they danced, be left in their hair! This might be said to be "more pagan" as well as "less demonic", but in truth, Christian society had dancing and garlands in the hair for centuries; it's only in puritan society that dancing and fiddling are to be frowned upon and exiled to the forest. It's in the puritan conception that Satan has a monopoly not only on devouring souls but also on dancing and partying; Christian society previously had a non-controlling share in the enterprises of Bacchus and Pan, but the puritans sold the entire franchise off to Satan for the proverbial mess of pottage. The author's aware of this defect, and doesn't take it to be the norm for society: he refers to the early puritans as being then in the first stages of joyless deportment, and the offspring of sires who had known how to be merry, in their day... the generation next to the early emigrants wore the blackest shade of Puritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all the subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up. We have yet to learn again the forgotten art of gayety. (This is from chapter 21, "The New England Holiday", which contains frequent references to the old land, England, where people knew how to make merry. It would probably be no consolation to Hawthorne that we've largely forgotten it now as well.)

At the climax of the book, things change, however; it's not stated that any spiritual agency was at work, but there is a quite definite sense of catharsis and grace - not only of the character, but also of their society and the novel as a whole, as the ending triumphs over the constriction and witch-haunted atmosphere of the earlier parts, and also moves away from the forest and its dreams of abdication of ties and bonds and responsibility. God hasn't appeared; but the world is not God-forsaken at the end of the novel, as it seemed for much of it.

To rewind a bit... one other thing missing from the novel was the lack of certain obvious inferences about Original Sin. This bothered me, because the novel was supposed to be about puritans, and puritans loved their Utter Depravity, and so I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and for the writer to start treating the Scarlet Letter as a metaphor for the inherent sinfulness of the unhappy race of Adam, and to make plain that, in fact, Hester wasn't unusual, because everyone else around was a sinner too. OK, maybe it would have trite for the author to moralise in that way, but at least one of the puritan ministers could have said that. (Hester finds herself frequently the subject of some sermon on sin; is it too unreasonable to expect that some priest might make that sermon on how everyone else is sinful too?) Additionally, the mixed lot of humankind could be seen in Pearl, wild and wilful, dealing with the consequences of her parents' sin, affected by it not for the better; her ostracism from the townsfolk mirroring the way "we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear", as Chesterton has it. But the insight that, actually, everyone's in Hester Prynne's situation only occurs to Hester (the character least able to derive any benefit from it), and, weirdly, is attributed to the whispers of Satan:

She was terrified by the revelations that were thus made. What were they? Could they be other than the insidious whispers of the bad angel, who would fain have persuaded the struggling woman, as yet only half his victim, that the outward guise of purity was but a lie, and that, if truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom besides Hester Prynne's?... Sometimes, the red infamy upon her breast would give a sympathetic throb, as she passed near a venerable minister or magistrate, the model of piety and justice, to whom that age of antique reverence looked up as to a mortal man in fellowship with angels. "What evil thing is at hand?" would Hester say to herself. Lifting her reluctant eyes, there would be nothing human within the scope of view, save the form of this earthly saint!

Satan has a compelling reason to voice these thoughts to Hester, however - O Fiend, whose talisman was that fatal symbol, wouldst thou leave nothing, whether in youth or age, for this poor sinner to revere? - but given the puritan attitude to Utter Depravity, everyone in the novel should have been thinking the exact same thing, and they weren't. OK, narrative necessity (the townsfolk need to be judgemental and inflexible for the story to work), but still...

I've written mostly on the things I felt to be missing, because they were some of the things that struck me most; and also because a book can sometimes be more enjoyable for honest disagreement - it becomes a little like having a vigorous but friendly argument. And The Scarlet Letter was very much on this level - absorbing, but I wasn't passively absorbed. (Most of my reaction was along the lines of "dude, where's the Original Sin?" and "dude, someone needs to run amok in this town with a cricket bat", but... yeah.) Nevertheless, there's lots of interesting quotes and passages - his passing references to that alchemy of quiet malice, by which women can concoct a subtile poison from ordinary trifles (mercifully, the German ladies don't seem prone on this, but I remember English girls as being very vicious) and man's faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil's office; and a fine passage on mercy:

I said but now, that there could be no good event for him, or thee, or me, who are here wandering together in this gloomy maze of evil, and stumbling at every step over the guilt wherewith we have strewn our path. It is not so! There might be good for thee, and thee alone, since thou hast been deeply wronged, and hast it at thy will to pardon. Wilt thou give up that only privilege? Wilt thou reject that priceless benefit?

Other notable quotes: Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart!

The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers - stern and wild ones - and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss. Reverend Dimmesdale also finds guilt a good teacher; he is able to be much more merciful, and have a kinder approach to poor sinners, due to the guilt that eats him up inside. Although he finds this hard to credit -

As concerns the good which I may appear to do, I have no faith in it. It must needs be a delusion. What can a ruined soul like mine effect towards the redemption of other souls? - or a polluted soul, towards their purification?

In this he echoes the concerns of the Lollards, who considered that only those in a state of grace should be priests or governors. But Dimmesdale is flat-out wrong here, and in making him so, Hawthorne effectively takes more the position of the Catholic Church, that even a sinful priest can legitimately mediate grace - a connection that Hawthorne would doubtless not have enjoyed, had he made it.

Hawthorne describes the class of puritan divines as follows: All that they lacked was the gift that descended upon the chosen disciples at Pentecost, in tongues of flame; symbolising, it would seem, not the power of speech in foreign and unknown languages, but that of addressing the whole human brotherhood in the heart's native language. These fathers, otherwise so apostolic, lacked Heaven's last and rarest attestation of their office, the Tongue of Flame. They would have vainly sought - had they ever dreamed of seeking - to express the highest truths through the humblest medium of familiar words and images. What Hawthorne kindly omits from mentioning is that the puritan patriarchs had excommunicated vast chunks of "the humblest medium of familiar words and images". Christ on the cross, and the stained-glass windows that were instruction for the illiterate, were familiar images until the puritans came along and vandalised as many churches as they could get their hands on. Images in general were spurned by the puritans, and dancing, and a lot of music, and plays - the English mediaeval mystery plays dramatised large chunks of the Bible, until the puritans decided to respond to them not by rewriting and adapting the theology but by throwing them out of the window. These were people not only unblessed with Tongues of Flame, but quite determined to mutilate their natural tongues because they had betimes spoken bad words or popish things.

And be the stern and sad truth spoken, that the breach which guilt has once made into the human soul is never, in this mortal state, repaired - I don't think this is entirely true, and it arguably reflects the state of puritan society and theology in the novel - very fixed on sin, no vision of Christ (and hence, little sense that "by his stripes we are healed"). Again, though, this arguably has a narrative function: the novel is kept essentially a grace-free zone, in which society and guilt can only be run away from (the forest), until the final catharsis.

In addition to these matters, Hawthorne also wanders further afield in time and subject matter, and briefly discusses feminism: A tendency to speculation, though it may keep woman quiet, as it does man, yet makes her sad. She discerns, it may be, such a hopeless task before her. As a first step, the whole system of society is to be torn down and built up anew. Then, the very nature of the opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit which has become like nature, is to be essentially modified before woman can be allowed to assume what seems a fair and suitable position. Finally, all other difficulties being obviated, woman cannot take advantage of these preliminary reforms until she herself shall have undergone a still mightier change; in which, perhaps, the ethereal essence, wherein she has her truest life, will be found to have evaporated.

He also has Prynne, at the end, become a believer that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness. I wonder how she, and Hawthorne, would have regarded how relations between man and woman have proceeded since; I doubt the sexual revolution would be regarded as the fulfilment of these hopes.

And finally, he considers Richard Dawkins and his ilk: In their researches into the human frame, it may be that the higher and more subtile faculties of such men were materialised, and that they lost the spiritual view of existence amid the intricacies of that wondrous mechanism, which seemed to involve art enough to comprise all of life within itself. The Rev. Dimmesdale is less sympathetic to these characters than the narrator, however, although his burden of guilt makes him even somewhat envious of them - Were I an atheist - a man devoid of conscience - a wretch with coarse and brutal instincts - I might have found peace, long ere now. Nay, I never should have lost it! A fit note to end on; hopefully, within the next weeks, I shall have some thoughts on Pullman's Northern Lights and Dawkins' God Delusion typed up, and we shall ponder their wretchedness and coarse and brutal instincts (or higher and more subtile faculties, as the case may be). Until then -

Preach! Write! Act! Do anything, save to lie down and die! Words to live by.