Despite the novel’s frequent references to Dimmesdale’s repressed passion, a sexual encounter between Hester and him seems as remote from the events described in the novel as the Puritan penal system is from contemporary mores. In Studies in Classic American Literature (see “For Further Reading”), D. H. Lawrence assumed that Hester seduced Dimmesdale, an explanation that renders the act of adultery more plausible, but not any easier to imagine. Depriving his readers of the means of imagining the event that triggers Dimmesdale’s unraveling, Chillingworth’s vendetta, Pearl’s birth, and Hester’s disgrace seems to be a deliberate part of Hawthorne’s artistic design.

The crime that gives the novel its name and preoccupies all of the characters, then, is shrouded as much by the symbolism that overshadows the thing symbolized as by the shame of the characters. Without an account of the criminal act, readers of The Scarlet Letter apprehend Hester’s crime through the refracted light of multiple moral perspectives. In that he is Hester’s creator, Hawthorne’s view of Hester’s crime is at least interesting, if not determinative of how readers of his day, or of ours, should respond. The narrator and the Puritan community both overtly pass judgment on Hester’s act, although the former vacillates in the harshness with which he judges her. In addition, each of the three important adult characters—Arthur Dimmesdale, Roger Chillingworth, and Hester Prynne—present a particular response to Hester’s adultery that may inform our own. The fourth important character, Pearl, though a child and only intuitively aware of the crime, offers an additional perspective as well as a real challenge to a response of unmediated censure, for if the Puritans cannot qualify their judgment of Hester’s crime, they cannot acknowledge what Hester calls its “consecration.” Though the perspectives of Hawthorne, the novel’s narrator, the community, and each of the novel’s four main characters say more about these individuals and their Puritan society than about adultery, each perspective contributes to the reader’s multidimensional experience of the novel’s central, unmentionable event.

Perspectives on Hester’s Crime

Hawthorne’s ambivalence toward his Puritan ancestry complicates the attempts to understand his response to Hester Prynne, her act of adultery, and the punishment inflicted on her. In the novel’s introductory section “The Custom-House,” Hawthorne refers to the “stern and black-browed Puritans” who were his forebears: William and John Hathorne, the author’s great-great-great grandfather and great-great-grandfather, who lived in Salem during the mid-1600s. These men were magistrates, and the records of early Massachusetts history, with which Hawthorne was acquainted, contain accounts of each of these men inflicting humiliating and often brutal sentences. The elder Magistrate Hathorne, for example, sentenced a burglar to having his ear lopped off and the letter B branded onto his forehead.

But the notoriety of the Hawthorne forebears derives primarily from their treatment of women. In their roles as magistrates and Puritan patriarchs, the Hathornes had no squeamishness about inflicting physical punishments on women for their religion, sexual behavior, and, most infamously, supposed practice of witchcraft. The reference in “The Custom-House” to the “incident of [William Hathorne’s] hard severity towards a woman” relates to the treatment of a Quaker woman, who was tied half-naked to the back of a cart and flogged ten times each in Boston, Salem, and Dedham, at the honorable William Hathorne’s direction. The Records of the Salem Quarterly Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts (Salem, 1914; vol. 4, p. 84) reveals a sentence issued by William Hathorne against an erring woman in November of 1668:

Hester Craford, for fornication ... as she confessed, was ordered to be severaly whipped and that security be given to save the town from the charge of keeping the child.... The judgment of her being whipped was respitte for a month or six weeks after the birth of her child, and it was left to the Worshipful Major William Hathorne to see it executed on a lecture day.

This passage likely influenced Hawthorne’s choice of name for his heroine in The Scarlet Letter. William Hathorne’s fifth son, John, added to the notoriety of the family name in his role examining many of those accused of being witches during the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692, a role he never repented even when other magistrates who served on the same panel expressed their remorse. Most of those accused and executed as witches were women. Hawthorne describes his feelings about his Hathorne ancestors with a mix of horror, awe, and kinship, asking that he not be cursed for their deeds, at the same time imagining their disdain for their descendant and noting that “strong traits of their nature have intertwined themselves with mine” (p. 11). Critics generally take the Hawthorne’s addition of a w to his ancestral name as evidence of a desire to distance himself from his ancestors; possibly, though, Hawthorne sought to spare the Hathornes the association with his literary career, which he characterized in “The Custom-House” as a source of ignominy.

Hawthorne’s relationship to William and John Hathorne is similar in its ambivalence to that of the narrator of The Scarlet Letter to the Puritan patriarchs who impose sentence on Hester Prynne. In describing the Boston governor and the assemblage of elders who preside over the exposure of the scarlet letter, the narrator vacillates between qualified praise and open dissent:

[Governor Bellingham] was not ill fitted to be the head and representative of a community, which owed its origin and progress, and its present state of development, not to the impulses of youth, but to the stern and tempered energies of manhood, and the sombre sagacity of age; accomplishing so much, precisely because it imagined and hoped so little. The other eminent characters, by whom the chief ruler was surrounded, were distinguished by a dignity of mien, belonging to a period when the forms of authority were felt to possess the sacredness of divine institutions. They were, doubtless, good men, just, and sage (p. 55).

The narrator’s view of Hester’s crime is as complicated as his view of her persecutors. While observing the unsuitedness of the Puritan patriarchs to pass judgment on Hester’s crime, and commenting on the cruelty and coarseness of the Puritan crowd that gathers before the prison house, the narrator repeatedly refers to Hester’s crime as a sin, or a transgression of basic morality, rather than an infraction against the mores of a particular culture during a particular period.

In contrast to the complicated, internal response of Hawthorne’s narrator and likely Hawthorne himself, the Puritan community responds in a manner that is fully public and only modestly nuanced. This response immediately eclipses the crime and its immediate consequences in the first months following the act of adultery.