215).

The young Hester Prynne on the pillory responds to her circumstance with defiance and shame, which she combines with remorse over the personal dimension of adultery, the betrayal of her husband. By the end of the book, however, Hester has internalized some part of the society’s judgment of her behavior, and views her crime as one of serious moral consequence.

From the novel’s opening, Hester’s response to her crime also has an external component, the exotic letter she has stitched with the same flamboyance she later devotes to Pearl’s costumes. Hester’s needlework gives expression to “a rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic” in her nature. Her beautiful renderings might also constitute an escape for Hester from the shame of her predicament, the dreary isolation of her daily existence, and the plodding literalism of the Puritan society, were Hester not so burdened by her sin. Her needlework

might have been a mode of expressing, and therefore soothing, the passion of her life. Like all other joys, she rejected it as sin. This morbid meddling of conscience with an immaterial matter betokened, it is to be feared, no genuine and steadfast penitence, but something doubtful, something that might be deeply wrong, beneath (p. 70).

Given Hawthorne’s notorious preoccupation with ancestral sin, The Scarlet Letter could also be characterized as a “morbid meddling” of conscience and art. In Studies in Classic American Literature, D. H. Lawrence characterized Hawthorne’s writing as a dressing up of unpleasant, internal material: “That blue-eyed darling Nathaniel knew disagreeable things in his inner soul. He was careful to send them out in disguise.” Hester’s artistry, coupled with the errant intelligence that Hester allows to develop in her isolation, invite the speculation that she might have expressed her artistic ability as a writer. But Hawthorne had no use for women writers, pronouncing them “without a single exception, detestable.” The success of such female authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom’s Cabin immediately became a best seller, infuriated Hawthorne. Surely he exaggerated their dominance in American literary life and the effect of their popularity on his own success when he wrote that “America is now wholly given over to a d—d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash—and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed.” Though he created in Hester Prynne a heroine with a depth of perception and subversive intelligence that are consistent with literary creation, having her unite her intellect and her art in fiction writing possibly would have changed Hawthorne’s apparent estimation of Hester from that of an ennobled victim of the relations between men and women to a genuine threat to the advantaged position of the former. That the form Hester’s art takes is needlework—“then as now, almost the only one within a woman’s grasp”—should not diminish the role of her creations, which sustain Hester and Pearl economically, express what remains of Hester’s passionate nature, and over time earn Hester a role in the community.

Rational Views of Hester’s Crime

The perspectives explored in the novel, then, provide responses to Hester’s crime that, while varied in nature, are uniformly extreme in degree. Understanding the act from the disparate perspectives presented is like reconstructing a disaster from the reflections on the charred and shattered surfaces of shrapnel. The psychological traits of the characters and their relationships to the adulterous affair so color their responses that the nature of the central issue is hard to discern. Neither collectively nor individually do these views jibe with contemporary views of adultery, to the extent that “contemporary views” can be known. While the existence, in many states, of laws prescribing adultery suggests continued intolerance, for decades these laws have been dead letters, serving at most as an expression of a community’s mores, but not as live instruments of the State’s penal authority. The existence of these laws, coupled with their nonenforcement, probably mirrors the views of contemporary American society. The distilled message from the repeated polling of the American people following the revelation of President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky in 1998 is that most Americans continue to view adultery as wrong in the abstract but are uneasy with attaching public consequences to its commission. If a disparity exists between prevalent views of adultery and the views embodied by the Puritan patriarchs and, with some gradations, by the Boston community and the four central characters, The Scarlet Letter remains an affecting dissection of shame, primarily in the person of Hester Prynne, and of guilt, primarily in the person of Arthur Dimmesdale.

One explanation for what seem hugely disproportionate responses to the crime of adultery is that the crime symbolized by the letter A and identified by a veiled reference in the title is a stand-in for a darker, unspoken sin. Scholars have uncovered court records and other materials documenting a scandal involving the ancestors of Elizabeth Manning Hathorne, Hawthorne’s mother. In 1681 the sisters of Nicholas Manning were convicted of incest with their brother Nicholas Manning. The sisters were sentenced to a night in prison and to being publicly flogged while naked. In addition, they were forced to sit in the town’s meetinghouse with signs affixed to them reading “This is for whorish carriage with my naturall brother.” Within a few years of the conviction of the Manning sisters, the law books of Massachusetts made the wearing of the letter I the mandatory sentence for incest. Gloria C. Erlich first explored the probable influence of the Manning episode on Hawthorne’s fiction in Family Themes and Hawthorne’s Fiction: The Tenacious Web. In Hawthorne’s Secret: An Un-Told Tale, Philip Young postulates that when Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter, he had in mind a woman who gives birth to her brother’s child, and not necessarily an adulteress.

But the incestuous conduct of Hawthorne’s ancestors two centuries earlier is not an obviously more reasonable basis for the communal outrage and psychological torment depicted in The Scarlet Letter. Nathaniel’s Hawthorne’s unusually close relationship with his sister Elizabeth has caused some to speculate that the source of the author’s anxiety about the subject was more immediate than an ancient familial scandal. Hawthorne’s father died when his only son was four, leaving Elizabeth Hathorne destitute and with no choice but to move with her three small children into her brother’s home. As his mother withdrew into a hermit’s existence, rarely leaving her bedroom, Nathaniel and his attractive, strong-willed, and literate sister, Elizabeth, or Ebe, became constant companions.