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Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Nathaniel Hawthorne
American writer
born July 4, 1804, Salem, Mass., U.S.
died May 19, 1864, Plymouth, N.H.
Main
American novelist and short-story writer who was a master of the
allegorical and symbolic tale. One of the greatest fiction writers in
American literature, he is best-known for The Scarlet Letter (1850) and
The House of the Seven Gables (1851).
Early years
Hawthorne’s ancestors had lived in Salem since the 17th century. His
earliest American ancestor, William Hathorne (Nathaniel added the w to
the name when he began to write), was a magistrate who had sentenced a
Quaker woman to public whipping. He had acted as a staunch defender of
Puritan orthodoxy, with its zealous advocacy of a “pure,” unaffected
form of religious worship, its rigid adherence to a simple, almost
severe, mode of life, and its conviction of the “natural depravity” of
“fallen” man. Hawthorne was later to wonder whether the decline of his
family’s prosperity and prominence during the 18th century, while other
Salem families were growing wealthy from the lucrative shipping trade,
might not be a retribution for this act and for the role of William’s
son John as one of three judges in the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692.
When Nathaniel’s father—a ship’s captain—died during one of his voyages,
he left his young widow without means to care for her two girls and
young Nathaniel, aged four. She moved in with her affluent brothers, the
Mannings. Hawthorne grew up in their house in Salem and, for extensive
periods during his teens, in Raymond, Maine, on the shores of Sebago
Lake. He returned to Salem in 1825 after four years at Bowdoin College,
in Brunswick, Maine. Hawthorne did not distinguish himself as a young
man. Instead, he spent nearly a dozen years reading and trying to master
the art of writing fiction.
First works
In college Hawthorne had excelled only in composition and had determined
to become a writer. Upon graduation, he had written an amateurish novel,
Fanshawe, which he published at his own expense—only to decide that it
was unworthy of him and to try to destroy all copies. Hawthorne,
however, soon found his own voice, style, and subjects, and within five
years of his graduation he had published such impressive and distinctive
stories as “The Hollow of the Three Hills” and “An Old Woman’s Tale.” By
1832, “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” and “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” two of
his greatest tales—and among the finest in the language—had appeared.
“Young Goodman Brown,” perhaps the greatest tale of witchcraft ever
written, appeared in 1835.
His increasing success in placing his stories brought him a little
fame. Unwilling to depend any longer on his uncles’ generosity, he
turned to a job in the Boston Custom House (1839–40) and for six months
in 1841 was a resident at the agricultural cooperative Brook Farm, in
West Roxbury, Mass. Even when his first signed book, Twice-Told Tales,
was published in 1837, the work had brought gratifying recognition but
no dependable income. By 1842, however, Hawthorne’s writing had brought
him a sufficient income to allow him to marry Sophia Peabody; the couple
rented the Old Manse in Concord and began a happy three-year period that
Hawthorne would later record in his essay “The Old Manse.”
The presence of some of the leading social thinkers and philosophers
of his day, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, and Bronson
Alcott, in Concord made the village the centre of the philosophy of
Transcendentalism, which encouraged man to transcend the materialistic
world of experience and facts and become conscious of the pervading
spirit of the universe and the potentialities for human freedom.
Hawthorne welcomed the companionship of his Transcendentalist
neighbours, but he had little to say to them. Artists and intellectuals
never inspired his full confidence, but he thoroughly enjoyed the visit
of his old college friend and classmate Franklin Pierce, later to become
president of the United States. At the Old Manse, Hawthorne continued to
write stories, with the same result as before: literary success,
monetary failure. His new short-story collection, Mosses from an Old
Manse, appeared in 1846.
Return to Salem
A growing family and mounting debts compelled the Hawthornes’ return in
1845 to Salem, where Nathaniel was appointed surveyor of the Custom
House by the Polk administration (Hawthorne had always been a loyal
Democrat and pulled all the political strings he could to get this
appointment). Three years later the presidential election brought the
Whigs into power under Zachary Taylor, and Hawthorne lost his job; but
in a few months of concentrated effort, he produced his masterpiece, The
Scarlet Letter. The bitterness he felt over his dismissal is apparent in
“The Custom House” essay prefixed to the novel. The Scarlet Letter tells
the story of two lovers kept apart by the ironies of fate, their own
mingled strengths and weaknesses, and the Puritan community’s
interpretation of moral law, until at last death unites them under a
single headstone. The book made Hawthorne famous and was eventually
recognized as one of the greatest of American novels.
Determined to leave Salem forever, Hawthorne moved to Lenox, located
in the mountain scenery of the Berkshires in western Massachusetts.
There he began work on The House of the Seven Gables (1851), the story
of the Pyncheon family, who for generations had lived under a curse
until it was removed at last by love.
At Lenox he enjoyed the stimulating friendship of Herman Melville,
who lived in nearby Pittsfield. This friendship, although important for
the younger writer and his work, was much less so for Hawthorne.
Melville praised Hawthorne extravagantly in a review of his Mosses from
an Old Manse, and he also dedicated Moby Dick to Hawthorne. But
eventually Melville came to feel that the friendship he so ardently
pursued was one-sided. Later he was to picture the relationship with
disillusion in his introductory sketch to The Piazza Tales and depicted
Hawthorne himself unflatteringly as “Vine” in his long poem Clarel.
In the autumn of 1851 Hawthorne moved his family to another temporary
residence, this time in West Newton, near Boston. There he quickly wrote
The Blithedale Romance, which was based on his disenchantment with Brook
Farm. Then he purchased and redecorated Bronson Alcott’s house in
Concord, the Wayside. Blithedale was disappointingly received and did
not produce the income Hawthorne had expected. He was hoping for a
lucrative political appointment that would bolster his finances; in the
meantime, he wrote a campaign biography of his old friend Franklin
Pierce. When Pierce won the presidency, Hawthorne was in 1853 rewarded
with the consulship in Liverpool, Lancashire, a position he hoped would
enable him in a few years to leave his family financially secure.
Last years
The remaining 11 years of Hawthorne’s life were, from a creative point
of view, largely anticlimactic. He performed his consular duties
faithfully and effectively until his position was terminated in 1857,
and then he spent a year and a half sight-seeing in Italy. Determined to
produce yet another romance, he finally retreated to a seaside town in
England and quickly produced The Marble Faun. In writing it, he drew
heavily upon the experiences and impressions he had recorded in a
notebook kept during his Italian tour to give substance to an allegory
of the Fall of man, a theme that had usually been assumed in his earlier
works but that now received direct and philosophic treatment.
Back in the Wayside once more in 1860, Hawthorne devoted himself
entirely to his writing but was unable to make any progress with his
plans for a new novel. The drafts of unfinished works he left are mostly
incoherent and show many signs of a psychic regression, already
foreshadowed by his increasing restlessness and discontent of the
preceding half dozen years. Some two years before his death he began to
age very suddenly. His hair turned white, his handwriting changed, he
suffered frequent nosebleeds, and he took to writing the figure “64”
compulsively on scraps of paper. He died in his sleep on a trip in
search of health with his friend Pierce.
Major novels
The main character of The Scarlet Letter is Hester Prynne, a young
married woman who has borne an illegitimate child while living away from
her husband in a village in Puritan New England. The husband, Roger
Chillingworth, arrives in New England to find his wife pilloried and
made to wear the letter A (meaning adulteress) in scarlet on her dress
as a punishment for her illicit affair and for her refusal to reveal the
name of the child’s father. Chillingworth becomes obsessed with finding
the identity of his wife’s former lover. He learns that Hester’s
paramour is a saintly young minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, and
Chillingworth then proceeds to revenge himself by mentally tormenting
the guilt-stricken young man. Hester herself is revealed to be a
compassionate and splendidly self-reliant heroine who is never truly
repentant for the act of adultery committed with the minister; she feels
that their act was consecrated by their deep love for each other. In the
end Chillingworth is morally degraded by his monomaniac pursuit of
revenge, and Dimmesdale is broken by his own sense of guilt and publicly
confesses his adultery before dying in Hester’s arms. Only Hester can
face the future optimistically, as she plans to ensure the future of her
beloved little girl by taking her to Europe.
The House of the Seven Gables is a sombre study in hereditary sin
based on the legend of a curse pronounced on Hawthorne’s own family by a
woman condemned to death during the witchcraft trials. The greed and
arrogant pride of the novel’s Pyncheon family down the generations is
mirrored in the gloomy decay of their seven-gabled mansion, in which the
family’s enfeebled and impoverished poor relations live. At the book’s
end the descendant of a family long ago defrauded by the Pyncheons lifts
his ancestors’ curse on the mansion and marries a young niece of the
family.
In The Marble Faun a trio of expatriate American art students in
Italy become peripherally involved to varying degrees in the murder of
an unknown man; their contact with sin transforms two of them from
innocents into adults now possessed of a mature and critical awareness
of life’s complexity and possibilities.
Assessment
Hawthorne’s high rank among American fiction writers is the result of at
least three considerations. First, he was a skillful craftsman with an
impressive arthitectonic sense of form. The structure of The Scarlet
Letter, for example, is so tightly integrated that no chapter, no
paragraph, even, could be omitted without doing violence to the whole.
The book’s four characters are inextricably bound together in the
tangled web of a life situation that seems to have no solution, and the
tightly woven plot has a unity of action that rises slowly but
inexorably to the climactic scene of Dimmesdale’s public confession. The
same tight construction is found in Hawthorne’s other writings also,
especially in the shorter pieces, or “tales.” Hawthorne was also the
master of a classic literary style that is remarkable for its
directness, its clarity, its firmness, and its sureness of idiom.
A second reason for Hawthorne’s greatness is his moral insight. He
inherited the Puritan tradition of moral earnestness, and he was deeply
concerned with the concepts of original sin and guilt and the claims of
law and conscience. Hawthorne rejected what he saw as the
Transcendentalists’ transparent optimism about the potentialities of
human nature. Instead he looked more deeply and perhaps more honestly
into life, finding in it much suffering and conflict but also finding
the redeeming power of love. There is no Romantic escape in his works,
but rather a firm and resolute scrutiny of the psychological and moral
facts of the human condition.
A third reason for Hawthorne’s eminence is his mastery of allegory
and symbolism. His fictional characters’ actions and dilemmas fairly
obviously express larger generalizations about the problems of human
existence. But with Hawthorne this leads not to unconvincing pasteboard
figures with explanatory labels attached but to a sombre, concentrated
emotional involvement with his characters that has the power, the
gravity, and the inevitability of true tragedy. His use of symbolism in
The Scarlet Letter is particularly effective, and the scarlet letter
itself takes on a wider significance and application that is out of all
proportion to its literal character as a scrap of cloth.
Hawthorne’s work initiated the most durable tradition in American
fiction, that of the symbolic romance that assumes the universality of
guilt and explores the complexities and ambiguities of man’s choices.
His greatest short stories and The Scarlet Letter are marked by a depth
of psychological and moral insight seldom equaled by any American
writer.
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THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES: A Romance
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Type of work: Novel
Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
Type of lot: Psychological romance
Time of plot: 1850
Locale: Salem, Massachusetts
First published: 1851
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Woven into the ingenious plot of this novel is the theme that the
sins of the fathers are passed on to the children in succeeding
generations. The book reflects the author's interest in New England
history and his doubts about a moribund New England that looked backward
to past times.
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Principal Characters
Colonel Pyncheon, a stern Massachusetts magistrate who, during the
famous witchcraft trials of the seventeenth century, sent to his death a
man whose property he coveted for himself. Cursed by his innocent
victim, the Colonel died on the day his big new house, the House of the
Seven Gables, built on his victim's land, was officially opened to
guests.
Matthew Maule, Colonel Pyncheon's victim, who swore that his unjust
accuser should drink blood, as Colonel Pyncheon did when he died.
Thomas Maule, the son of Matthew Maule. As the head carpenter building
the House of the Seven Gables, young Maule took an opportunity to build
a secret recess in which was hidden the deed by which the Pyncheons
hoped to claim a vast domain in Maine.
Jaffrey Pyncheon, one of Colonel Pyncheon's nineteenth century
descendants and a man like his ancestor in many ways. A judge, a member
of Congress at one time, a member of many boards of directors, and an
aspirant to the governorship of his state, he is a rich man who through
his own efforts has multiplied the fortune he inherited from his uncle.
Although he tries to present himself in a good light. Jaffrey Pyncheon
is a hard man and not entirely honest. He destroys one of his uncle's
wills, which names his cousin Clifford as heir, and he stands by while
his cousin is wrongly sent to prison for a murder he did not commit.
Convinced that his wronged cousin knows of additional family wealth
hidden by their uncle, Jaffrey threatens the broken man with confinement
in an insane asylum if the hiding place of the remaining wealth is not
revealed. Fortunately for his cousin, Jaffrey dies of natural causes
induced by emotion while making his threats.
Clifford Pyncheon, Jeffrey's unfortunate cousin, who serves a
thirty-year prison term for allegedly murdering his uncle, who really
died of natural causes. A handsome, carefree, beauty-loving man at one
time, he emerges from prison three decades later a broken, pale, and
emaciated wreck of a human being, content to hide away in
the House of the Seven Gables, where he is looked after by his sister
Hepzibah and their young cousin Phoebe. Clifford's mind is weakened and
his spirit so broken by misfortune that he actually does strange, if
harmless, acts, so that Jaffrey's threat to force Clifford into an
asylum could be made good. At Jaffrey's unexpected death Clifford feels
a great release after having been oppressed by his cousin for so long.
Clifford, his sister, and Phoebe Pyncheon inherit Jeffrey's fortune and
have the promise of a comfortable life in the future.
Hepzibah Pyncheon, Clifford's spinster sister, who lived alone for many
years in shabby gentility in the House of the Seven Gables while her
brother was in prison. She has few friends, for she seldom leaves the
house, and she is so nearsighted that she always wears a frown, making
people think she is a cross and angry woman. After the return of her
brother from prison, she sets up a little shop in her house to try to
provide for herself and Clifford, to whom she is devoted. Opening the
shop is very difficult for her, as she dislikes meeting people and
believes that entering trade is unladylike for a member of the Pyncheon
family.
Phoebe Pyncheon, a young, pretty, and lively girl from the country. She
comes to live with Hepzibah when her mother, a widow, remarries. Phoebe
takes over the little cent-shop and makes it a profitable venture for
Hepzibah. Phoebe also brings new life to the House of the Seven Gables
by cheering it with her beauty and song, as well as by tending the
neglected flowers and doing other homely tasks. She is highly
considerate of her elderly cousins and spends much of her time
entertaining Clifford.
Mr. Holgrave, a liberal-minded young daguerreotyp-ist who rents a
portion of the House of the Seven Gables from Hepzibah. An eager,
energetic young man of twenty-two, he falls in love with Phoebe
Pyncheon, and they are engaged to be married. When Phoebe inherits a
third of Jaffrey's large fortune, Holgrave decides to become more
conservative in his thinking. It is he who reveals the secret recess
hiding the now-useless deed to the vast tract of land in Maine. He knows
the secret because he is a descendant of Thomas Maule. In fact, his name
is Maule, but he hides his true identity by assuming for a time the name
of Holgrave.
Uncle Venner, an old handyman befriended by the Pyncheons. He is one of
the few persons of the town to accept Hepzibah and Clifford as friends
when they are in unfortunate circumstances.
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The Story
The House of the Seven Gables was a colonial house built in the English
style of half-timber and half-plaster. It stood on Pyncheon Street in
quiet Salem. The house had been built by Colonel Pyncheon, who had
wrested the desirable site from Matthew Maule, a poor man executed as a
wizard. Because Colonel Pyncheon was responsible and because he was
taking the doomed man's land, Maule, at the moment of his execution,
declared that God would give the Pyncheons blood to drink. Despite this
grim prophecy, the Colonel had his house, and its builder was Thomas
Maule, son of the old wizard.
Colonel Pyncheon, dying in his great oak chair just after the house had
been completed, choked with blood so that his shirtfront was stained
scarlet. Although doctors explained the cause of his death as apoplexy,
the townsfolk had not forgotten old Maule's prophecy. The time of the
Colonel's death was inauspicious. It was said that he had just completed
a treaty by which he had bought huge tracts of land from the Indians,
but this deed had not been confirmed by the general court and was never
discovered by any of his heirs. Rumor also had it that a man was seen
leaving the house about the time Colonel Pyncheon died.
More recently, another startling event had occurred at the House of the
Seven Gables. Jaffrey Pyncheon, a bachelor, had been found dead in the
Colonel's great oak armchair, and his nephew, Clifford Pyncheon, had
been sentenced to imprisonment after being found guilty of the murder of
his uncle.
These events were in the unhappy past, however, and in 1850, the House
of the Seven Gables was the home of Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon, an elderly,
single woman, who let one wing of the old house to a young man of
radical tendencies, a maker of daguerreotypes, whose name was Mr.
Holgrave.
Miss Hepzibah was about to open a shop in one of the rooms of her house.
Her brother Clifford was coming home from the state prison after thirty
years, and she had to earn money in some way to support him. On the
first day of her venture as a storekeeper, Miss Hepzibah proved to be a
failure. The situation was saved, however, by the arrival of young
Phoebe Pyncheon from the country. Soon she was operating the shop at a
profit.
Clifford arrived from the prison a broken man of childish, querulous
ways. Once he tried to throw himself from a big arched window which
afforded him almost his only contact with the outside world. He was fond
of Phoebe, but Miss Hepzibah irritated him with her sullen scowling. For
acquaintances, Clifford had Uncle Venner, a handyman who did odd jobs
for the neighborhood, and the tenant of the house, Mr. Holgrave, the
daguerreotypist.
The only other relative living in town was the highly respected Judge
Pyncheon, another nephew of old Jaffrey Pyncheon, for whose murder
Clifford had spent thirty years in prison. He was, in fact, the heir of
the murdered man, and he had been somehow involved with Clifford's
arrest and imprisonment. For these reasons, Clifford refused to see him
when the Judge offered to give Clifford and Hepzibah a home at his
country seat.
Meanwhile, Phoebe had become friendly with Mr. Holgrave. In turn, he
thought that she brought light and hope into the gloomy old house, and
he missed her greatly when she returned to her home in the country. Her
visit was to be a brief one, however, for she had gone only to make some
preparations before coming to live permanently with Miss Hepzibah and
Clifford.
Before Phoebe returned from the country, Judge Pyncheon visited the
House of the Seven Gables and, over Miss Hepzibah's protest, insisted on
seeing Clifford, who, he said, knew a family secret which meant great
wealth for the Judge. When at last she went out of the room to summon
her brother, Judge Pyncheon sat down in the old chair by the fireplace,
over which hung the portrait of the Colonel Pyncheon who had built the
house. As the Judge sat in the old chair, his ticking watch in his hand,
an unusually strong family likeness could be noted between the stern
Judge and his Puritan ancestor in the portrait. Unable to find Clifford
to deliver the Judge's message, Miss Hepzibah returned. As she
approached the door,, Clifford appeared from within, laughing and
pointing to the chair where the Judge sat dead of apoplexy under the
portrait of the old Colonel. His shirt front was stained with blood. The
wizard's curse had been fulfilled once more; God had given him blood to
drink.
The two helpless old people were so distressed by the sight of the dead
man that they crept away from the house without notifying anyone and
departed on the train. The dead body of the Judge remained seated in the
chair.
It was some time before the body was discovered by Holgrave. When Phoebe
returned to the house, he admitted her. He had not yet summoned the
police because he wished to protect the old couple as long as possible.
While he and Phoebe were alone in the house, Holgrave declared his love
for her. They were interrupted by the return of Miss Hepzibah and the
now calm Clifford. They had decided that to run away would not solve
their problem.
The police attributed the Judge's death to natural causes, and Clifford,
Miss Hepzibah, and Phoebe became the heirs to his great fortune. It now
seemed certain that Jaffrey Pyncheon had also died of natural causes,
not by Clifford's hand, and that the Judge had so arranged the evidence
to make Clifford appear a murderer.
In a short time, all the occupants of the House of the Seven Gables were
ready to move to the Judge's country estate which they had inherited.
They gathered for the last time in the old room under the dingy portrait
of Colonel Pyncheon. Clifford said he had a vague memory of something
mysterious connected with the picture. Holgrave offered to explain the
mystery and pressed a secret spring near the picture. When he did so,
the portrait fell to the floor, disclosing a recess in the wall. From
this niche, Holgrave drew out the ancient Indian deed to the lands which
the Pyncheons had claimed. Clifford then remembered he had once found
the secret spring. It was this secret that Judge Pyncheon had hoped to
learn from Clifford.
Phoebe asked how Holgrave happened to know these facts. The young man
explained his name was not Holgrave, but Maule. He was, he said, a
descendant of the wizard, Matthew Maule, and of Thomas Maule, who built
the House of the Seven Gables. The knowledge of the hidden Indian deed
had been handed down to the descendants of Thomas Maule, who built the
compartment behind the portrait and secreted the deed there after the
Colonel's death. Holgrave was the last of the Maules, and Phoebe the
last of the Pyncheons. Matthew Maule's curse had been expiated.
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Critical Evaluation
In reputation, The House of the Seven Gables usually stands in the
shadow of its predecessor, The Scarlet Letter. It is, however, a rich
and solid achievement, a Gothic romance whose characters are among
Nathaniel Hawthorne's most complex. The author himself thought it, in
comparison with the earlier work, "more characteristic of my mind, and
more proper and natural for me to write."
In his preface, Hawthorne explicitly states his moral: "The truth,
namely that the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive
ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure
and uncontrollable mischief." This sentiment echoes the biblical adage
that "The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are
set on edge." Hawthorne's interest in the heritage of sin was probably
whetted by the history of his own family. His first American ancestor,
William Hathorne (Nathaniel himself added the w to the family name), was
a soldier and magistrate who once had a Quaker woman publicly whipped
through the streets. William's son John, having, as Nathaniel said,
"inherited the persecuting spirit," was a judge at the infamous Salem
witch trials, during which a defendant cursed another of the three
judges with the cry, "God will give you blood to drink!" Thenceforth, as
Hawthorne noted, although the family remained decent, respectable folk,
their fortunes began to decline.
The fate of the Pyncheon family of the novel is considerably more
dramatic. Matthew Maule's curse on Colonel Pyncheon. who has persecuted
him for witchcraft and wrested from him the land on which the
seven-gabled house is to be built, is precisely that which Judge John
Hathorne had heard in a similar trial. It is apparently fulfilled on the
day of the housewarming when Colonel Pyncheon dies of apoplexy, the
hemorrhage rising through his throat to stain his white shirt. Hawthorne
would have readers believe, however, that such sins as Pyncheon's are
not so easily paid for. The family occupies the mansion, but misfortune
is their constant lot. There are repeated apoplectic deaths, sometimes
heralded by an ominous gurgling in the throat; greed leads Judge Jaffrey
Pyncheon, like his ancestor, to participate in a trumped-up trial, this
time against his own cousin; and years of pride and isolation have
thinned the family blood so that, like the scrawny chickens that peck in
the Pyncheon garden, they are an unattractive, ineffectual lot. Judge
Pyncheon is a monster who hides his avarice and callousness behind a
facade of philanthropy and civic service. Clifford, like Hawthorne's
Young Goodman Brown, is a sensitive soul who is unmanned by his
confrontation with evil; after years of imprisonment, he is poised on
the brink of madness. Hepzibah, a spinster who has spent most of her
life waiting for her brother's release, is virtually helpless either to
resolve her precarious financial situation or to deal with her
malevolent cousin.
Only young Phoebe possesses both goodness and energy. It is significant
that she is the "country cousin" whose father married beneath his rank;
Hepzibah observes that the girl's self-reliance must have come from her
mother's blood. Thus Hawthorne casts his vote for the energizing effects
of a democratic, as opposed to an aristocratic, social system; he has
Holgrave, the daguerreotypist, support this view with the comment that
families should continually merge into the great mass of humanity,
without regard to ancestry.
Holgrave is the other fully vital character in the novel. He is one of
Hawthorne's most charming creations: a perceptive, adventurous man who
has been, it seems, almost everywhere and done almost everything. His
conversations with Phoebe reveal him as a radical who believes that the
past "lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body," preventing any
generation's true fulfillment—a thesis frequently expressed by
Hawthorne's contemporary, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Holgrave goes so far as
to suggest that institutional buildings should "crumble to ruin once in
twenty years, or thereabouts, as a hint to the people to examine into
and reform the institutions which they symbolize." He is also a
psychologist; his daguerreotypes, which go beyond mere pictorial
likeness to expose personality, symbolize his insight into human nature.
At the end of the novel, readers are led to believe that the curse is
broken as Phoebe, the last the Pyncheons, plans to marry Holgrave, who
turns out to be a descendant of old Matthew Maule. The curse's effects
can all be explained naturally: Holgrave observes that perhaps old
Maule's prophecy was founded on knowledge that apoplectic death had been
a Pyncheon trait for generations. Avarice and cruelty can certainly be
passed on by example; and pride, isolation, and inbreeding can account
for the "thin-bloodedness" of the once-aristocratic family. Now, as
Phoebe, whose blood has already been enriched by plebeian stock, and
Holgrave, who has escaped the stifling influence of his own declining
family by traveling widely, replace a tradition of hatred with that of
love, it seems plausible that the curse may indeed have run its course.
Perhaps the chain of ugly events—what Chillingworth of The Scarlet
Letter termed "dark necessity"—can be terminated by positive acts of
good will. The novel is replete with Gothic characteristics; mystery,
violence, a curse, gloomy atmosphere, archaic diction, and visits from
the spirit world. Yet, though it is not realistic, it demonstrates what
Henry James called Hawthorne's "high sense of reality," in that it
reveals profound truths about how the effects of the sins of the fathers
are felt by children for generations to come. The ending discloses that,
although he recognized the deterministic effects of heredity,
environment, and man's predisposition to evil, Hawthorne was essentially
a hopeful man who believed that the individual possesses a residuum of
will that can cope with and perhaps change "dark necessity."
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THE SCARLET LETTER
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Type of work: Novel
Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
Type of plot: Psychological romance
Time of plot: Early days of the Massachusetts Colony
Locale: Boston
First published: 1850
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The Scarlet Letter is Hawthorne's masterpiece and his most
profound exploration of sin, alienation, and spiritual regeneration. The
novel traces the effects—social, moral, psychological, and spiritual—of
Hester Prynne's adulterous relationship with the Reverend Arthur
Dimmesdale on four people: the lovers themselves, their daughter Pearl,
and Roger Chillingworth, Hester's husband.
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Principal Characters
Hester Prynne, an attractive young woman living among the Puritans of
Boston during the 1650s. She becomes a martyr because she, presumably a
widow, bears a child out of wedlock; this sin results in her being
jailed and then publicly exhibited on a pillory for three hours. When
she is released from jail, she must wear for a lifetime a scarlet "A"
upon her bosom. She becomes a seamstress, stitching and embroidering to
earn a living for herself and for Pearl, her child. After her one act of
sin, Hester behaves with such uncanny rectitude she seems an American
Jeanne d'Arc, battling not against opposing armies and bigotry but
against bigotry alone, the most formidable of antagonists. Hester
refuses to name the child's father, who is the Reverend Arthur
Dimmesdale, her minister; she does not quail when her supposedly dead
husband, Roger Chillingworth, comes from out of the forest to witness
her appearance on the pillory; and without complaint or self-pity she
fights her way back to respectability and the rights of motherhood. Her
situation is made more poignant (and heroic) by Dimmesdale's lack of
sufficient moral courage to confess that he is Pearl's father. Hester
seems to need no partner to share her guilt. Her life ends in tragedy
(as it must) when Dimmesdale dies, but the reader feels that Hester—as
strong as the oak in American clipper ships—will stoutly and resolutely
make her way through life.
The Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, a minister in Boston. Emotionally he is
drawn and halved by the consequences of his sin with Hester, and he is
pulled apart by responsibility. Should he confess and thus ruin his
career or should he keep silent and continue the great good resulting
from his sin-inspired sermons? Outwardly Dimmesdale is a living man, but
inwardly he is the rubble and wreckage resulting from a Puritan
conscience. One night he drags himself (along with Hester and Pearl) up
to the pillory where he feels he should have stood long ago; but this
confession is a sham, for only Roger Chillingworth (hidden in the
darkness) observes the trio. Finally, at the end of his Election Day
sermon, he takes Hester and Pearl by the hand, ascends the pillory,
confesses publicly, and sinks down dead. When his clothing is removed,
Puritans see the stigma of an "A" on the skin of his chest. Hawthorne
does not judge Dimmes-dale's weakness or strength; he says simply, "This
is Dimmesdale."
Roger Chillingworth, a "physician" who might better be called "Evil."
Thought to have been killed by the Indians, he reenters Hester's life
when she first stands on the pillory. Pretending to minister to the
physically ailing Dimmesdale, he tries only to confirm his suspicion
that the minister is Pearl's father. When Arthur and Hester, in a
desperate act of hope, book passage on a ship to England, Chillingworth
also signs up for the voyage, and Hester knows she can never escape him.
Although motivated by his wife's bearing another man's child,
Chillingworth nevertheless seems chillingly sinister in his revenge.
Conniving, sly, monomaniacal, he is more a devilish force than a man.
Pearl, Hester's elfin, unpredictable daughter. She refuses to repeat the
catechism for the governor and thus risks being taken from her mother.
At a meeting of Hester and Arthur in the forest she treats the minister
as a rival; when he kisses her on the brow, she rushes to a stream and
washes away the unwelcome kiss.
Governor Bellingham, of the Massachusetts Colony. He thinks Hester is
unfit to rear Pearl but is persuaded to allow them to remain together by
the pleas of Dimmesdale.
The Reverend John Wilson, a stern divine. Early in the story he exhorts
Dimmesdale to force Hester to reveal Pearl's father.
Mistress Higgins, the bitter-tempered sister of the governor; she is
simply and literally a witch.
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The Story
On a summer morning in Boston, in the early days of the Massachusetts
Colony, a throng of curious people had gathered outside the jail in
Prison Lane. They were there looking for Hester Prynne, who had been
found guilty of adultery by a court of stern Puritan judges. Condemned
to wear on the breast of her gown the scarlet letter, the "A" which
stood for adulteress, she was to stand on the stocks before the
meetinghouse, so that her shame might be a warning and a reproach to all
who saw her. The crowd waited to see her ascend the scaffold with her
child in her arms, and there for three hours bear her shame alone.
At last, escorted by the town beadle, the woman appeared. She moved
serenely to the steps of the scaffold and stood quietly under the
staring eyes that watched her public disgrace. It was whispered in the
gathering that she had been spared the penalty of death or branding only
through the intercession of the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, into whose
church she had brought her scandalous sin.
While Hester stood on the scaffold, an elderly, almost deformed man
appeared from the edge of the forest. When her agitation made it plain
that she had recognized him, he put his finger to his lips as a sign of
silence.
Hester's story was well known in the community. She was the daughter of
an ancient house of decayed fortune, and when she was young, her family
had married her to a husband who had great repute as a scholar. For some
years, they had lived in Antwerp. Two years before, the husband had sent
his wife alone across the ocean to the Massachusetts Colony, intending
to follow her as soon as he could put his affairs in order. There had
been news of his departure, but his ship had never been heard of again.
Hester, a young, attractive widow, had lived quietly in Boston until the
time of her disgrace.
The scaffold of the pillory on which Hester stood was situated next to
the balcony of the church where all the dignitaries of the colony sat to
watch her humiliation. The ministers of the town called on her to name
the man who with herself was equally guilty, and the most eloquent of
those who exhorted her was the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, her pastor.
Still Hester refused to name the father of her child, and she was led
back to the prison after her period of public shame had ended.
On her return to prison, Hester was found to be in a state of great
nervous excitement. When at last medical aid was called, a man was found
who professed knowledge of medicine. His name was Roger Chillingworth,
he told the jailer, and he had recently arrived in town after a year of
residence among the Indians. Chilling-worth was the stranger who had
appeared so suddenly from the forest while Hester stood on the scaffold
that afternoon, and she knew him as her husband, the scholar Prynne. His
ship had been wrecked on the coast, and he had been captive among the
Indians for many months.
He also asked Hester to name the father of her child. When she refused,
he stated that he would remain in Boston to practice medicine, swearing
at the same time that he would devote the rest of his life to
discovering the identity of the man who had dishonored him. He commanded
Hester not to betray the relationship between them, and she swore she
would keep his secret.
When Hester's term of imprisonment was over, she found a small house on
the outskirts of town, far removed from other habitation. There with her
child, who she had named Pearl, she settled down to earn a living from
needlework, an outcast from society and still wearing the scarlet emblem
on her breast.
Hester Prynne dressed her child in bright, highly ornamented costumes,
in contrast to her own sober dress. As she grew up, Pearl proved to be a
capricious, wayward child, hard to discipline. One day, Hester called on
Governor Bellingham to deliver a pair of embroidered gloves. She also
wanted to see him about the custody of Pearl, for there was a movement
afoot among the strict church members to take the child away from her.
In the garden of the governor's mansion, Hester found the governor,
Dimmesdale, and old Roger Chillingworth. Because the perverse Pearl
would not repeat the catechism, the governor was about to separate the
child from her mother. Dimmesdale saved the situation, however, by a
persuasive speech which resulted in the decision to let Hester keep
Pearl, who seemed to be strangely attracted to the minister.
Roger Chillingworth had become intimately acquainted with Arthur
Dimmesdale both as his parishioner and his doctor, for the minister had
been in ill health ever since the physician had come to town. As the two
men lodged in the same house, the physician came to know Dimmes-dale's
inmost thoughts and feelings. The minister was much perturbed by
thoughts of conscience and guilt, but when he expressed these ideas in
generalities to his congregation, the people thought him only the more
righteous. Chillingworth, though, was now convinced that Dimmesdale was
Pearl's father, and he conjured up for the sick man visions of agony,
terror, and remorse.
One night, unable to sleep, Dimmesdale walked to the pillory where
Hester Prynne had stood in ignominy. He went up the steps and stood for
a long time in the same place. A little later Hester, who had been
watching at a deathbed, came by with little Pearl. The minister called
them to the scaffold, saying that they had been there before when he
lacked courage to stand beside them. Thus the three stood together,
Dimmesdale acknowledging himself as Pearl's father, and Hester's partner
in sin. This striking tableau was not unobserved. Roger Chillingworth
watched them from the shadows.
Hester Prynne was so shocked by Dimmesdale's feeble and unhealthy
condition that she was determined to see her former husband and plead
with him to free the sick minister from his evil influence.
One day, she met the old physician gathering herbs in the forest and
begged him to be merciful to his victim. Chillingworth, however, was
inexorable; he would not forgo his revenge on the man who had wronged
him. Hester then advised him that she would tell Arthur Dimmesdale their
secret and warn him against his physician. A short time later, Hester
and Pearl intercepted Dimmesdale in the forest as he was returning from
a missionary journey to the Indians. Hester confessed her true relation
with Chillingworth and warned the minister against the physician's evil
influence. She and the clergyman decided to leave the colony together in
secret, to take passage in a ship then in the harbor, and to return to
the Old World. They were to leave four days later, after Dimmesdale had
preached the Election Sermon.
Election Day, on which the new governor was to be installed, was a
holiday in Boston, and the port was lively with the unaccustomed
presence of sailors from the ship in the harbor. In the crowd was the
captain of the vessel, with whom Hester had made arrangements for her
own and Dimmesdale's passage. During the morning, the captain informed
Hester that Roger Chillingworth had also arranged for passage on the
ship. Filled with despair, Hester turned away and went with Pearl to
listen to Dimmesdale's sermon.
Unable to find room within the church, she stood at the foot of the
scaffold where at least she could hear the sound of his voice. As the
procession left the church, everyone had only words of praise for the
minister's inspired address. Dimmesdale walked like a man in a dream,
and once he tottered and almost fell. When he saw Hester and Pearl at
the foot of the scaffold, he stepped out of the procession and called
them to him. Then, taking them by the hand, he climbed the steps of the
pillory. Almost fainting, but with a voice terrible and majestic, the
minister admitted his guilt to the watching people. With a sudden
motion, he tore the ministerial band from across his breast and sank
dying to the platform. When he thus exposed his breast, witnesses said
that the stigma of the scarlet letter "A" was seen imprinted on the
flesh above his heart.
Chillingworth, no longer able to wreak his vengeance on Dimmesdale, died
within the year, bequeathing his considerable property to Pearl. For a
time, Hester disappeared from trie colony, but years later, she returned
alone to live in her humble thatched cottage and to wear as before the
scarlet emblem on her breast. The scarlet letter, which was once her
badge of shame, however, became an emblem of her tender mercy and
kindness— an object of veneration and reverence to those whose sorrows
she alleviated by her deeds of kindness and mercy. At her death, she
directed that the only inscription on her tombstone should be the letter
"A."
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Critical Evaluation
Since it was first published in 1850, The Scarlet Letter has never been
out of print, nor indeed out of favor with literary critics. It is
inevitably included in listings of the five or ten greatest American
novels. Considered the best of Nathaniel Hawthorne's writings, it may
also be the most typical—the strongest statement of his recurrent themes
and an excellent example of his craftsmanship.
The main thematic emphasis in The Scarlet Letter, as in most of
Hawthorne's work, is on sin and its effects upon both the individual and
society. It is frequently noted that Hawthorne's preoccupation with sin
springs from the Puritan-rooted culture in which he lived and from his
awareness of two of his own ancestors who presided over bloody
persecutions during the Salem witchcraft trials. It is difficult for
readers from a more permissive era to conceive of the heavy import that
seventeenth century New Englanders placed upon transgression of the
moral code. As Yvor Winters had pointed out, the Puritans, believing in
predestination, viewed the commission of any sin as evidence of the
sinner's corruption and preordained damnation. The harsh determinism and
moralism of those early years, however, had softened somewhat by
Hawthorne's day; furthermore, he had worked out, perhaps during the
twelve years he spent in contemplation and semi-isolation, his own
notions about man's will and his nature. Thus The Scarlet Letter proves
him closer to Paul Tillich than to Cotton Mather or Jonathan Edwards.
Like Tillich, Hawthorne saw sin not as an act but as a state—that which
Existentialists refer to as alienation, and which Tillich describes as a
threefold separation from God, other men, and self. This alienation
needs no fire and brimstone as consequence; it is in itself a hell.
There is a certain irony in the way in which this concept is worked out
in The Scarlet Letter. Hester Prynne's pregnancy forces her sin to
public view, and she is compelled to wear the scarlet "A" as a symbol of
her adultery. Yet, although she is apparently isolated from normal
association with "decent" folk, Hester, having come to terms with her
sin, is inwardly reconciled to God and self; and she ministers to the
needy among her townspeople, reconciling herself with others until some
observe that her "A" now stands for "Able." On the other hand, Arthur
Dimmesdale, her secret lover, and Roger Chillingworth, her secret
husband, move freely in society and even enjoy prestige: Dimmesdale as a
beloved pastor, Chillingworth as a respected physician. But Dimmesdale's
secret guilt gnaws so deeply inside him that he views himself with scorn
as a hypocrite, and he is unable to make his peace with God or to feel
at ease with his fellowman. For his part, Chillingworth has permitted
revenge to permeate his spirit so much that his alienation is absolute;
he refers to himself as a "fiend," unable to impart forgiveness or
change his profoundly evil path. His is the unpardonable
sin—unpardonable not because God will not pardon, but because his own
nature has become so depraved that he cannot repent or accept
forgiveness.
Hawthorne clearly distinguishes between sins of passion and those of
principle. Finally, even Dimmesdale, traditional Puritan though he is,
becomes aware of the difference:
We are not, Hester, the worst sinners in the world. There is one
worse than even the polluted priest! That old man's revenge has been
blacker than my sin. He has violated, in cold blood, the sanctity of a
human heart. Thou and I, Hester, never did so.
Always more concerned with the consequences than the cause of sin,
Hawthorne anticipated Sigmund Freud's theories of the effects of guilt
to a remarkable extent. Hester, whose guilt is openly known, grows
through her suffering into an extraordinarily compassionate and
understanding woman, a complete person who is able to come to terms with
life—including sin. Dimmesdale, who yearns for the relief of confession,
but hides his guilt to safeguard his role as pastor, is devoured
internally. Again like Freud, Hawthorne recognized that spiritual
turmoil may produce physical distress. Dimmesdale 's well-being
diminishes, and eventually he dies from no apparent cause other than
continual emotional stress. The Scarlet Letter has links with a number
of Hawthorne's shorter works. Dimmesdale reminds one of Young Goodman
Brown, who, having once glimpsed the darker nature of mankind, must
forevermore view humanity as corrupt and hypocritical; and of Parson
Hooper in "The Minister's Black Veil," who continues to perform the
duties of his calling with eloquence and compassion but is forever
separated from the company of men by the veil which he wears as a symbol
of secret sin. Chillingworth is essentially like Ethan Brand, the
limeburner who found the unpardonable sin in his own heart: "The sin of
an intellect that triumphed over the sense of brotherhood with man and
reverence for God, and sacrificed everything to its mighty claims!"
Hawthorne's craftsmanship is splendidly demonstrated in The Scarlet
Letter. The structure is carefully unified, with three crucial scenes at
the beginning, middle, and end of the action taking place on the
scaffold. The scarlet "A" itself is entwined into the narrative
repeatedly, as a symbol of sin or of shame, as a reminder of Hester's
ability with the needle and her ableness with people, and in
Dimmesdale's case, as evidence of the searing effects of secret guilt.
Several times there is forewarning or suggestion that is fulfilled later
in the book: for example, notice is made that Pearl, the impish child of
Hester and Dimmesdale, seems to lack complete humanity, perhaps because
she has never known great sorrow; at the end of the story, when
Dimmesdale dies, readers are told that "as [Pearl's] tears fell upon her
father's cheek, they were the pledge that she would grow up amid human
joy and sorrow, nor forever do battle with the world, but be a woman in
it."
Hawthorne's skill as a symbolist is fully in evidence. As one critic has
noted, there is hardly a concrete object in the book that does not do
double duty as a symbol: the scarlet letter, the sunlight that eludes
Hester, the scaffold of public notice, the armor in which Hester's shame
and Pearl's elfishness are distorted and magnified—also serve as central
symbols in this, the greatest allegory of a master allegorist.
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