Scarlet Letter (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

the community’s social norms. She also fears for the child’s moral health, and endeavors to constrain her child’s spiritual development at the same time she herself internally ventures past the constraints of received moral wisdom. Moreover, the iconoclastic reveries in which Hester indulges reflect acquiescence in her guilt more than active subversiveness; accepting her fallen state frees Hester to question the whole order of society because she accepts the society’s judgment that she can scarcely fall farther. To the extent Hester finds moral truth in her digressions, she sees herself as too sullied to be an instrument of its expression, having
    long since recognized the impossibility that any mission of divine and mysterious truth should be confided to a woman stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or even burdened with a life-long sorrow. The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure, and beautiful; and wise, moreover, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy; and showing how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such an end! (p. 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