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

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