Hester Prynne

The Scarlet Letter by Hugues Merle 1861

Hester Prynne was raised in England, but married a scholar whose desire for knowledge took them to Amsterdam. From there, about 1642, Hester was sent to  New England. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who tells Hester’s story in The Scarlet Letter [published 1850], does not tell us how she managed there. It cannot have been easy to be a young woman alone among the Puritans in Boston.

We meet Hester, a woman with a rich coloring and abundant dark hair, emerging from the jail with a baby in her arms. She will not tell the name of the child’s father and is condemned to stand on a scaffold above the marketplace for three hours and to wear a scarlet “A” on her breast for the rest of her life. From the scaffold, Hester sees her long lost husband, standing with some Indians at the edge of the crowd. He comes to her when she is put back in prison, saying “The man who has wronged us both still lives. I will find him.” He makes Hester promise that she will not reveal their former relationship.

Hester goes to live in a thatched cottage by the seashore, making a living for herself and her child with her needle. She embroiders the scarlet letter with gold thread and dresses her child in beautiful clothes. At three, her Pearl of great price, is something of a fairy child, happy to play in nature, since she and her mother are shunned by the townspeople. She is beautiful and intelligent, but has a wild and defiant mood. Her mother has trouble disciplining her.

When the town fathers discuss taking Pearl away from her mother, Arthur Dimmesdale, the town’s beloved young minister, intervenes: “The child is all she has to bring her to God.”

For Hester, her isolation, shame and the scarlet letter itself are teachers. She thinks her thoughts freely. “The world’s law was not law for her mind.” Though Hester becomes a cold, dignified figure as her energy leaves her body and enlivens her mind, to the townspeople she has become an inexhaustible sister of mercy. She is humble, quick to give where charity is needed and a nurse to the sick. The “A” comes to stand for able. Her consciousness of sin also makes her a counselor for those who need one.

By the time Pearl is seven, Hester observes that the minister, Dimmesdale, is very ill. She notes that her husband, Chillingworth, has been living with him. She tells Chillingworth that she will tell the minister he was her husband and is now his enemy.

Looking for a chance to speak to Dimmesdale, Hester meets him in the forest. The minister confesses his misery at the fact that people imagine he is blameless, while he himself is wracked with guilt. Hester throws her arms around him. “I do forgive you. I am your friend. May God forgive us both.” She tells him that there is a larger world around them. “Begin anew,” she says. “Make thyself a new name!” Dimmesdale does not believe he can do this alone.

For an hour Hester casts off the terrible ”A” and the two imagine leaving on a ship together. They will make a new life for themselves in the Old World. Pearl, who has been playing by the brook, will not come to Hester until she puts the “A” back on her breast, however, and when the minister kisses Pearl, she runs to the brook and washes it off.

A ship sits waiting in the harbor, to leave in three days. Hester, with her child and Dimmesdale, plans to be on it. Boston takes a holiday when a new governor is to be elected and Dimmesdale preaches an especially powerful sermon on this day. After it, Dimmesdale struggles up to the scaffolding in the marketplace, begging Hester’s help. Once there he confesses his guilt. Pearl kisses him, her father, which brings her a sense of relief and Dimmesdale dies.

Hester and Pearl disappear and are not seen for many years. But one day Hester, a stately and solemn older woman, still wearing the gold-embroidered “A” on her breast, resumes living in the seaside cottage at the edge of town. It is observed that she is the recipient of tokens of love from a foreign country and that she is embroidering clothes for a grandchild. Clearly Pearl is married and happy, living elsewhere.

Hester herself resumes her nursing, bringing counsel and comfort to those who need it. She looks forward to the day when a “new truth would be revealed in order to establish the whole relation of men and women on a surer ground of mutual happiness.” When she dies, Hester is buried beside the minister Dimmesdale in the churchyard.

Hester Prynne comes to her redemption through solitary and free-thinking reliance on natural morality and common sense rather than civil law. She is resilient enough to walk freely through the town and become a help to others. Late in life, she returns to the place which has been most meaningful to her. She reminds us that none of us live for ourselves alone, and that service to others is more important than obsession with righteousness.