A Psychological Reading of The Scarlet Letter

The anxiety is older than Hester's sentence. The novel proper opens on a prison door that already looks ancient, in a colony that has set aside ground for a graveyard and a jail before it has finished calling itself a refuge. A wild rose grows beside the portal. Hawthorne plants a mercy in the same picture as the punishment, then spends the book showing which one the town uses.

On the morning of the scaffold the women in the crowd are not satisfied. The magistrates have been too soft. One of them wants a brand on the forehead, so the shame will not be a piece of needlework the prisoner can make beautiful. They are not the injured husband. They are members proving membership. A public sinner lets everyone else stand on the safe side of a line, and the town has to look at the person it required.

The Custom-House frame does the same work for the narrator. A surveyor finds a rag of scarlet cloth in the shape of a capital A, wound around an old man's papers, and tells the story as a recovery. A found object lets him handle shame without admitting he needed to invent a woman to carry it. The letter arrives as evidence, not as his choice.

Hester's wound is not a secret. The town has made her the place where the secret is stored so that other houses can stay unmarked. She could leave. She takes a cottage at the edge of the settlement and lives by the needle, including work for the officials who sentenced her. Staying is penance, attachment, and a refusal to let the story travel without her. Gold thread on the letter does not cancel the sentence. It refuses the picture the crowd preferred, a woman broken into the shape of their disgust.

Seven years on, people begin to say the A means Able. She is the person who appears at a sickbed and is gone when the sun returns. The new word is respect, and it is not repair. The same years have cooled her. She thinks about the relation of men and women in terms the colony would hear as a tearing-down, and she knows she is not the woman who will establish that relation. A community can change its pronunciation of a shame and still leave the person marble.

She also keeps a bargain that is not hers alone. In the jail the husband she has not seen for years tells her to breathe not, to any soul, that she ever called him husband. He will seek the other man as he has sought truth in books. She agrees. The mark on her chest is honest about her. The silence about his name is the lie she maintains so that his revenge can have a room.

Arthur Dimmesdale's defence is eloquence. He thins, clutches his chest, and becomes a more moving preacher. The congregation hears a minister who understands sin because sympathy has been given to him. He is describing his own case with the name taken out. A general confession tells the truth in a grammar that does not require a partner, a child, or a platform. The more exactly he suffers, the more they adore him. The voice gets richer on the credit of a fact the voice will not own.

From the balcony, on the first morning, he leans down and charges her to speak the name of her fellow-sinner, if it would give her soul peace. The plea sounds like pastoral care. It is also a request that she do the speaking he will not do. She refuses. From that hour the secret has two keepers and one visible body. His later sermons repeat the structure of that plea: truth, offered in a form that leaves him on the safe side of the railing.

At midnight he climbs the same scaffold while the town sleeps. He wants the posture of penance without the witnesses who would make it real. Hester and Pearl stand with him for a moment, coming from a governor's deathbed where she has been sewing. Pearl asks if he will stand there with them at noon the next day. He offers the last judgement instead. A meteor burns, and his guilt gives it the shape of a letter A. The narrator will not swear the sky drew it. After the sermon the sexton holds up the minister's glove, found on the platform, and calls it a devil's jest. The town reads the red letter in the sky as Angel, because the governor died in the night. None of those readings is noon.

Roger Chillingworth is what a mind becomes when an injury is not allowed to be grief. He arrives at the edge of the crowd with one shoulder higher than the other, beside a Native guide, and he does not claim his wife. Claiming her would put him on the scaffold in the sight of the letter. He chooses a new name and a medical intimacy, and he will find the lover by a sympathy that makes the man tremble. The wronged husband disappears on purpose, so that a physician can take his place beside the unmarked body.

He becomes the minister's doctor and then the man who lives with him. Care is the costume. The work is to keep the secret conscious and unspeakable, and to call the pressure treatment. A leech, in the old sense, is a doctor. Hawthorne keeps the other sense. When Hester tells him what seven years have made of him, he justifies the torture as the thing that has kept the minister alive. A healer who needs the patient ill in order to have a self is practising identity. Without a hidden sinner, he would have to be only a man who was left.

Once Dimmesdale confesses in daylight, the physician has nothing left to enter. He says the minister has escaped him. He dies within the year, and his will leaves a considerable property, here and in England, to Pearl. The child of the secret inherits the estate of the man who lived inside it.

Pearl is the fact the town keeps trying to turn into a sign. She is dressed so that mother and child look like the letter walking. Other children refuse her. She reaches for the scarlet A, throws flowers at it, and by the water shapes a green letter out of seaweed. Asked, in the governor's hall, who made her, she says she was plucked from the rose-bush by the prison door. The elders hear an unholy child and talk of taking her away. Hester lays a finger on the red token and says she can teach the child what she has learned from it. The governor calls that token a badge of shame. The mother is already treating it as a curriculum.

Her questions are the pressure Dimmesdale's sermons avoid. At midnight she asks for noon, not for a doctrine. In the forest, when Hester takes the letter off and lets her hair down, Pearl will not cross the brook. She has never seen her mother without the mark. Remove it in secret, and the child does not see freedom. She sees a stranger. Hester has to pin the letter back on before her daughter will come.

This is not an inner life written at the density of the minister's speeches. Hawthorne gives Pearl perception and refusal, and withholds the ordinary childhood that would make her only a girl. The risk of the reading is to treat her as a function. The book sometimes does that too. What it does not do is let the adults' symbols rest. When the town later loses track of her, letters arrive with seals Boston cannot read. She was never only their allegory.

Hawthorne arranges three visits to one platform. The adultery is already finished when the door opens. The first is morning: Hester alone in the public eye, the husband hidden in the crowd, the minister above her begging a name he cannot bear to hear. The second is midnight, and the three stand together where no one is required to believe them. The third is a holiday, after the Election sermon, and he calls them up while the town still has its eyes.

A mind organised around concealment keeps returning to the scene of the omitted act. Each return tests whether the witnesses are real. Midnight fails the test on purpose. The forest offers a counterfeit solution: tell the one person who already knows, take a ship, begin again where the letter has no public meaning. Pearl's refusal at the brook declines that solution. A secret shared with an accomplice is still a secret.

The walk back shows the cost of lifting the defence before the room is ready. Once he has agreed to leave, he wants to blaspheme, to spoil a young parishioner, to put a filthy word in a child's mouth. Seven years of a clean voice do not open into peace. They open sideways. The impersonation has been using the rest of him as storage.

At the last scaffold the narrator calls a description of the revealed breast irreverent. The conclusion then collects incompatible accounts: a letter in the flesh, a mark made by the minister's own scourge, a stigma produced by the physician's arts, and witnesses who saw nothing and heard no confession of that kind. People see the mark their theory requires. The form keeps the argument open after the man is dead.

The defence breaks in public, and it breaks late. Chillingworth catches the minister's arm and calls him a madman. There was no place on earth secret enough, he says, except this scaffold. Dimmesdale climbs anyway, tears the ministerial band from his breast, and dies in that honesty, with Hester supporting him. Confession here does not restore a life. It spends the last of one. The debt was already destroying the body while the voice grew more beloved.

Hester's ending is the harder one, because she survives it. She and Pearl leave. No one in Boston learns, with certainty, whether the child dies young or grows into another country's life. When Hester returns, the cottage holds comforts she does not care to use. No magistrate would still force the letter. She puts it on of her own will. Women come with sorrows the town would rather not hear, and she tells them she is not the woman who will establish a new relation between men and women. The letter, chosen, is a place other women can speak, and a sentence she will not let the town forget.

One tombstone serves both graves, with a space between, as if their dust had no right to mingle. A red A on black is the last public reading. She wore it in life. He wore it at the end. The stone wears it after both of them. The space between the graves refuses to pretend the symbol made them one person. The tension stays fixed, in public, as a mark, and held apart, in the ground, as two sleeps that do not mix.

The anxiety is the relief a group feels when one person is legible as the sinner, so everyone else can keep a clean name. Households, congregations, and public arguments still know the figure who must wear the mistake while a partner keeps the voice of concern. Dimmesdale's sermons are that grammar. They are moving because they are true, and they are safe because they name a sin without naming a man. A reputation can be built out of accurate generalities. The book is interested in what that building costs the body underneath.

The other recognition is the letter that gets renamed. A public disgrace can be reinterpreted as strength, Able instead of the first word, without the inner freeze thawing. Standing in the community can improve while the person who carried the mark grows colder and keeps someone else's secret. Hawthorne shows a noon that was available for seven years, and a death that arrived in the hour the noon was finally taken. The resonance is recognition. Readers know the unmarked partner, and the temptation to call a private rehearsal a confession.

This account can shrink a novel about law, theology, and a colonial settlement into a diagram of four psyches. The governor's hall, the magistrates, and the Election sermon are political facts of a seventeenth-century town. Hawthorne wrote in 1850 about the 1640s, with a Custom-House narrator who has his own quarrel with Salem ancestors and a government post he has lost. The frame is not a neutral case history. A reading that ignores his need to recover a letter from an attic will treat the romance as if it had no stake in who gets to tell a shame.

Shame and guilt are later words. They illuminate the split between a mark everyone can see and a mark one man will not show. They are not diagnoses, and they must not turn Hester into a patient who mishandled her sentence. Other readings sit in the book with equal claim: a romance of forbidden love, a theological argument about visible sanctity, a protest at the sexual double standard, a study of a child the adults keep trying to allegorise. Pearl's inner life is thinner than Dimmesdale's speeches. Chillingworth's turn into a near-allegory of revenge is Hawthorne's design as much as a mind's development. The conflicting reports of the minister's breast warn against any reader, including this one, who needs one body to settle the meaning.

Crime and Punishment studies a mind whose secret sharpens the public voice while the body spends itself. Raskolnikov and Dimmesdale both learn that concealment can make guilt eloquent in general and unspeakable in particular. Raskolnikov is drawn towards someone who already knows and will not decorate the fact. Dimmesdale postpones the room that would make the fact costly, until the only stage left is the one that kills him. Jane Eyre is the other shelf. Jane keeps a private account of herself when every household tries to give her a smaller name. Hester's letter is an account the town forced into public and that she, at the end, chooses to keep. Jane leaves while leaving is still possible. Hester stays, because the town never stops being the room.