The Scarlet Letter

ESTER AT HER NEEDLE.

Hester Prynne’s term of confinement was now at an end. Her prison-door
was thrown open, and she came forth into the sunshine, which, falling
on all alike, seemed, to her sick and morbid heart, as if meant for no
other purpose than to reveal the scarlet letter on her breast. Perhaps
there was a more real torture in her first unattended footsteps from
the threshold of the prison, than even in the procession and spectacle
that have been described, where she was made the common infamy, at
which all mankind was summoned to point its finger. Then, she was
supported by an unnatural tension of the nerves, and by all the
combative energy of her character, which enabled her to convert the
scene into a kind of lurid triumph. It was, moreover, a separate and
insulated event, to occur but once in her lifetime, and to meet which,
therefore, reckless of economy, she might call up the vital strength
that would have sufficed for many quiet years. The very law that
condemned her—a giant of stern features, but with vigor to support,
as well as to annihilate, in his iron arm—had held her up, through
the terrible ordeal of her ignominy. But now, with this unattended
walk from her prison-door, began the daily custom; and she must either
sustain and carry it forward by the ordinary resources of her nature,
or sink beneath it. She could no longer borrow from the future to help
her through the present grief. To-morrow would bring its own trial
with it; so would the next day, and so would the next; each its own
trial, and yet the very same that was now so unutterably grievous to
be borne. The days of the far-off future would toil onward, still with
the same burden for her to take up, and bear along with her, but never
to fling down; for the accumulating days, and added years, would pile
up their misery upon the heap of shame. Throughout them all, giving up
her individuality, she would become the general symbol at which the
preacher and moralist might point, and in which they might vivify and
embody their images of woman’s frailty and sinful passion. Thus the
young and pure would be taught to look at her, with the scarlet letter
flaming on her breast,—at her, the child of honorable parents,—at
her, the mother of a babe, that would hereafter be a woman,—at her,
who had once been innocent,—as the figure, the body, the reality of
sin. And over her grave, the infamy that she must carry thither would
be her only monument.

It may seem marvellous, that, with the world before her,—kept by no
restrictive clause of her condemnation within the limits of the
Puritan settlement, so remote and so obscure,—free to return to her
birthplace, or to any other European land, and there hide her
character and identity under a new exterior, as completely as if
emerging into another state of being,—and having also the passes of
the dark, inscrutable forest open to her, where the wildness of her
nature might assimilate itself with a people whose customs and life
were alien from the law that had condemned her,—it may seem
marvellous, that this woman should still call that place her home,
where, and where only, she must needs be the type of shame. But there
is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has
the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to
linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and
marked event has given the color to their lifetime; and still the more
irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it. Her sin, her
ignominy, were the roots which she had struck into the soil. It was as
if a new birth, with stronger assimilations than the first, had
converted the forest-land, still so uncongenial to every other pilgrim
and wanderer, into Hester Prynne’s wild and dreary, but life-long
home. All other scenes of earth—even that village of rural England,
where happy infancy and stainless maidenhood seemed yet to be in her
mother’s keeping, like garments put off long ago—were foreign to her,
in comparison. The chain that bound her here was of iron links, and
galling to her inmost soul, but could never be broken.

It might be, too,—doubtless it was so, although she hid the secret
from herself, and grew pale whenever it struggled out of her heart,
like a serpent from its hole,—it might be that another feeling kept
her within the scene and pathway that had been so fatal. There dwelt,
there trode the feet of one with whom she deemed herself connected in
a union, that, unrecognized on earth, would bring them together before
the bar of final judgment, and make that their marriage-altar, for a
joint futurity of endless retribution. Over and over again, the
tempter of souls had thrust this idea upon Hester’s contemplation, and
laughed at the passionate and desperate joy with which she seized,
and then strove to cast it from her. She barely looked the idea in the
face, and hastened to bar it in its dungeon. What she compelled
herself to believe—what, finally, she reasoned upon, as her motive
for continuing a resident of New England—was half a truth, and half a
self-delusion. Here, she said to herself, had been the scene of her
guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly punishment; and so,
perchance, the torture of her daily shame would at length purge her
soul, and work out another purity than that which she had lost; more
saint-like, because the result of martyrdom.

[Illustration: The Lonesome Dwelling]

Hester Prynne, therefore, did not flee. On the outskirts of the town,
within the verge of the peninsula, but not in close vicinity to any
other habitation, there was a small thatched cottage. It had been
built by an earlier settler, and abandoned because the soil about it
was too sterile for cultivation, while its comparative remoteness put
it out of the sphere of that social activity which already marked the
habits of the emigrants. It stood on the shore, looking across a basin
of the sea at the forest-covered hills, towards the west. A clump of
scrubby trees, such as alone grew on the peninsula, did not so much
conceal the cottage from view, as seem to denote that here was some
object which would fain have been, or at least ought to be, concealed.
In this little, lonesome dwelling, with some slender means that she
possessed, and by the license of the magistrates, who still kept an
inquisitorial watch over her, Hester established herself, with her
infant child. A mystic shadow of suspicion immediately attached itself
to the spot. Children, too young to comprehend wherefore this woman
should be shut out from the sphere of human charities, would creep
nigh enough to behold her plying her needle at the cottage-window, or
standing in the doorway, or laboring in her little garden, or coming
forth along the pathway that led townward; and, discerning the scarlet
letter on her breast, would scamper off with a strange, contagious
fear.

Lonely as was Hester’s situation, and without a friend on earth who
dared to show himself, she, however, incurred no risk of want. She
possessed an art that sufficed, even in a land that afforded
comparatively little scope for its exercise, to supply food for her
thriving infant and herself. It was the art—then, as now, almost the
only one within a woman’s grasp—of needlework. She bore on her
breast, in the curiously embroidered letter, a specimen of her
delicate and imaginative skill, of which the dames of a court might
gladly have availed themselves, to add the richer and more spiritual
adornment of human ingenuity to their fabrics of silk and gold. Here,
indeed, in the sable simplicity that generally characterized the
Puritanic modes of dress, there might be an infrequent call for the
finer productions of her handiwork. Yet the taste of the age,
demanding whatever was elaborate in compositions of this kind, did not
fail to extend its influence over our stern progenitors, who had cast
behind them so many fashions which it might seem harder to dispense
with. Public ceremonies, such as ordinations, the installation of
magistrates, and all that could give majesty to the forms in which a
new government manifested itself to the people, were, as a matter of
policy, marked by a stately and well-conducted ceremonial, and a
sombre, but yet a studied magnificence. Deep ruffs, painfully wrought
bands, and gorgeously embroidered gloves, were all deemed necessary to
the official state of men assuming the reins of power; and were
readily allowed to individuals dignified by rank or wealth, even while
sumptuary laws forbade these and similar extravagances to the plebeian
order. In the array of funerals, too,—whether for the apparel of the
dead body, or to typify, by manifold emblematic devices of sable cloth
and snowy lawn, the sorrow of the survivors,—there was a frequent and
characteristic demand for such labor as Hester Prynne could supply.
Baby-linen—for babies then wore robes of state—afforded still
another possibility of toil and emolument.

By degrees, nor very slowly, her handiwork became what would now be
termed the fashion. Whether from commiseration for a woman of so
miserable a destiny; or from the morbid curiosity that gives a
fictitious value even to common or worthless things; or by whatever
other intangible circumstance was then, as now, sufficient to bestow,
on some persons, what others might seek in vain; or because Hester
really filled a gap which must otherwise have remained vacant; it is
certain that she had ready and fairly requited employment for as many
hours as she saw fit to occupy with her needle. Vanity, it may be,
chose to mortify itself, by putting on, for ceremonials of pomp and
state, the garments that had been wrought by her sinful hands. Her
needlework was seen on the ruff of the Governor; military men wore it
on their scarfs, and the minister on his band; it decked the baby’s
little cap; it was shut up, to be mildewed and moulder away, in the
coffins of the dead. But it is not recorded that, in a single
instance, her skill was called in aid to embroider the white veil
which was to cover the pure blushes of a bride. The exception
indicated the ever-relentless rigor with which society frowned upon
her sin.

Hester sought not to acquire anything beyond a subsistence, of the
plainest and most ascetic description, for herself, and a simple
abundance for her child. Her own dress was of the coarsest materials
and the most sombre hue; with only that one ornament,—the scarlet
letter,—which it was her doom to wear. The child’s attire, on the
other hand, was distinguished by a fanciful, or, we might rather say,
a fantastic ingenuity, which served, indeed, to heighten the airy
charm that early began to develop itself in the little girl, but which
appeared to have also a deeper meaning. We may speak further of it
hereafter. Except for that small expenditure in the decoration of her
infant, Hester bestowed all her superfluous means in charity, on
wretches less miserable than herself, and who not unfrequently
insulted the hand that fed them. Much of the time, which she might
readily have applied to the better efforts of her art, she employed in
making coarse garments for the poor. It is probable that there was an
idea of penance in this mode of occupation, and that she offered up a
real sacrifice of enjoyment, in devoting so many hours to such rude
handiwork. She had in her nature a rich, voluptuous, Oriental
characteristic,—a taste for the gorgeously beautiful, which, save in
the exquisite productions of her needle, found nothing else, in all
the possibilities of her life, to exercise itself upon. Women derive
a pleasure, incomprehensible to the other sex, from the delicate toil
of the needle. To Hester Prynne it 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.

In this manner, Hester Prynne came to have a part to perform in the
world. With her native energy of character, and rare capacity, it
could not entirely cast her off, although it had set a mark upon her,
more intolerable to a woman’s heart than that which branded the brow
of Cain. In all her intercourse with society, however, there was
nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it. Every gesture,
every word, and even the silence of those with whom she came in
contact, implied, and often expressed, that she was banished, and as
much alone as if she inhabited another sphere, or communicated with
the common nature by other organs and senses than the rest of human
kind. She stood apart from moral interests, yet close beside them,
like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer
make itself seen or felt; no more smile with the household joy, nor
mourn with the kindred sorrow; or, should it succeed in manifesting
its forbidden sympathy, awakening only terror and horrible repugnance.
These emotions, in fact, and its bitterest scorn besides, seemed to be
the sole portion that she retained in the universal heart. It was not
an age of delicacy; and her position, although she understood it well,
and was in little danger of forgetting it, was often brought before
her vivid self-perception, like a new anguish, by the rudest touch
upon the tenderest spot. The poor, as we have already said, whom she
sought out to be the objects of her bounty, often reviled the hand
that was stretched forth to succor them. Dames of elevated rank,
likewise, whose doors she entered in the way of her occupation, were
accustomed to distil drops of bitterness into her heart; sometimes
through that alchemy of quiet malice, by which women can concoct a
subtle poison from ordinary trifles; and sometimes, also, by a coarser
expression, that fell upon the sufferer’s defenceless breast like a
rough blow upon an ulcerated wound. Hester had schooled herself long
and well; she never responded to these attacks, save by a flush of
crimson that rose irrepressibly over her pale cheek, and again
subsided into the depths of her bosom. She was patient,—a martyr,
indeed,—but she forbore to pray for her enemies; lest, in spite of
her forgiving aspirations, the words of the blessing should stubbornly
twist themselves into a curse.

Continually, and in a thousand other ways, did she feel the
innumerable throbs of anguish that had been so cunningly contrived for
her by the undying, the ever-active sentence of the Puritan tribunal.
Clergymen paused in the street to address words of exhortation, that
brought a crowd, with its mingled grin and frown, around the poor,
sinful woman. If she entered a church, trusting to share the Sabbath
smile of the Universal Father, it was often her mishap to find herself
the text of the discourse. She grew to have a dread of children; for
they had imbibed from their parents a vague idea of something horrible
in this dreary woman, gliding silently through the town, with never
any companion but one only child. Therefore, first allowing her to
pass, they pursued her at a distance with shrill cries, and the
utterance of a word that had no distinct purport to their own
minds, but was none the less terrible to her, as proceeding from lips
that babbled it unconsciously. It seemed to argue so wide a diffusion
of her shame, that all nature knew of it; it could have caused her no
deeper pang, had the leaves of the trees whispered the dark story
among themselves,—had the summer breeze murmured about it,—had the
wintry blast shrieked it aloud! Another peculiar torture was felt in
the gaze of a new eye. When strangers looked curiously at the scarlet
letter,—and none ever failed to do so,—they branded it afresh into
Hester’s soul; so that, oftentimes, she could scarcely refrain, yet
always did refrain, from covering the symbol with her hand. But then,
again, an accustomed eye had likewise its own anguish to inflict. Its
cool stare of familiarity was intolerable. From first to last, in
short, Hester Prynne had always this dreadful agony in feeling a human
eye upon the token; the spot never grew callous; it seemed, on the
contrary, to grow more sensitive with daily torture.

[Illustration: Lonely Footsteps]

But sometimes, once in many days, or perchance in many months, she
felt an eye—a human eye—upon the ignominious brand, that seemed to
give a momentary relief, as if half of her agony were shared. The next
instant, back it all rushed again, with still a deeper throb of pain;
for, in that brief interval, she had sinned anew. Had Hester sinned
alone?

Her imagination was somewhat affected, and, had she been of a softer
moral and intellectual fibre, would have been still more so, by the
strange and solitary anguish of her life. Walking to and fro, with
those lonely footsteps, in the little world with which she was
outwardly connected, it now and then appeared to Hester,—if
altogether fancy, it was nevertheless too potent to be resisted,—she
felt or fancied, then, that the scarlet letter had endowed her with a
new sense. She shuddered to believe, yet could not help believing,
that it gave her a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other
hearts. She was terror-stricken by the revelations that were thus
made. What were they? Could they be other than the insidious whispers
of the bad angel, who would fain have persuaded the struggling woman,
as yet only half his victim, that the outward guise of purity was but
a lie, and that, if truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet
letter would blaze forth on many a bosom besides Hester Prynne’s? Or,
must she receive those intimations—so obscure, yet so distinct—as
truth? In all her miserable experience, there was nothing else so
awful and so loathsome as this sense. It perplexed, as well as shocked
her, by the irreverent inopportuneness of the occasions that brought
it into vivid action. Sometimes the red infamy upon her breast would
give a sympathetic throb, as she passed near a venerable minister or
magistrate, the model of piety and justice, to whom that age of
antique reverence looked up, as to a mortal man in fellowship with
angels. “What evil thing is at hand?” would Hester say to herself.
Lifting her reluctant eyes, there would be nothing human within the
scope of view, save the form of this earthly saint! Again, a mystic
sisterhood would contumaciously assert itself, as she met the
sanctified frown of some matron, who, according to the rumor of all
tongues, had kept cold snow within her bosom throughout life. That
unsunned snow in the matron’s bosom, and the burning shame on Hester
Prynne’s,—what had the two in common? Or, once more, the electric
thrill would give her warning,—“Behold, Hester, here is a
companion!”—and, looking up, she would detect the eyes of a young
maiden glancing at the scarlet letter, shyly and aside, and quickly
averted with a faint, chill crimson in her cheeks; as if her purity
were somewhat sullied by that momentary glance. O Fiend, whose
talisman was that fatal symbol, wouldst thou leave nothing, whether in
youth or age, for this poor sinner to revere?—such loss of faith is
ever one of the saddest results of sin. Be it accepted as a proof that
all was not corrupt in this poor victim of her own frailty, and man’s
hard law, that Hester Prynne yet struggled to believe that no
fellow-mortal was guilty like herself.

The vulgar, who, in those dreary old times, were always contributing a
grotesque horror to what interested their imaginations, had a story
about the scarlet letter which we might readily work up into a
terrific legend. They averred, that the symbol was not mere scarlet
cloth, tinged in an earthly dye-pot, but was red-hot with infernal
fire, and could be seen glowing all alight, whenever Hester Prynne
walked abroad in the night-time. And we must needs say, it seared
Hester’s bosom so deeply, that perhaps there was more truth in the
rumor than our modern incredulity may be inclined to admit.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

VI.