The Scarlet Letter is an 1850 romantic work of fiction in a historical setting, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and is considered to be his magnum opus. Set in 17th-century Puritan Boston, Massachusetts, during the years 1642 to 1649, it tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter through an affair and struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. Throughout the book, Hawthorne explores themes of legalism, sin, and guilt.
The experience of Hester and Dimmesdale recalls the story of Adam and Eve because, in both cases, sin results in expulsion and suffering. But it also results in knowledge – specifically, in knowledge of what it means to be immoral. For Hester, the Scarlet Letter is a physical manifestation of her sin and reminder of her painful solitude. She contemplates casting it off to obtain her freedom from an oppressive society and a checkered past as well as the absence of God.
Because the society excludes her, she considers the possibility that many of the traditions held up by the Puritan culture are untrue and are not designed to bring her happiness.
As for Dimmesdale, the ‘cheating minister’, his sin gives him ‘sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind, so that his chest vibrate[s] in unison with theirs.’
His eloquent and powerful sermons derive from this sense of empathy. The narrative of the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale is quite in keeping with the oldest and most fully authorized principles in Christian thought. His ‘Fall’ is a descent from apparent grace to his own damnation; he appears to begin in purity but he ends in corruption. The subtlety is that the minister’s belief is his own cheating, convincing himself at every stage of his spiritual pilgrimage that he is saved.
The rose bush’s beauty forms a striking contrast to all that surrounds it – as later the beautifully embroidered scarlet ‘A’ will be held out in part as an invitation to find ‘some sweet moral blossom’ in the ensuing, tragic tale and in part as an image that ‘the deep heart of nature’ (perhaps God) may look more kind on the errant Hester and her child than her Puritan neighbors do.
Throughout the work, the nature images contrast with the stark darkness of the Puritans and their systems.
Chillingworth’s misshapen body reflects (or symbolizes) the anger in his soul, which builds as the novel progresses, similar to the way Dimmesdale’s illness reveals his inner turmoil. The outward man reflects the condition of the heart; an observation thought to be inspired by the deterioration of Edgar Allan Poe, whom Hawthorne ‘much admired’.
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