Wordsmith - Student Submissions
“On a Field, Sable, the Letter A. Gules (228)” by Rachel Cote
(A review of the Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne)
Sin is something no one wishes to commit because not always does
the human mind stay intact while Satan makes his debut inside. That sweet sensation after doing something horrible only lasts for a second, then the guilt rolls in with a loud roar. It wastes away that person’s spirit until he repents to God as well as to the people around him, and then he must forgive himself. In the book, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel
Hawthorne, there are two people, a man and a woman, who both sinned and throughout their lives must pay the price of that sin.
One is daily absorbed with his shame and grief, while the other accepts hers and by so doing, leaves her guilt behind. Confession of sin,
differentiated the two characters in their shared sin; one repented, the other did not. How does hidden sin affect a person, and how does revealed sin affect a person? There are many ways, threaded throughout
Hawthorne’s classic novel. He gives us a story that fills the mind with
the spiritual reason to confess: “No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true. (188)”.
Hester Prynne was sent to Boston, Massachusetts by her husband during the late 1600’s. He told her and everyone else that he was
going to arrive some other day, but no one knew when. Instead of arriving as Hester’s husband, he came as a physician named Roger Chillingworth. While staying in Boston, before her husband came, Hester fell in love with the cleric and minister Arthur Dimmesdale; both of them committed adultery with each other. Hester became pregnant
and gave birth to a baby girl who she named Pearl. Hester was arrested for committing adultery and then was forced to stand on a platform in the middle of the town to be mocked and despised by the people who were disgusted with her wickedness. She was questioned many a times about the man with whom she had laid, but with the power of her love, she kept her secret. Hester’s husband arrived at the time Hester was on display on the town’s platform. Ashamed and embarrassed for himself and his wife, he disguised himself as Roger Chillingworth. Then, as Roger Chillingworth, he came to the governor’s attention, and became the primary physician in the town, as well as the assistant to Arthur Dimmesdale. This made his plan to seek out revenge on whoever Hester had fallen in love with ideal. As Dr. Chillingworth, he had the chance to question Hester when going in to give her medicine. He then suspected that it was the minister. After Hester was released from prison for her crime, she was forced to wear a red "A" sewn onto the chest of her garments. Ostracized, she lived alone with her daughter Pearl in a cottage by the sea for seven years.
Living with the shame of her sin revealed, Hester endured seven years of people scolding and passing judment on her. The weight of the scarlet letter was heavy, yet she held fast, using her strength founded on love, to stand. She had found peace through confessing her sin. After seven years Hester met with Dimmesdale in the forest, and they both ended all quarrels. Dimmesdale asked Hester if she had found peace or not and she only smiled as an answer. Judging by Hawthorne’s way of writing it
seems as though that smile was a "yes". Hester then said to Dimmesdale after he beat himself down with comments of despair and guilt, “You wrong yourself in this, […] you have deeply and sorely repented. Your sin left behind you, in the days long past. Your present life is not less holy, in very truth, than it seem in people’s eyes. Is there no reality in the penitence thus sealed and witnessed by good works? And wherefore should it not bring you peace?
(167)”.
Hester accepted her outcome in a way that she could live her life without hiding behind her sin. She believed that her love should be respected by the people. Her acceptance of her sin without remorse lead to another quote, “It lies not in the pleasure of the magistrates to take off this badge, […] were I worthy to be quit of it, it would fall away of its own nature, or be transformed into something that should speak a different purpose (147)”. Hester’s state of mind and emotion is hard to
describe. Hawthorne's words describe Hester’s true self best:
“The effect of the symbol-or rather, of the position in respect to society that was indicated by it-on the mind of Hester […], was powerful and peculiar. All the light and graceful foliage of her character had been withered up by this red-hot brand, and had long ago fallen away, leaving a bare and harsh outline, which might have been repulsive, had she possessed friends or companions to be repelled by it. Even the attractiveness of her person had undergone a similar change. It might be partly owing to the studied austerity or her dress, and […] to the lack of demonstration in her manners. It was a sad transformation, too, that her […] hair had either been cut off, or was […] hidden by a cap, that not a shining lock of it ever once gushed into the sunshine. It was due […] to all these causes, but still […] to something else, that there seemed to be no longer anything in Hester’s face for Love to dwell upon; nothing in Hester’s form, though majestic and statue-like, that Passion would […] dream of clasping in its embrace; nothing in Hester’s bosom, to make it […] the pillow of Affection. Some attribute had departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman. Such is
frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all the tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed […] into her heart that it can never show itself more. The latter is […] the truest theory. She who has once been woman, and ceased to be so, might at magic touch to effect the transfiguration. We shall see whether Hester Prynne were ever afterwards so touched, and so transfigured (143).”
Dimmesdale the adulterer, who hid behind a wall of mass self-hatred and guilt was a minister, dying at the hands of Roger Chillingworth’s slow, dark revenge. Chillingworth was the minister’s physician, and since Dimmesdale was suffering at the hands of guilt and shame, he fell ill, and even more ill with the medicine that Chillingworth was giving him. Though Chillingworth wasn’t trying to kill Dimmesdale, he wanted to make him sick, and full of more self-hatred and despair than Dimmesdale already had. Dimmesdale feared to reveal his shame to the people of Boston, because he would be viewed as a worse person than Hester. His reasoning was because he was a minister, a man who not only was a Christian, but a person who taught the Word, and lived in the church. What a disgrace it would be to live as a minister and it be revealed as an adulterer? For unconsciously, it already was; Dimmesdale would always place his hand over his heart, where his secret scarlet letter was, and if he did not cover his chest with his hand, a robe would cover it. Dimmesdale many times had gone to the pulpit to preach, and would draw a breath that he planned would release his confession, but it never came out. He feared that his own confession would cause his own death, maybe not physically but mentally and spiritually. He knew he was a hypocrite because he would tell himself that he would confess one day and then he wouldn’t. “He had striven to put a cheat upon himself
by making the avowal of a guilty conscience, but had gained only one other sin, and a self-acknowledged shame, without the momentary relief of being self-decieved. He had spoken the very truth, and transformed it into the veriest falsehood. […] by the constitution of his nature, he
loved the truth, and loathed the lie, as few men ever did. […] above all things […] he loathed his miserable self! (126)”.
At the end of the book after the seven years passed,
Dimmesdale and Hester meet in the woods, and tell each other their sufferings. Unlike Dimmsdale, Hester found peace within her shame. Hester then told Dimmesdale that her husband was Roger Chillingworth and that he was taking his revenge out on Dimmesdale. The next day the minister was required to give a sermon on the platform in Boston, and all the people gathered around to hear the good minister give his sermon. As the congregation begins to leave, Dimmesdale couldn’t take it any longer and called for Hester and her daughter Pearl. Both came, though Hester was uneasy at first. Dimmesdale then repented and confessed his crime to the whole congregation. He shows his scarlet letter on his chest and fell into Hester’s arms. They embraced each other and sighed with relief as their shame and despair faded away. Dimmesdale took his last breath, dying there in Hester’s arms.
The minister’s death came from the massive load
he had carried those seven years. He spoke to no one, not even Hester about it until that one day in the woods. Both people sinned, and both suffered, but one accepted her consequences while the other did not. Dimmesdale when he died, passed in freedom, for God had forgiven him and he had forgiven himself. The weight of the secret he held had lifted and left him. Hester, accepting her shame, living with and around the people who despised her became stronger; she had changed, becoming someone with an improved character. “But what shall we say, when an individual discovers a revelation, addressed to himself alone, on the same cast sheet of record! In such a case, it could only be the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man, rendered morbidly self contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature, until the firmament itself should appear no more than a fitting page for his soul’s history and fate (136)”.
Rachel Cote is a life-long homeschooler and a student at Royal Academy. She enjoys equestrian sports, writing and has recently learned to fly an airplane.
