The Scarlet Letter

As the novel’s first few chapters demonstrate, the Puritans who settled in 17th-century Massachusetts had an especially severe interpretation of the Christian concept of sin. Traditionally, Christianity has maintained that all humans are inherently sinful because of Adam and Eve’s transgression. This idea of humanity as innately flawed doesn’t necessarily translate into harsh condemnation and punishment; over the course of the novel, Hawthorne suggests that it can serve as a basis for compassion and forgiveness. This, however, is not the approach of Puritan society, which is primarily concerned with rooting out and shaming whatever it considers sinful. In doing so, it ironically demonstrates a lack of interest in the redemption or reformation of any particular sinner; although Dimmesdale speaks about Hester’s punishment being “effectual to [her] salvation” (62), its true purpose seems to be, as Chillingworth puts it, to transform her into “a living sermon against sin” (58). This dehumanizes both the person being judged and those judging her, in that it erodes their sense of empathy and shared human experience.

Of course, The Scarlet Letter is also ambivalent about whether Hester’s actions truly were sinful. One passage that implies condemnation is the narrator’s description of Hester and Pearl as a perverted image of “Divine Maternity” (i.e., Mary and Jesus): “Here, there was the taint of deepest sin in the most sacred quality of human life, working such effect, that the world was only the darker for this woman’s beauty, and the more lost for the infant that she had borne” (53). With that said, the novel also suggests that the truest examples of sin lie elsewhere—most notably, in the behavior of Chillingworth, Dimmesdale, and the community at large. In Chapter 4, Chillingworth himself even accepts partial responsibility for Hester’s actions, framing his decision to marry her as a selfish and even immoral one: “Mine was the first wrong, when I betrayed thy budding youth into a false and unnatural relation with my decay […] Between thee and me, the scale hangs fairly balanced” (68-69). This is a radical statement for Chillingworth’s time as well as Hawthorne’s, given how highly 19th-century gender ideology valued female sexual purity.

Another area in which competing ideas of sin arise is in Hester’s refusal to name her lover. Hester is adamant on the subject, and Dimmesdale worries that it would be wrong to ask her to betray the man. As Hester’s secret lover, Dimmesdale clearly has his own reasons for hoping Hester remains silent (though he suggests elsewhere that he would be relieved if she gave him up). Regardless, the debate reveals a rift between Hester and Dimmesdale’s concern for the sanctity of private emotion, and the community’s insistence on public displays of penance. As John Wilson says:

“[Dimmesdale] opposes to me […] that it were wronging the very nature of woman to force her to lay open her heart’s secret in such broad daylight, and in presence of so great a multitude. Truly, as I sought to convince him, the shame lay in the commission of the sin, and not in the showing of it forth” (60-61).

In fact, this Puritan society arguably believes that it’s appropriate to “show forth” not only sin but the entirety of an individual’s inner life: anything a person would prefer to keep secret is presumed to be something they shouldn’t be doing.

In other words, the society The Scarlet Letter depicts is one that expects an individual’s private and public personas to align with one another. This is the rationale for Hester’s punishment itself; the assumption is that the letter she wears expresses both the identity Salem has assigned to her and her true moral character. In reality, the relationship between personal and public identity isn’t so easily summed up, and the rest of the novel devotes considerable attention to the ways in which those identities intersect and diverge.