SCARLET LETTER - Analysis Chapter 1 : The Prison Door, Chapter 2 : The Market-Place

SCARLET LETTER

Analysis         :       Chapters 1 : The Prison-Door, Chapter 2  : The Market-Place

These chapters introduce the reader to Hester Prynne and begin to explore the theme of sin, along with its connection to knowledge and social order. The chapters’ use of symbols, as well as their depiction of the political reality of Hester Prynne’s world, testify to the contradictions inherent in Puritan society. This is a world that has already “fallen,” that already knows sin: the colonists are quick to establish a prison and a cemetery in their “Utopia,” for they know that misbehavior, evil, and death are unavoidable. This belief fits into the larger Puritan doctrine, which puts heavy emphasis on the idea of original sin—the notion that all people are born sinners because of the initial transgressions of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

But the images of the chapters—the public gatherings at the prison and at the scaffold, both of which are located in central common spaces—also speak to another Puritan belief: the belief that sin not only permeates our world but that it should be actively sought out and exposed so that it can be punished publicly. The beadle reinforces this belief when he calls for a “blessing on the righteous Colony of the Massachusetts, where iniquity is dragged out into the sunshine.” His smug self-righteousness suggests that Hester’s persecution is fueled by more than the villagers’ quest for virtue. While exposing sin is meant to help the sinner and provide an example for others, such exposure does more than merely protect the community. Indeed, Hester becomes a scapegoat, and the public nature of her punishment makes her an object for voyeuristic contemplation; it also gives the townspeople, particularly the women, a chance to demonstrate—or convince themselves of—their own piety by condemning her as loudly as possible. Rather than seeing their own potential sinfulness in Hester, the townspeople see her as someone whose transgressions outweigh and obliterate their own errors.

Yet, unlike her fellow townspeople, Hester accepts her humanity rather than struggles against it; in many ways, her “sin” originated in her acknowledgment of her human need for love, following her husband’s unexplained failure to arrive in Boston and his probable death. The women of the town criticize her for embroidering the scarlet letter, the symbol of her shame, with such care and in such a flashy manner: its ornateness seems to declare that she is proud, rather than ashamed, of her sin. In reality, however, Hester simply accepts the “sin” and its symbol as part of herself, just as she accepts her child. And although she can hardly believe her present “realities,” she takes them as they are rather than resisting them or trying to atone for them.

 Both the rosebush and Hester resist the kinds of fixed interpretation that the narrator associates with religion. The narrator offers multiple possibilities for the significance of the rosebush near the prison door, as he puzzles over its survival in his source manuscript. But, in the end, he rejects all of its possible “meanings,” refusing to give the rosebush a definitive interpretation.

So, too, does the figure of Hester offer various options for interpretation. The fact that she is a woman with a past, with memories of a childhood in England, a marriage in Europe, and a journey to America, means that, despite what the Puritan community thinks, she cannot be defined solely in terms of a single action, in terms of her great “sin.” Pearl, her child, is evidence of this: her existence makes the scarlet letter redundant in that it is she and not the snippet of fabric that is the true consequence of Hester’s actions. As Pearl matures in the coming chapters and her role in Hester’s life becomes more complex, the part Hester’s “sin” plays in defining her identity will become more difficult to determine. For now, the infant’s presence highlights the insignificance of the community’s attempt at punishment: Pearl is a sign of a larger, more powerful order than that which the community is attempting to assert—be it nature, biology, or a God untainted by the corruptions of human religious practices. The fact that the townspeople focus on the scarlet letter rather than on the human child underlines their pettiness, and their failure to see the more “real” consequences of Hester’s action.

 From this point forward, Hester will be formally, officially set apart from the rest of society; yet these opening chapters imply that, even before her acquisition of the scarlet letter, she had always been unique. The text describes her appearance as more distinctive than conventionally beautiful: she is tall and radiates a natural nobility that sets her apart from the women of the town, with whom she is immediately juxtaposed. Hester’s physical isolation on the scaffold thus only manifests an internal alienation that predates the beginning of the plot.

This is the first of three important scenes involving the scaffold. Each of these scenes will show a character taking the first step toward a sort of Emersonian self-reliance, the kind of self-reliance that would come to replace Puritan ideology as the American ideal. In this scene, Hester confronts her “realities” and discovers a new self that does not fit with her old conceptions of herself. Puritan doctrine views “reality” as merely an obstacle to a world beyond this one; Hester’s need to embrace her current situation (in part by literally embracing her daughter) implies a profound separation from the ideals of that ideological system. From now on, Hester will stand outside, if still surrounded by, the Puritan order.