The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Hester’s Moral Guilt)

 

The Scarlet Letter

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

(Hester’s Moral Guilt)

 

Hester’s guilt is complete and unredeemable. According to puritan ethics this is the correct position in Hester’s case. She has sinned against the seventh of Ten commandments. An adulteress has sinned against the commandment of God and lost his favour forever. Therefore, in the eyes of a rigid Puritan Hester has sinned unredeemably. She can be made to do penance by making her wear the scarlet letter, which will constantly remind her of her guilt.

In addition to the scarlet letter the presence of Pearl also reminds her of her guilt. Thus, she gets double punishment. The Puritan society asserts its authority over the individual conscience by forcing Hester to accept her punishment. Hester could avoid this punishment by running away alone or with Dimmesdale. But their own minds would not allow them to run away. Hester triumphs over her circumstance by her vocation (needle work) and her acceptance of her punishment.

Dimmesdale triumphs by his confession and public acknowledgement of sin. However, they are not allowed to be mixed up even after their death. Society may have to forgive them but their ultimate redemption lies in the hands of God. Therefore, society can only separate them even in death. The puritan ethics is perfectly carried out in this respect.

Jean Calvin, the 16th century French father of Puritanism, made the idea of the eternal sinfulness of man in Christian history very popular for the puritans. According to him all men are guilty and none is capable of judging Hester. All important people in Boston except the old priest John Wilson and the dying Governor Winthrop are guilty of one sin or the other. Dimmesdale is a hypocrite and coward; Chillingworth is guilty of probing improperly into the depths of human heart. Governor Bellungham is proud of his rich dresses, house and estate while his sister, Mistress Hobbins, is a witch. In the course of story of this book we learn that Hester has developed a sympathetic intuition about sinners in Boston and that she could understand sinfulness in people in whom it was to be the least expected. Dimmesdale himself has blasphemous ideas about God and religion. At the beginning of the story, it is the most frustrated people, who are the most outspoken critics of Hester. All this shows a Boston Puritan Society that is not capable of judging Hester because all its members are sinful in one way of the other.

The issue of the faith in religious morality is less important than the question of individual conscience. Hence it is Hester’s private morality which is correct here. The emphasis on the individual is typically 19^th century and it may have owed its origin to Hawthorne being under the influence of Emerson and the Transcendentalists. Therefore, if the whole society is corrupt or sinful, the individual, whose conscience makes him do his penance is sensitive to morality and he had his own personal morality as against the morality of a whole society. With her patience, courage and humility allied to good deeds Hester proves, that she is as good a Puritan as anybody else. She has been true to her own self-ordained punishment. She feels her sin both through the scarlet letter and the child Pearl but she never tortures herself as Dimmesdale does.

But why does she not torture herself? This is a question which should be considered. It is true that she is not shown, as a beloved of Dimmesdale at all in this book. We do not even know about her motivation for falling in love with Dimmesdale. That she is brave and resolute and resists the temptation of becoming a free thinker like Ann-Hutchison or a witch like Mistress Hibbins do show her own private sense of morality. Yet to say that she never considers herself a sinner at all would be totally false. As we have already seen she refuses to remove the scarlet letter on an order from the community. She is also afraid of the criticism of the Puritans and her own husband which shows that she admits her sin. It may be truer to say that Hester has a private morality which is not inferior to the social morality of the Puritans, but to suggest that she does not consider herself a sinner is completely false.