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 19th 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.
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