The Scarlet Letter article #3

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twayne United States Authors Series,

Chapter 5: “The Scarlet Letter: The Scaffold Scenes” (no author)

http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/Twayne/hits?r=d&o=DocTitle&n=1&l=7&h=u075_c05#sect22&c=1&locID=avlr&u=TUSA&u=TEA&u=TWA&t=KW&s=6  accessed 20 October 2007

At the beginning, middle, and end of The Scarlet Letter stand Hawthorne's three scaffold scenes. Much emphasis has been placed upon them, and justly so; to know these scenes well is to have a purchase on a romance which is remarkable for its synthesis of elements. Of large structural and thematic significance, each of the scaffold scenes brings together in a moment of moral, emotional, and psychological tension the major characters and forces of the story; concomitantly, each scene centers attention in a dramatic manner on the scarlet letter.

The first scaffold scene, we recall, takes place at midday. For this, as the beadle proclaims, is "the righteous Colony of the Massachusetts, where iniquity is dragged out into the sunshine." As Hawthorne constructs the scene, Hester Prynne stands on the scaffold holding her infant, the people stand below, and the leaders of the community--civil officers, magistrates, ministers--stand above on a balcony. The inhabitants of Boston are thus divided for this scene--the leaders apart and above; and such a division serves Hawthorne's purpose in characterizing both the officials and the people as component parts of this drama.

The officials, clearly, have authority in the matter. Earlier, a group of women outside the jail have muttered about the leniency of Hester Prynne's sentence; in assembly in the marketplace, however, established authority is unchallenged. The leaders of the community--notably Governor Bellingham, the Reverend Mr. Wilson, and the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale--feel the responsibility of exhorting, commanding Hester to confess the name of her partner. Doubtless, says Hawthorne, these are good men, "just and sage." But out of all humanity, he continues, "it would not have been easy to select the same number of wise and virtuous persons, who should be less capable of sitting in judgment on an erring woman's heart, and disentangling its mesh of good and evil, than the sages of rigid aspect towards whom Hester now turned her face." Indeed, Hester seems convinced "that whatever sympathy she might expect lay in the larger and warmer heart of the multitude."

The idea that sympathy and warmth come from the "people" is, as we have seen, at the very center of Hawthorne's democratic and artistic faith. Committed to a belief in the value of humanity, he would respect the "universal throb" of the human heart and regard the "magnetic chain of humanity" as virtually sacred. But it is the feelings rather than the ideas or perceptions of humanity that are to be trusted. As Hawthorne says in The Scarlet Letter: "when an uninstructed multitude attempts to see with its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to be deceived." But when it forms its judgment, "as it usually does, on the intuitions of its great and warm heart, the conclusions thus attained are often so profound and so unerring, as to possess the character of truths supernaturally revealed."

Strong language, this, expressing Hawthorne's fervent commitment to the collective heart of humanity as a fundamental source of wisdom. But, as Hawthorne sees and often says in his tales of colonial times, this was "not an age of delicacy." The Puritans are stern, somber, and repressive; their children belong "to the most intolerant brood that ever lived." In portraying a Puritan multitude, Hawthorne faces the problem of characterizing sternness and somberness while at the same time remaining true to his faith in humanity. He sports with the Puritans in his description of the Election holiday, saying that they compressed their mirth and public joy into this festal season and thereby so far dispelled their customary gloom that for one day "they appeared scarcely more grave than most other communities at a period of general affliction." Still, despite the lack of popular merriment on this holiday, "the great, honest face of the people smiled, grimly, perhaps, but widely too." Hawthorne sees through Puritan severity to a fundamental humanity; he may castigate or sport with the Puritan posture of grimness, but he cannot repudiate (he can do nothing but admire) the essential humanity that lies under the sad-colored garments of those he is describing. The public is despotic in its temper, he says, incorporating the specific example of the Puritans under this general principle; "it is capable of denying common justice, when too strenuously demanded as a right"; but when, "as despots love to have it," an appeal is made to its generosity, the public frequently awards "more than justice." The seat of generosity is the heart. And in perhaps no other place does Hawthorne repeat so insistently his faith in the great, warm heart of the people as in The Scarlet Letter.

The center of attention in the first scaffold scene is, of course, the letter worn by Hester Prynne. "The point which drew all eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer," says Hawthorne, was the "SCARLET LETTER, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom." In this scene the community officially discovers the letter; given the moral imperative that iniquity should be "dragged out into the sunshine," the stares of the townspeople, the "thousand unrelenting eyes . . . concentred" on Hester's bosom, constitute a kind of public meditation on the nature of sinfulness and guilt. Toward the end of the scene the Reverend Mr. Wilson, carefully prepared for the occasion, preaches a discourse on sin, "in all its branches, but with continuous reference to the ignominious letter. So forcibly did he dwell upon this symbol," writes Hawthorne, that it assumed new terrors in the people's imagination "and seemed to derive its scarlet hue from the flames of the infernal pit." The letter dominates the scene; it sets Hester apart to such an extent that those who had known her previously "were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time"; it has the effect of "a spell" which puts her in a "sphere by herself."

As Hester stands on the scaffold, tall, "lady-like," with "dark and abundant hair," the crowd notes with some astonishment that her beauty shines out and makes a halo of her misfortune. From the beginning of her exposure to public view, Hester bears her ordeal with haughty agony. Undeniably she flaunts the letter; yet Hawthorne seems to sympathize with the emotional understanding shown by the youngest matron outside the jail when she says that the pang of the letter will be always in Hester's heart. Alone in the world with the symbol and consequence of her sin, Hester dons an armor of pride that is also a mantle of suffering.

In this initial scene Roger Chillingworth appears on the outskirts of the crowd in a motley civilized and savage costume and soon after experiences an unsettling shock of recognition. Once Chillingworth has recognized Hester on the scaffold, "a writhing horror" twists across his face "like a snake"; for one moment his features are visibly convulsed by a powerful emotion which he quickly controls by an effort of will. Then "the convulsion grew almost imperceptible, and finally subsided into the depths of his nature." When he sees that he is recognized by Hester, "he slowly and calmly raised his finger, made a gesture with it in the air, and laid it on his lips."

Chillingworth has repressed his instinctive emotional response to the situation. The snakelike convulsion that expressed his feelings has been pushed deep into his being where it remains as the source of monomania and revenge. And his first message to Hester Prynne is the time-honored gesture of silence and secrecy, the finger raised to the lips. Thus, from the beginning Chillingworth has possessed himself of "the lock and key" of Hester's silence. From the beginning, apparently, he has "resolved not to be pilloried beside her on her pedestal of shame."

On the scaffold with the other leaders of the community stands Arthur Dimmesdale, whose role as Hester's pastor and spiritual mentor forces him to address her and to ask for the name of her partner in sin. In the terrible ambivalence of his position Dimmesdale wants Hester to name him even as he does not want to be named. He would have her pin the letter on him, but he will not reveal his partnership in it. "Be not silent from any mistaken pity and tenderness," he says to Hester; though your partner in sin "were to step down from a high place, and stand there beside thee, on thy pedestal of shame, yet better were it so, than to hide a guilty heart through life. What can thy silence do for him, except it tempt him--yea, compel him, as it were--to add hypocrisy to sin? Heaven hath granted thee an open ignominy, that thereby thou mayest work out an open triumph over the evil within thee, and the sorrow without. Take heed how thou deniest to him--who, perchance, hath not the courage to grasp it for himself--the bitter, but wholesome, cup that is now presented to thy lips!"

To the multitude, Dimmesdale's appeal seems powerful beyond withstanding. Proof against such emotional eloquence, however, is the man who has it in him to frame the appeal. Even in the first scaffold scene Hawthorne shows forth the deep ambivalence of Dimmesdale's position: the minister would like to be named and known for what he is, an adulterer. Thus, when he speaks the above words to Hester Prynne, the words themselves are true, pathetically so. Being named would bring shame and disgrace, but also the relief of standing clear in one's own identity; moreover, in this community, this "righteous" colony, there is an undeniably correct course of action for Dimmesdale to take--sin and iniquity, he knows, ought to be dragged out into the broad light of noonday. His appeal to Hester is thus pathetically sincere; he is asking her to help him in a way he cannot help himself.

But we gradually come to see why he cannot help himself. For, with all his physical and psychological debility, which makes him seem weak and gives him the posture of a moral invalid deserving of pity (or perhaps contempt), Dimmesdale is afflicted with a devious pride. He cannot surrender an identity which brings him the adulation of his parishioners, the respect and praise of his peers. His contortions in the guise of humility only add to the public admiration which, in turn, feeds an ego fundamentally intent on itself.

After the appeal of Dimmesdale and the harsher stricture of Mr. Wilson have failed to make Hester speak, Chillingworth moves closer to the scaffold and imperiously bids her to name the father of her child. "'I will not speak!' answered Hester, turning pale as death, but responding to this voice, which she too surely recognized. 'And my child must seek a heavenly Father; she shall never know an earthly one!'" After gesturing first for silence, Roger Chillingworth has thus spoken in this first scaffold scene, lending his voice, for personal reasons, to the communal desire for Hester to name her partner. But the gesture of silence has fitted Hester's mood--The Scarlet Letter will develop amid the dry regions of silence.

The first scaffold scene concludes (at the end of chapter 3) with a final emphasis on the letter. When Hester is led back to prison, those who peered after her whispered "that the scarlet letter threw a lurid gleam along the dark passage-way of the interior." The Reverend Mr. Wilson has put Hester's letter at the center of his formal discourse; Dimmesdale and Chillingworth have spoken to Hester, overtly and covertly. And the private drama, depending for its form on the silence of the actors, has begun in the midst of communal meditation and a public demand for confession. Thus the terms of the private drama stand opposed to the efforts of the community to have everything immediately out in the open. Those who see the community as a source of all wrong in the romance forget that silence--breeding pride, hypocrisy, and vengeance--is the imposition and the condition of the private drama. But, of course, only in this particular community would silence invoke such subterranean suffering.

Hawthorne's second scaffold scene, which comes precisely at the middle of his romance, turns the moral structure of the first inside out. This is Dimmesdale's scene, staged at midnight rather than at midday. In terms of Puritan orthodoxy it can be nothing but a scene of pseudo-confession, a "mockery of penitence," in Hawthorne's words, a "vain show of expiation." Again Hawthorne emphasizes the letter, this time by stressing Dimmesdale's infatuation with his own guilt. During one of his nights of penance, the thought of going to the scaffold has come over Dimmesdale. Attiring himself with "as much care as if it had been for public worship, and precisely in the same manner," he makes his way to the deserted marketplace. Alone on the scaffold, he feels that the entire world is gazing at the scarlet letter over his heart. His shriek of agony, a good deal more modulated than at first it seems, awakens Governor Bellingham and Mistress Hibbins; but neither sees him on the scaffold. The Reverend Mr. Wilson, returning from the deathbed of Governor Winthrop, walks slowly by the scaffold without noticing Dimmesdale. For darkness is not the medium in which the Puritans recognize sin. Darkness corresponds to secrecy; the midnight scaffold scene is an extension of the private drama. Accordingly, it involves Dimmesdale, Chillingworth, Hester, and Pearl in a unique and lurid confrontation.

Returning homeward with Pearl from the same errand which has brought the Reverend Mr. Wilson and Roger Chillingworth to minister to the final spiritual and bodily needs of Governor Winthrop, Hester is summoned onto the scaffold by Dimmesdale. As he stands with Hester and Pearl, the minister feels the vitality of life other than his own, but he shrinks back from Pearl's request to stand thus together in the broad light of the following noon. The meteor that then lights up the sky bathes them "in the noon of that strange and solemn splendor"; but it is, of course, a false noon, unnatural, lacking moral efficacy.

Hawthorne puts his meteor to good use. It leads him to refer to the New England habit of reading history as God's Providence--of interpreting natural phenomena as signs of special meaning from God to his chosen people. But the massive self-projection of Dimmesdale's guilt also finds embodiment in the meteor. What shall we say, asks Hawthorne, when one man "discovers a revelation, addressed to himself alone," written across the sky: "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, interior, 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." Thus Dimmesdale sees a great scarlet A in the sky; cosmic ego evokes cosmic evidence of guilt. But Hawthorne does not dispense with his meteor without a final touch that corroborates Dimmesdale's sense of its shape by illustrating the collective ego of the community. People in the town, Dimmesdale hears the next day, have likewise seen the A. "As our good Governor Winthrop was made an angel this past night," the sexton tells him, "it was doubtless held fit that there should be some notice thereof." Hawthorne provides the meteor; history and conscience do the rest. And the public and the private worlds in the romance remain apart and opposed.

The same glance that reveals to Dimmesdale the great letter in the sky discloses Chillingworth at the foot of the scaffold. Lighted by the meteor, Chillingworth's features take on a new expression, or, as Hawthorne says, perhaps "the physician was not careful then, as at all other times, to hide the malevolence with which he looked upon his victim." In a setting suggesting to Hester and Dimmesdale the day of judgment, Chillingworth seems "the arch-fiend" himself, come to claim his own. So intense is Dimmesdale's perception of Chillingworth that, when utter blackness succeeds the vivid light of the meteor, the smiling and scowling face of the physician seems somehow to remain, "painted on the darkness," the only reality in an "annihilated" world. "Come good Sir, and my dear friend," says Chillingworth: "let me lead you home." "I will go home with you," replies Dimmesdale. Thus he goes "home" with the man he fears and hates, the man who has discovered the secret of the scarlet letter and whose principle of being has come to depend on its remaining a secret. The nadir of Dimmesdale's moral struggle stands as the moment of triumph for the avenging Chillingworth.

Hawthorne prepares for his third and final scaffold scene by refocusing attention on Hester's scarlet letter. After seven years it has become an object of familiarity in the town. But in the marketplace on Election day are many people from the country who have heard exaggerated rumors about the letter without ever having seen it. They throng about Hester Prynne "with rude and boorish intrusiveness." Noting the curiosity of the crowd, sailors "thrust their sunburnt and desperado-looking faces into the ring" and Indians fasten "their snake-like black eyes on Hester's bosom." Lastly, their interest in a "wornout subject languidly reviving itself, by sympathy with what they saw others feel," the people of the town torment Hester Prynne, "perhaps more than all the rest, with their cool, well-acquainted gaze at her familiar shame." Thus, just prior to the scaffold scene, "the burning letter...had strangely become the centre of more remark and excitement, and was thus made to sear her breast more painfully than at any time since the first time she put it on."

The ensuing scene takes its form unexpectedly, amid the wonder of the spectators. Dimmesdale again takes the initiative, this time at midday; he beckons Hester and Pearl to ascend the scaffold with him. Hester's strength is necessary if he is to be "guided by the will which God hath granted" him. At the hour of his greatest public success and triumph ("Never, on New England soil, had stood the man so honored by his mortal brethren as the preacher!"), Arthur Dimmesdale, the spiritual darling of the people, ascends the scaffold with Hester and Pearl. Once again, Roger Chillingworth is present: in the first scaffold scene, he would know the name of Hester's partner; in the second, he does know; and, in the third, he tries desperately to keep others from knowing. Do not perish in dishonor, he whispers in savage fear to Dimmesdale; "I can yet save you." But Dimmesdale repudiates Chillingworth as the tempter, and with the help of God (and Hester) moves toward the freedom of the scaffold. "Hadst thou sought the whole earth over," says Chillingworth, quite in keeping with the dramatic logic of the narrative, "there was no one place so secret,--no high place nor lowly place, where thou couldst have escaped me,--save on this very scaffold!" And Dimmesdale thanks God, assures a doubting Hester that he is doing God's will, and reveals his own scarlet letter to the astonished multitude.

In contrast to the second scaffold scene, which Chillingworth comes to dominate, this final scene remains under the control of Dimmesdale. Perhaps convinced by the towering eloquence of his Election Day sermon, he insists on viewing the world as the creation of a merciful Providence. He cannot agree with Hester when she hopes they may meet in eternity, having "ransomed one another" with all their woe. Only God knows, says Dimmesdale, returning to the subject of his own spiritual drama, "and He is merciful! He hath proved his mercy, most of all, in my afflictions. By giving me this burning torture to bear upon my breast! By sending yonder dark and terrible old man, to keep the torture always at red-heat! By bringing me hither, to die this death of triumphant ignominy before the people! Had either of these agonies been wanting, I had been lost for ever! Praised be his name! His will be done! Farewell!"

The paradox of mercy by affliction thus makes possible the "triumphant ignominy" of Dimmesdale's death. Thankful for the A, for Chillingworth, and for the scaffold, the minister has projected an intense religious odyssey, with himself in the heroic central role. His statement that he is "the one sinner in the world" attests to the fusion of guilt and ego that has characterized his life even as it proclaims the omnipotence of the God who can save him. A curious mixture of theology and self, Dimmesdale's ascending faith distances him from Hester and leaves him assured of his own salvation.