How long scarlet letter

Already a print subscriber? Go here to link your subscription. Need help? Visit our Help Center. Go here to connect your wallet. Or is it? Hester Prynne is a tall, dignified character who endures her outcast status with grace and strength. Although she has fallen to a low place as an adulteress with an illegitimate child, she becomes a successful seamstress and raises her daughter even though the authorities want to take the child away.

Hawthorne not only knew accomplished women such as Peabody and Margaret Fuller, he was writing The Scarlet Letter directly after the first women's rights convention in New York in He apparently had affection for the word, which means dishonor, infamy, disgrace, or shame.

Either that, or he needed a thesaurus. While the reviews were generally positive, others condemned The Scarlet Letter as smut. Is the French era actually begun in our literature?

The method of society has been exemplified by the affixing of the scarlet letter on Hester's bosom. This is her punishment, the heaviest that man can afflict upon her. But, like all legal punishment, it aims much more at the protection of society than at the reformation of the culprit.

Hester is to stand as a warning to others tempted as she was: if she recovers her own salvation in the process, so much the better for her; but, for better or worse, society has ceased to have any concern with her.

In a word, society, as at present administered, presents the unhandsome spectacle of a majority of successful hypocrites, on one side, contending against a minority of discovered criminals, on the other; and we are reduced to this paradox, — that the salvation of humanity depends primarily on the victory of the criminals over the hypocrites.

Of course, this is only another way of saying that hypocrisy is the most destructive to the soul of all sins; and meanwhile we may comfort ourselves with the old proverb that hypocrisy itself is the homage which vice pays to virtue, or, if the inward being of society were in harmony with its outward seeming, heaven would appear on earth.

Hester, then, the social outcast, finds no invitation to repentance in the law that crushes her. The only alternative it offers her is abject self-extinction, or defiance. She chooses the latter: but at this point her course is swayed by a providential circumstance with which society had nothing to do. God, as a direct consequence of the sin which man had thus punished, had given her a lovely child, whose place was on that same dishonored bosom, to connect her parent forever with the race and descent of mortals, and to be finally a blessed soul in heaven.

Had they taken her from me, I would willingly have gone with thee into the forest, and signed my name in the Black Man's book too, and that with mine own blood! Standing, as she did, alone with Pearl amidst a hostile world, her life turned, in a great measure, from passion and feeling to thought.

She cast away the fragments of a broken chain. The world's law was no law for her mind. She assumed a freedom of speculation which her neighbors, had they known it, would have held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the scarlet letter. Shadowy guests entered her lonesome cottage that would have been as perilous as demons to their entertainer, could they have been seen so much as knocking at her door.

At times, a fearful doubt strove to possess her soul, whether it were not better to send Pearl at once to Heaven, and go herself to such futurity as Eternal Justice might provide.

The scarlet letter had not done its office. Such being the result of society's management of the matter, let us see what success attended the efforts of an individual to take the law into his own hands.

This accomplice is unknown; that is, society has not found him out. But he is known to himself, and consequently to Roger Chillingworth, who is a symbol of a morbid and remorseless conscience.

Chillingworth has been robbed of his wife. But between that and other kinds of robbery there is this difference, — that he who is robbed wishes not to recover what is lost, but to punish the robber. And his object in inflicting this punishment is not the robber's good, nor the wife's good, nor even the public good; but revenge, pure and simple.

The motive or passion which actuates him, is, in short, a wholly selfish one. It was deeply provoked, no doubt; but so, also, in another way, was the crime which it would requite. Unlike the latter, moreover, it involves no risk; on the contrary, it is enforced by the whole weight of social opinion. If the man had really or unselfishly loved his wife, he would not act thus.

His wish would be to shield her, — to protect the sanctity of the marriage relation, as typified in her, from further pollution. His hostility to the seducer, even, would be more public than personal, — hatred of the sin, not of the individual; for men support with considerable equanimity the destruction of other men's married happiness.

But, by bringing the matter to the personal level, Chillingworth confesses his indifference to any but personal considerations, not to mention his disbelief in God. As regards religion, indeed, he declares himself a fatalist. By thy first step awry thou didst plant the germ of evil; but since that moment it has all been a dark necessity.

Ye that have wronged me are not sinful, save in a kind of typical illusion; neither am I fiend-like, who have snatched a fiend's office from his hands. It is our fate. Let the black flower blossom as it may! The revenge of society consists in publishing the sinner's ignominy. But this method would baffle Chillingworth's revenge just where he designed it to be most effective; for, by leaving the sinner with no load of secret guilt in his heart, it is inadvertently merciful in its very unmercifulness.

The real agony of sin, as Chillingworth clearly perceived, lies not in its commission, which is always delightful, nor in its open punishment, which is a kind of relief, but in the dread of its discovery. The revenge which he plans, therefore, depends above all things upon keeping his victim's secret.

By rejecting all brutal and obvious methods he gains entrance into a much more sensitive region of torture. He will not poison Hester's babe, because he knows that it will live to cause its mother the most poignant pangs she is capable of feeling. Let him hide himself in outward honor, if he may!

Not the less he shall be mine! But it was the constant shadow of my presence, the closest propinquity of the man whom he had most vilely wronged, and who had grown to exist only by this perpetual poison of the direst revenge!

And it demonstrates the truth that the only punishment which man is justified in inflicting upon his fellow is the punishment which is incidental to his being restrained from further indulgence in crime. Such restraint acts as a punishment, because the wicked impulse is thereby prevented from realizing itself; but it is intrinsically an act not of revenge, but of love, since the criminal is thereby preserved from increasing his sinful burden by accomplishing in fact what he had purposed in thought.

The Puritan system was selfish and brutal, merely; Chillingworth's was satanically malignant; but both alike are impotent to do anything but inflame the evils they pretend to assuage. Society and the individual have both demonstrated their incapacity to deal with the great problem of human error. Neither suppression nor torture is of any avail. The devil is always anxious to be enlisted against himself, but his reasons are tolerably transparent. When, at length, Hester and Dimmesdale meet again, they are ripe to fall more deeply and irrevocably than before.

The woman faces the prospect boldly, thinking more of her lover than of herself; he trembles in his flesh, but is willing in his heart; but there is no sincere hesitation on either side. One hour of genuine remorse would have given them insight to perceive that no such shallow device as flight could bring them peace; for it would have shown them that the source of their misery was not the persecution suffered from without, but the inward violation committed by themselves.

Chillingworth comprehends the situation perfectly, and quietly makes his preparations, not to obstruct their escape, but to accompany it. This is the most hideous episode in the story, and well represents the bottomless slough of iniquity which awaits the deliberate choice of evil.

And it elevates Chillingworth into the bad eminence of chief criminal of the three. Not only is his actual wickedness greater, but the extenuation is less.

The lovers might plead their love, but he only his hate. This interpretation of his character may profitably be pondered by the student of the human soul. From the fate of Hester and Dimmesdale we may learn that it avails not the sinner to live a life of saintly deeds and aims, but to be true; not to scourge himself, to wear sackcloth, or to redeem other souls, but openly to accept his shame. The poison of sin is not so much in the sin itself as in the concealment; for all men are sinners, but he who conceals his sin pretends a superhuman holiness.

To acknowledge our sins before God, in the ordinary sense of the phrase, is a phrase, and no more, unproductive of absolution. But to acknowledge our sins before men is, in very truth, to acknowledge them before God; for the appeal is made to the human conscience, and the human conscience is the miraculous presence of God in human nature, and from such acknowledgment absolution is not remote.

The reason is that such acknowledgment surrenders all that is most dear to the unregenerate heart, and thereby involves a humiliation or annihilation of evil pride which eradicates sinful appetite.

All sin is based on selfishness; but the supreme abdication of self, postulated by voluntary and unreserved self-revelation, leaves no further basis for sin to build on. The man who has never been guilty of actual sin is peculiar rather than fortunate; but in all events he has no cause to pride himself on the immunity, which indicates at best that he has been spared adequate temptation.

Hester and Dimmesdale, in the story, stop short of taking this step, but Chillingworth actually begins by taking it. The Americans began applying pressure to the Japanese defense of Iwo Jima in February , when B and B bombers raided the island Live TV.

This Day In History. History Vault. Middle East. Vietnam War. Sign Up. Westward Expansion. Art, Literature, and Film History. Cold War. American Revolution.