Chapter One Puritan Theocracy as Shown in Hester’s Scaffold Scene
Hawthorne starts this novel with a very clear intention to enclose its setting within a particular religious milieu1—a Puritan community in early 17th century New England. It is a townspeople both beneath and outside the nexus of the
unchallengeable power represented by the meetinghouse, “the place whence proclamations were wont to be made” (SL 64). Not the townspeople but the men of authority have had the sole power to decide for the community. The main discussion in this chapter will be that Hawthorne writes Hester’s sin and her scaffold scene to examine two underlying aspects of the Puritan theocracy. The first is that behavior represents faith. The second is that the course of the community’s religious and political development is determined by an interlocking patriarchal power relation.
On their “errand into the wilderness” of New England, what concerns the Puritans most is no longer how they should contend with those of another religion but how they should build a model Christian society as “a city upon a hill” for the Church of England and the rest of the world to follow (Winthrop 91).2 The community is a
“Utopia of human virtue and happiness” where religion has considerable influence on almost every aspect (SL 47). Not for nothing does Hawthorne point out in the novel that the community is a theocracy where “religion and law were almost identical, and in whose character both were so thoroughly interfused” (SL 50). For the community,
1 In “The Custom-House,” Hawthorne wrote that the story he told was about a woman who “had flourished during a period between the early days of Massachusetts and the close of the seventeenth century” (SL 32). By September 27, 1849, he was already working on The Scarlet Letter every day. It was finished by February 3, 1850. See Randall Stewart, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 93-95. Also, Hawthorne wrote that the story of the novel happened “not less than two centuries ago” (SL 49), and that the function of the scaffold changed from being “a penal machine” to being “merely historical traditionary”
for “two or three generations past” (SL 55). We can infer that the specific historical time in which Hawthorne set this novel is around 1640s and later, and that the characters in the novel are mainly the first and second generations of the Massachusetts Colony.
2 I use the title of the book by Perry Miller—Errand in the Wilderness.
religion which regulates their faith is to be represented by the law which regulates their behavior. This means that their behavior is the result of their faith. It is the community’s conception that there exists an optimal union of religion and law and of faith and behavior. Of course, it requires a forceful and formidable effort for the community to maintain this ideal union by regulating their behavior through law, for
“the mildest and severest acts of public discipline were alike made venerable and awful” and “might be invested with almost as stern a dignity as the punishment of death itself” (SL 50). The community notices that in the system of this ideal union, behavior regulated by law is relatively far more unstable and variable than faith regulated by religion. It is not an effort for the community, composed of the people of the same religion, to build a society where one can do or express whatever one wishes to and can still have a say in communal affairs. The integrity of the community as a religious entity lies in social conformity which they regard as a pivotal factor in stabilizing their newly formed society and which they display through behavioral regulation. Social stability is a basic prerequisite for the desirable results of either physical or spiritual activities in the community. The community has just experienced religious conflict and even persecution back in old England and know that due to dissent and conflict, even a long-established society can become chaotic, let alone their fledgling commonwealth. The situation in colonial New England that the
community faces is different from that in Old England. The community’s forceful and formidable behavioral regulation is a precautionary measure that denotes their fear that the perfect union may be breached and that they are hence proven to be unworthy of God’s grace. It is through his examination of the community’s fear and its
precautionary behavioral regulation that Hawthorne brings to light the two striking characteristics of the community aspiring represent God’s Word.
We need to return to Hester’s scaffold scene to find out more about what
Hawthorne attempts to say. There is an ideal unity of the community’s social behavior, but Hester’s sin violates this unity. Hawthorne designs Hester’s scaffold scene with an aim that the community is divided into three strata—if considered vertically—a top stratum of “men no less dignified than the Governor, and several of his counselors, a judge, a general, and the ministers of the town … in the balcony of the meeting-house, looking down on the platform [of the scaffold]” (SL 56); a middle stratum of Hester as a sinner and the product of her sin; and a bottom stratum of the common people.
Hawthorne first draws our attention to five women from the bottom strata who severely judge Hester and refers to their judgments as “a circumstance to be noted”
(SL 50). All these five women are “self-constituted judges” and criticize Hester to various degrees, for they consider themselves to be “of mature age and church members in good repute” and regard themselves as an antithesis of this young sinner who brings not only shame upon them but also threat to the community’s social stability (SL 51). Despite the fact that each has her own judgment on Hester, all of them firmly believe that there is a higher power, represented by those men with “the majesty or reverence of rank and office” in the meetinghouse, to determine the handling of the sinner and that “the infliction of a legal sentence would have earnest and effectual meaning” (SL 56). If we temporarily remove Hester’s sin from the scaffold scene, we see more clearly the pattern of the community’s behavioral regulation:
Sin was a violation of order, grace a restoration of order. All the main tenets of Christian religion could be stated in term of this concept, and the Puritans so stated them again and again. … Subordination was indeed the very soul of order, and the Almighty as a God of order formed his earthly
kingdom in a pattern of subordination. … The Puritans were no levelers.
Social classes and various offices, orders, and positions of social ranks existed for them as part of a divinely ordered plan. (Morgan, Puritan Family 15)
Having ultimate faith in their religion, the common townspeople have physically given themselves to be regulated by the men of authority and have also spiritually consider them capable of connecting faith with God’s Word.
Still, we need to put Hester’s sin back into the scaffold scene and see beyond her sin as a breach in the community’s collective agreement. Hester is despised and accused of breaking one of the Ten Commandments: adultery. It is to be noted that the community never directly names Hester’s sin and that the scarlet letter which they command her to wear only symbolizes a negative meaning. The community’s biblical accusation of Hester’s sin remains symbolic because the sin is too ignominious for the community to denominate and because turning their fear of the sin into exasperation means something more substantial and significant for the community if they want to prevent their society from further deviating from the biblical prescriptions, as Hawthorne writes of the community’s reaction:
The [scaffold] scene was not without a mixture of awe, such as must always invest the spectacle of guilt and shame in a fellow-creature, before the society shall have grown corrupt enough to smile, instead of
shuddering, at it. … They [the community] were stern enough to look upon her [Hester’s] death, had that been the sentence, without a murmur at its severity, but had none of the heartlessness of another social state, which would only find a theme for jest in an exhibition like the present.
(SL 56)
The community’s angry reaction may give us a feeling that the community is desperate against sin. As one townsman tells the communal attitude towards sin,
“iniquity is searched out, and punished in the sight of rulers and people; as here in our godly New England” (SL 62). For the community, “the more desperate the situation, the more action it evoked” (Miller, Puritan Mind 37). They anticipate building “an ideal of social conformity, of law and order, of regulation and control,” and in order to achieve that goal, they set “a social code demanding obedience to external law, a code to which good people voluntarily conformed and to which bad people should be made to conform” (Miller, Puritan Mind 192; emphasis mine). It is from the community’s angry reaction to Hester’s sin that we need to explore how the community expresses faith and executes regulatory codes of conduct.
The image of Hester standing on the scaffold with baby Pearl at her bosom unmistakably reminds us of the image of a broken family where the father is missing.
During those three hours of Hester’s public humiliation, one thing that concerns the whole community most, especially those men of authority in the meetinghouse, is the absence of Pearl’s father. A voice proceeds from the cold and stern crowd around the scaffold, “Speak, woman! Speak; and give your child a father!” (SL 68) It seems that those men of authority consider it their duty of “sitting in judgment on an erring woman’s [Hester’s] heart, and disentangling its mesh of good and evil” (SL 64) to obtain the knowledge of the guilty father’s name by their strenuous endeavor to “deal with this poor sinner’s [Hester’s] soul” (SL 66). Under the great encouragement from the Reverend John Wilson and Governor Bellingham, the Reverend Arthur
Dimmesdale, a young respected clergyman, attempts to persuade Hester to reveal her paramour’s name. He reasons, “If thou feelest it to be for thy soul’s peace, and that thy earthly punishment will thereby be made more effectual to salvation, I charge thee
to speak out the name of thy fellow-sinner and fellow-sufferer” (SL 67). Dimmesdale fails to convince Hester but is quite successful in making the crowd believe “that Hester Prynne would speak out that guilty name; or else that the guilty one himself … would be drawn forth in an inward and inevitable necessity, and compelled to ascend the scaffold” (SL 68). The community’s strong desire to know the name of the guilty father does not arise so much from their curiosity about this scandalous affair as from their urgent need to turn that image of a broken family into the image of a whole family. Hawthorne stages not only Hester’s public humiliation and the community’s exasperation but also the implication of the Puritan doctrine in “family government as part of the natural order” (Todd 101), as William Perkins agues:
It followeth that the holy and righteous government [the family] thereof, is a direct means for the good ordering both of Church and
Commonwealth; yea that the laws thereof being rightly informed, and religiously observed, are available to prepare and dispose men to the keeping of order in other governments. For this first society is as it were the school, wherein are taught and learned the principles of authority and subjection. (qtd. in Todd 101; emphasis mine).
The community’s social stability is built on the sacrifice of one’s individuality for social conformity. This sacrifice of one’s individuality is, for women especially, actually a double confinement where each individual has to conform to the male head of the family that conforms to the authoritative men of the community. For the
Puritans in the New World, “the family has become the basic and most essential unit of church government, and … the head of the protestant, and especially of puritan household is expected to oversee the spiritual welfare of his family and to conduct daily worship in the home” (Todd 96). “The family was regarded as a religious
society with obligations of group Scripture reading, prayer, and catechism. … Within the family the husband [the father] was without question the master. He was prince and teacher, pastor and judge in his household” (Bremer 177). Most scholars of 17th century New England history agree that the Puritans regard the male head of the household as biblically responsible for commanding and instructing the other family members in the way of God. Hawthorne brings our attention to early colonial
masculinity, presenting the Puritan knowledge on its definition, development and construction. Adult maturity is marked by marriage and the acquisition of the status of a householder. A man's performance in this role, his exercise of reason as well as force in marital relationship, is the ultimate test of his manhood. Effective manhood in this period involves learning and performing a social role, which is founded upon
self-mastery and internal discipline. The social order rests, in the last resort, on this gender order. The patriarchal preference in a household is also religiously supported and monitored by pastors in Baxter’s view:
[Pastors ought to] have a special eye upon families, to see that they are well ordered, and the duties of each relation performed … if [pastors]
could but get the rulers of families to do their duty, to take up the work where [pastors] left it, and help it on, what abundance of good might be done! … Go occasionally among them … and ask the master of the family whether he prays with them, and reads the Scripture, or what he doth? Labor to convince such as neglect this, of their sin … Persuade the master of every family to cause his children and servants to repeat the Catechism to him, every Sabbath evening, and to give him some account of what they have heard at church during the day. (qtd. in Todd 105) Agreeing to obey behavioral regulation, the Puritans are convinced that under
the piloting of a father, the enactment of family government and family worship is an obligation of a Christian household.3 In order that the Puritans can fulfill their religious conviction, “it is thy [the father’s] part [role/responsibility] to see it,” as John Cotton explicitly writes, “that thy children and servants be God’s people” (qtd.
in Morgan, Puritan Family 7). The wife, children, and even servants of the family must conform to their male leader, the father who leads the whole family in conformity to Puritan society. “If the family failed to teach its members properly, neither the state nor the church could be expected to accomplish much” (Morgan, Puritan Family 139). The Puritan view about the family and the father plays an indispensable part in bringing about the kingdom of God in the New World:
[P]ersonal ambition became group ambition for the reform of established authority. … [T]heir emphasis on family mutuality and voluntary
subordination had the effect of intensifying access to the father, at home as well as in religious fantasy. The major Puritan institutions of church and family encouraged men to model social authority on the father’s role.
To have direct access to the father’s word became the Puritan restatement of the highest earthly ambition. … [T]his faith struggled to transform personal ambition into group loyalty, with the family as a “little
commonwealth” under the father’s rule. … Preaches often spoke directly to the head of the household, even gave the husband semi-ministerial authority to educate the family in religious matters. (Leverenz 46;
3 When the English Puritans met with difficulty in their efforts to purify the Church of England in the last years of Elizabeth I’s reign, they turned to the sphere they could still control—their individual families. It was during this period around 1600 that the English Puritans began to place emphasis on the Sabbath, to revive family worship, and to encourage personal acts of mercy to the sick and the dying. When the Puritan beliefs prospered in the 1640s, this tradition of family worship emerged into the open and also along with the Puritan immigrants into the New World. For more information on the Puritan family worship, see J. I. Packer, A Quest for Godliness: the Puritan Vision of the Christian Life, and Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order.
emphasis mine)
Hawthorne further draws our attention to his approach to this Puritan conception of the family in the community in terms of the relationship between husband/father and wife in marriage. Clearly, it is the absence of Hester’s husband that the community considers to be the cause of her sin, for “the more conventional Puritan pattern is to connect sin not to the mother’s absence but to her presence when unguided by the father’s hand” (Leverenz 149). “[T]he insistence of puritans on the father’s
responsibilities is incidentally seen as increasing the dependence of the wife on the husband,” and “it is allegedly Puritanism—extreme Protestantism—which has
spiritualized the family and sacerdotalized the role of the [husband] by entrusting him with the responsibility for [the] household religious education” (Todd 102-03). Hester is married to a learned man and is sent to settle in Boston before him. Her husband is expected to reunite with her after he finishes some necessary affairs. “[N]o tidings have come of this learned gentleman, Master Prynne,” as one townsman so comments,
“and this young lady … being left to her own misguidance” (SL 62; emphasis mine).
The community presumes that “her husband may be at the bottom of the sea” and believes that without the guidance of her husband, she is “strongly attempted to her fall” (SL 63). Because of “their great mercy and tenderness of heart,” the
Massachusetts magistracy has “not been bold to put in force the extremity of [the]
righteous law against her”—death penalty (SL 63). Instead of giving Hester death penalty, the community aims to turn her into “a living sermon against sin” by
commanding her to wear the scarlet letter (SL 63). The scarlet letter not only punishes Hester but also warns the common people against committing the same crime.
To have a clearer understanding of the relationship between husband and wife in Puritan society, we need to first turn to the theme of marriage that is antecedent to
the formation of the family. A whole family formed by marriage as a union of individuals is invested with the Puritan emphasis on the intrinsic spiritual values of the marital relationship between husband and wife—a set of extravagant formulations positing that marital love is not merely a love between two people and that the love in marriage should transcend mundane love. One is too infatuated with the pleasure and delight of marital love to gain spiritual enlightenment. For colonial Puritan couples, marriage is not a union of two lineages but aims for the higher ends of serving God. It is noteworthy that colonial Puritans take the order of the functions of matrimony stated by the Church of England in the Book of Common Prayer (1662) and reverse it.
The English Church stipulates that matrimony is first ordained for procreation, second as a way to avoid fornication, and third for the mutual society, help, and comfort that one ought to have for the other. The Puritans reverse this order, and this reversal is recognized by Baptists in The Baptist Confession of 1869. The Puritans lay a biblical foundation for the duties of husband and wife based on Genesis 2 and Ephesians 5.4 They view the first duty of husband and wife as an intimate relationship entirely in accordance with Ephesians 5:25-33.5 Husband and wife are also helpers of each other’s salvation, for they are to bring up in each other faith, love, obedience, and
4 See Genesis 2:18-25, which portrays how man and woman are created by God and which emphasizes a union of man and woman as each other’s best partner, as God intends.
5 The following is Ephesians 5:25-33, and I shall return to this excerpt later when I discuss the marriage theme in the community on a social and religious scale:
(25) Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her (26) to sanctify her, cleansing her by the bath of water with the word,
(27) that he might present to himself the church in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.
(28) So (also) husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.
(29) For no one hates his own flesh but rather nourishes and cherishes it, even as Christ does the church,
(30) because we are members of his body.
(31) For this reason a man shall leave (his) father and (his) mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh."
(32) This is a great mystery, but I speak in reference to Christ and the church.
(33) In any case, each one of you should love his wife as himself, and the wife should respect her husband.
good works; to warn and help each other against sin and temptation; to join in the Lord’s worship in the family and in private; and to prepare each other for the approach of death and comfort in the hope of eternal life.
The gender issue related to Hester’s scaffold scene is of too much significance to be taken for granted or to be ignored. The purpose of Hawthorne utilizing the sin of adultery as a way to convulse the community should be subject to close scrutiny.
Hawthorne has Hester receive public humiliation on the scaffold as a known perpetrator of such a sin, the commitment of which requires a man and a woman.
Hester’s determined refusal to tell the guilty name and her assertion that her child will seek a heavenly father instead of an earthly one stop all those lengthy interrogations of her soul and stir up the anxiety of the whole community, which arises from their inability to restore the image of a whole family and the marital relationship as instructed in the Scripture. Among all those meetinghouse members, Arthur Dimmesdale and John Wilson as the two most qualified speakers to Hester’s soul, nevertheless, remind us of colonial ministers’ frequent use of female imagery in their preaching to the common people about conversion and saving faith, in terms of “a great mystery … in reference to Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:32; emphasis mine). They imagine patriarchal God, using gendered language to figure their spiritual abjection, condition, and obedience. In the biblical instruction on the relationship between Christ and the church as that between husband and wife, women are
considered dependent on men’s help to “be holy and without blemish” (Ephesians 5:
27). In other words, women are originally a weaker figure in such a double metaphorical marital relationship—Christ as husband and the church as wife on a religious scale and men as husband and women as wife on a familial scale. The
former denotes the believers’ relation with God—the total subordination of the church
to the Father while the latter is a miniature of the former forcibly applied by the church to the family—an accentuated, wider range of application of this marital metaphor. The church which is biblically transformed into a wife is to be redeemed through faith in Christ as a husband, and this religious femininity is employed in the social construction of subjectivity. Femininity in each individual reaffirms the fact that the Puritans are in desperate need of divine grace and that they thus strengthens their privileged status of being chosen for salvation. The Puritans’ claim that they are already chosen by God for salvation is a prophecy of their future reunion with Him as divine grace. In order to maintain their divine status, Puritan believers, men and women, young and old, are eager for a radical transformation of his or her very own being (a symbolically weak female figure).
Puritan men, especially those of authority, appropriate the female imagery offered by the ministerial conversion narrative, only as a necessary phase on the way to reestablishing familial and social authority. This act of the Puritans re-conceiving themselves collectively as virgin daughters to prove their heavenly father’s virtue is undoubtedly an act of refusing to acknowledge what is implied in the biblical femininity of the church and its forcibly applied religious femininity in each individual. They refuse to acknowledge that Hester’s commitment of adultery
exemplifies the imperfectability of human beings and their liability to sin. Hester’s sin signifies the image of a broken family where the father is missing and where the wife betrays the husband. After interrogating Hester for no fruitful result, the eldest
clergyman John Wilson tells Hester, “Woman, transgress not beyond the limits of Heaven’s mercy,” and offers her a chance that “may avail to take the scarlet letter off [her] breast” once she tells the guilty name and shows her “repentance” (SL 68).
Wilson’s offer is one in which Hester can find in the Great Father a mothering
protector. More importantly, his offer is not without a purpose to restore social authority and order by transforming Hester into a virgin daughter from whom innocence, purity, obedience (childlike dependence) to patriarchal authority are demanded. “It is a language changing ‘I’ into ‘we,’ a nursing collective in a logical pattern.” “In a group perspective, associations to the Word take on an intensity of tender mothering only within a secure frame of paternal control” (Leverenz 146) The men of authority in the meetinghouse make great efforts to stake a claim to the mystery of Hester’s soul, regarding as an obstacle the “[w]ondrous strength and generosity of [her] heart” (SL 68). She refuses to let the ignominious letter be taken off by saying, “It’s too deeply branded. Ye cannot take it off” (SL 68). Hester refuses to be a relatively weak figure that depends on patriarchal help for salvation. For those in power, Hester denies a union that extends to the individual soul not only for their supreme happiness but also for their total resignation to be ruled by God.
There is mutual faith that should not be overlooked in the biblical instruction on the relationship between husband and wife. In the process of receiving God’s grace, the husband should love and help his wife, and the wife should respect her husband.
This marital relationship is also symbolic of the relationship between God and His elect. For colonial Puritan couples, however, the mutuality in marriage is remodeled into a skewed system of the husband’s domination over his wife in domestic life. This domestic control system is a hierarchical structure where the husband automatically assumes a superior position:
It must not be concluded that the puritan marriage relationship was in actuality egalitarian, or that puritan woman were completely ‘liberated’
from the control of their spouses. Obedience to husbands was strongly enjoined and surely expected under most circumstances, and the authority
of the woman in the household, however exalted, was still in the most liberal theory a slight degree less than that of her husband. (Todd 115) Despite the fact that both men and women should quell their masculinity in their service of God, this emasculation is exacerbated on women while men still remain relatively dominant and assertive. Within a whole Puritan family, parents are encouraged to break the will of their children and demand absolute obedience from them, and hence the younger generation can abandon their self-will and self-reliance, which is necessary in the Puritan conversion experience. Girls are expected to identify with their mothers’ submissiveness to husbands, fathers, the sate, and the church.
Boys are expected to grow up, marry, and act within the family as an earthly analogue for God. These mixed expectations of children lead to the unique patterns of marriage and child-rearing for colonial Puritan couples and are highlighted by the contradictory demands of Puritan religious doctrine and social practice.
Hester’s case is devoid of a wife’s biblical responsibilities in marriage. When those men of authority urges Dimmesdale to “speak, in the hearing of all men, to that mystery of a woman’s [Hester’s] soul” (SL 66-67; emphasis mine), they desire for the knowledge of the name of Pearl’s father—a name which, though guilty, can
symbolically help turn the image of a broken family into that of a whole family. The reason why the meetinghouse members so urgently demands that Hester tell the guilty name is that they have to prove their capability of regulating not only one’s behavior but also one’s interiority. It is necessary that the meetinghouse members enter Hester’s soul and control its operation the moment she is brought out of the prison. In “the grim and grisly presence of the town-beadle,” who “prefigured and represented in his aspect the whole dismal severity of the Puritanic code of law, which it was his
business to administer in its final and closest application to the offender,” Hester
walks up to the threshold of the prison door and “repelled him, by an action marked with natural dignity and force of character, and stepped into the open air, as if by her own free-will” (SL 52; emphasis mine). Hawthorne purposely portrays Hester as a mentally unruly person in the face of the whole dismal severity of the Puritanic code of law that strictly regulates human behavior, underscoring the fact that her interiority is beyond the control of human law. The scaffold scene thus turns into a three-hour mental tug-of-war between the sinner and the men of authority—namely, a process of mental questioning. That is why Hawthorne juxtaposes Hester’s state of mind with her physical reaction on the scaffold.
With “a haughty smile, and a glance that would not be abashed,” (SL 52-53), Hester appears, with the letter A on her bosom that “was so artistically done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore; and which was of a splendor in accordance with the taste of the age, but greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony” (SL 53). The scarlet A, which is too
distinguishing to ignore, “transfigured the wearer,—so that both men and women, who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne, were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time,” and “had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and inclosing her in a sphere by herself” (SL 53-54).
Hester’s scornful physical reaction and the “fantastically embroidered and
illuminated” letter diminish or even annul the result that the whole community wishes to achieve with their severe censure (SL 53-54). Furthermore, Hawthorne’s focus on the splendid aspects of Hester’s femininity is a counterbalance to the tempestuous atmosphere around the scaffold and subverts the general idea about a sinner awaiting punishment:
The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance, on a large scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam, and a face which, besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. She was lady-like, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those days; characterized by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace, which is now recognized as its indication. And never had Hester Prynne appeared more lady-like, in the antique interpretation of the term, than as she issued from the prison. (SL 53)
Hester’s manner is definitely a great shock to the spectators of the scaffold scene.
Hawthorne writes, “Those who had before known her, and had expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out, and made a halo of misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped” (SL 53). Yet, “a sensitive observer” has detected that “there was something exquisitely painful in it [Hester’s antagonistic manner]” and that
“[h]er attire, which, indeed, she had wrought for the occasion, in prison, and had modeled much after her own fancy, seemed to express the attitude of her spirit, the desperate recklessness of her mood, by its wild and picturesque peculiarity” (SL 53;
emphasis mine). Hester’s antagonistic manner, which is obviously not a sign of obedience, is clearly a representation of her inner thoughts. Experiencing an almost unbearable suffering and discerning “a quality so much more terrible in the solemn mood of the popular mind” (SL 57), Hester reacts by extracting her mind from the present reality and inserting it into an imaginative tour of “the entire tract along which she had been treading, since her happy infancy” (SL 58):
Her mind, and especially her memory, was preternaturally active, and kept bringing up other scenes than this roughly hewn street of a little town, on the edge of the Western wilderness; other faces than were lowering upon her from beneath the brims of those steeple-crown hats. … Possibly, it was an instinctive device of her spirit, to relieve itself, by the exhibition of these phantasmagoric forms, from the cruel weight and hardness of the reality. (SL 57; emphasis mine)
Psychologically speaking, her imaginative tour relieves her from the cruel weight and hardness of the reality. While her mind is fully active, her body remains relatively impassive. Her impassivity acerbates the men of authority because they see it as a representation of her mind that belittles their authority. They would not tolerate Hester’s such manner and manage to bring her back from her wandering thoughts.
Hester does return to the reality, not by the efforts of the meetinghouse members, but by her glimpse of Roger Chillingworth, a glimpse too impressive to neglect. “Hester Prynne’s womanly fancy failed not to recall” this figure (SL 58), “a figure which irresistibly took possession of her thoughts” and throws her back into “this intense consciousness of being the object of severe and universal observation” (SL 60).
Hester’s mental return certainly is not the due result of the meetinghouse’s function.
The meetinghouse members require Hester to admit her unlawful and immoral indiscretion, to acknowledge her blame and her handling by the meetinghouse, and more importantly, to tell the name of her child’s father—a name that symbolically turns the image of a broken family into that of a whole family and a name that
betokens the authoritative men’s success in meddling in her soul. Hawthorne gingerly presents Hester’s physical and mental activities on the scaffold as a rebuttal of the relentless reality. Writing with the Puritan idea in mind that a forcible intrusion into
one’s soul can be attempted by a few men with “the forms of authority [which] were felt to possess the sacredness of divine institutions” (SL 64), Hawthorne dramatizes Hester’s case to point out that “it were wronging the very nature of woman to force her to lay open her heart’s secrets in such broad daylight, and in presence of so great a multitude” (SL 65).
After a long struggle against the severe public judgment and the intrusive clerical admonition, Hester succinctly answers, “And my child must seek a heavenly Father; she shall never know an earthly one” (SL 68). Hester’s assertion of her child seeking a heavenly Father instead of an earthly one has threatened the community’s long-established aspiration to reunite with the Lord as the male head of the heavenly family. The community thinks that it is forbidden for her to establish a godly
relationship with the Lord by viewing Him as a heavenly Father of her child. Hester has already violated the general pattern of the acquisition of God’s grace. In the Puritan view, the whole process of Puritan conversion into true Christianity affirms the existence of a new kind of interiority—a private, unique, inner space where one is self-conscious of the sacrifice or renunciation of one’s subjectivity for one’s
occupation by God. According to Calvinist belief, the idea of a self apart from God leads to its fall, and the concept of an autonomous self is innately depraved (Morgan Visible Saints). As John Wilson comments on Hester’s scaffold scene, “[i]t is of moment to her soul, and therefore … momentous to [Dimmesdale’s/the minister’s]
own, in whose charge hers is” (SL 67). What the men of authority in the meetinghouse care about is the sinner’s spiritual regeneration, her eligibility for biblical promises of repentance, and, most of all, her awareness of salvation through the medium of the meetinghouse members. “[M]utual conference,” as John Cotton discreetly explains,
“between Godly, ingenious and selfe-denying Christians [the meetinghouse members]
is a notable meanes [means] sanctified of God for the instruction & edification one of another, till wee [we] all come to be of one minde [mind] in the Lord” (qtd. in Stavely 125). The ultimate development of the meetinghouse’s reaction to Hester is their attempt to overcome her extreme resistance to reveal the guilty father because her revelation of the guilty name signifies that her soul is under the control of the meetinghouse members. Only through violent mental wrenching can the men of authority force Hester to admit her extreme folly, break Hester’s obdurate will, and bring her back to the godly governance.
Women are often seen as interference with mankind’s relationship with the Lord.
The community’s experience with Hester is emblematic of their threatened experience with God. Hester’s case illustrates the imperfectability of the human soul, and the soul belongs to the men who have the power to speak to its mysteries. If Hester is an obedient wife, she is an obedient servant of God and a figure of righteous passive desire. Now, she is an adulteress and is viewed as, or rather, discoursed as, an apostate defiling God’s love. John Wilson and Arthur Dimmesdale play an essential role in the handling of Hester as “[t]he principle that ministers should be allowed time to
consider the issues of conformity played into the puritans’ hands” (Spurr 62). They
“should deal with [her], here in the face of Heaven, and before these wise and upright rulers, and in the hearing of all the people, as touching the vileness and blackness of [her] sin” (SL 65; emphasis mine) because they “could the better judge what
arguments to use, whether of tenderness or terror, such as might prevail over [her]
hardness and obstinacy; insomuch that [she] should no longer hide the name of [the guilty father] who tempted [her] to this grievous fall” (SL 65; emphasis mine). It seems not unreasonable to suggest that these highly-educated ministers are themselves masculinity and patriarchy looming large in their dealing with Hester. They draw their
identity from speaking, predominantly in the sermon, the speech invested with the authority and power of patriarchy implied in God’s Word. In contrast to their female imagery in their service of God, they are believed to be endowed with the ability to spiritually convert a person and thus are deemed eligible for handling such a sinner as Hester.6
Hawthorne’s use of the word “discourse” as a descriptor for the ministers’
public speeches can be unmistakably interchangeable with the word
“sermon”—well-reasoned speech made by the ministers to advise people (SL 68, 249).
We need to take into further consideration the way the ministers preach to their congregation because “American Puritanism’s use of its two major literary forms, the sermon and spiritual narrative, enacts the same transformation of the isolated self into the ‘tribe’ [church-town/community]” (Leverenz 136). As Hawthorne might have observed, the sermon is quite often the method that colonial ministers use to “perform for the benefit of mankind” (Miller, Puritan Mind 95), and “truth [of the sermon]
should be long studied and diligently elaborated” (Miller, Puritan Mind 95) “till [as Richard Baxter stated] it be concocted into a clear methodical understanding, and the Scheme or Analysis of it have left upon the soul its proper image, by an orderly and deep impression” (qtd. in Miller, Puritan Mind 95). Doctrine (proper image, and orderly and deep impression), reasons (a clear methodical understanding), and uses (the benefit of mankind) are the effects that Puritan sermons are expected to achieve.
Public sermons delivered by John Wilson, especially those delivered by Arthur Dimmesdale, achieve those three sermonic effects in the “inmost spirits” of their audience (SL 247). We can find no better example than the townspeople’s reaction
6 For further discussion on the themes of female imagery and marriage in Puritanism, see John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea, Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, and Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity.
after they hear the young minister Dimmesdale’s Election Day Sermon. Dimmesdale possesses “[t]he eloquent voice, on which the souls of the listening audience had been borne aloft, as on the swelling waves of the sea,” and “the high spell that had
transported them into the region of another’s mind …[and that had left them] with their awe and wonder still heavy on them” (SL 248). “According to their united testimony, never had man spoken in so wise, so high, and so holy a spirit, as he [Dimmesdale] that spake this day; nor had inspiration ever breathed through mortal lips more evidently than it did through his” (SL 248).
It is strongly characteristic of the Puritan mind that “[m]ethod [of the sermon] is the parent of intelligence, the master of memory” and that “[t]ruth is methodical, Error lies latent in confusion” (Miller, Puritan Mind 139). As exemplified by Dimmesdale’s “written discourse” to his congregation, the Puritan sermon aims to bring “ideas that must have been as marvelous to himself as to his audience,” and by dealing with “the relation between the Deity and the communities of mankind,” the sermon serves “to foretell a high and glorious destiny for the newly gathered people of the Lord” (SL 249). Dimmesdale certainly has the ability to arrange the Puritan theology into ordered and methodized ideas that are “as marvelous to himself as to his audience,” and his ordered and methodized ideas are intended to assist his
congregation in their memorization of the theology, for the Puritans deem order and method essential in helping the doctrine to be “understood, known, and committed to memory” (William Ames [1576-1633]; qtd. in Miller, Puritan Mind 366). As such, Dimmesdale is thought of by his congregation as “the mouth-piece of Heaven’s messages of wisdom, and rebuke, and love” (SL 142).
Considered churlish and potentially rebellious against the Puritan theocracy, Hester is brought to face “relentless inquisitions used by the government for the
purpose of crushing opposition” and accordingly cannot hope for justice (Osgood 1:
189). It is far more important and imminent for the community to resolve the crisis and maintain the social stability than to reflect that Hester’s case “may serve … to symbolize a sweet moral lesson” (SL 48). Hester is not allowed appeals against “the leading inhabitants, cherishing the more rigid order of principles in religion and government” (SL 100). This kind of cooperation between political and religious leaders is also presented by Hawthorne describing those men of authority in the balcony of the meetinghouse above the scaffold—“the Governor, and several of his counselors, a judge, a general, and the ministers” all of whom are on the top stratum of the society (SL 56). They are “distinguished by a dignity of mien, belonging to a period when the forms of authority were felt to possess the sacredness of divine institutions” (SL 64). Based on the sacredness of divine institutions, decisions announced from the meetinghouse have a power to bring the townspeople under control. Hester poses a threat to the controlling system of the top stratum. The top stratum has long had the notion of possible obstacles or threats from the bottom stratum and has thus designed the scaffold as an “instrument of discipline” (SL 55).
The scaffold is “a portion of a penal machine … in the promotion of good citizenship”
(SL 55). With the constituents of the meetinghouse being men of authority in religion and government, the meetinghouse is a form of patriarchal oligarchy, presenting an earthly pure father image. The patriarchal oligarchy physically regulates the
townspeople, decides the course of the community’s development, and
psychologically “meddle[s] with a question of human guilt, passion, and anguish” (SL 65). The patriarchal oligarchy is a religious and political medium through which the community is made a Bible Commonwealth, as Darrett B. Rutman argues:
A meetinghouse where God's word in all its purity could be heard would
bulk large, and men would worship God as He would have them worship.
But far more: Men would serve their fellow men in this city as God would have them serve; men would fit into a society of men in such a way that the society would redound to God's credit, add luster to His crown. (Winthrop’s Boston 4)
Interlocking patriarchal subordinations form as the community works towards their ultimate goal of receiving God’s grace. An individual conforms to the paternal leader of the family. The family conforms to the paternal leaders of the community. If the community is veered in the direction of their leaders’ arbitrary selection and
interpretation of the biblical scriptures, then, they deserve the status as the elect and the Promised Land as a Bible Commonwealth. The formation of these interlocking patriarchal subordinations in the New World, as Hawthorne notes, “owed its origin and progress, and its present state of development, not to the impulses of youth, but to the stern and tempered energies of manhood, and the somber sagacity of age” (SL 64;
emphasis mine). Hawthorne finds this distinguishing feature “accomplishing so much, precisely because it imagined and hoped so little” (SL 64).
Nevertheless, through her claim that her child “must seek a heavenly Father”
and that “she [her child] shall never know an earthly one,” Hester repudiates a familial father, disobeys those communal fathers, and above all, violates the Puritan method of receiving the Father’s grace (SL 68). Hester’s such claim has to be
carefully dealt with on a social and religious scale, for it has already turned the sinner from a disobedient wife into a rebellious agitator. Hawthorne dramatizes an inevitable change in the interaction between the communal patriarchs and the common people.
When the men of authority are unable to make Hester concede, they turn to assure the common people of their original common consent to build a Bible Commonwealth:
[I]t is by mutual consent, through a special overvaluing providence and a more than an ordinary approbation of the churches of Christ, to seek out a place of cohabitation and consortship, under a due form of government both civil and ecclesiastical. In such cases as this, the care of the public must oversway all private respects by which not only conscience but mere civil policy doth bind us; for it is a true rule that particular
[individual] estates cannot subsist in the ruin of the public. (Winthrop 82;
emphasis mine)
What concerns the meetinghouse now is their importance being undermined.
As a specially overvaluing providence dependent on a more than ordinary approbation of the churches of Christ, the meetinghouse has another target to take care of. “[T]he eldest clergyman of Boston, a great scholar, like most of his
contemporaries in the profession,” John Wilson, has noticed such a need and draws on his most effective method—discourse (SL 65):
Discerning the impracticable sate of the poor culprit’s mind, the eldest clergyman, who had carefully prepared for the occasion, addressed the multitude a discourse on sin, in all its branches, but with continual reference to the ignominious letter. So forcibly did he dwell upon this symbol, for the hour or more during which his periods were rolling over the people’s heads, that it assumed new terrors in their imagination….
(SL 68-69; emphasis mine)
The eldest clergyman preaches to the public with two focuses. The first is that he reminds the sinner of the bitterness of her shame. The second, more importantly, is that he strengthens the meetinghouse’s leading status and the common people’s faith.
To surpass the negative influence of Hester’s case on the community, the minister
metamorphoses the common people’s rancor into the terrors of divine wrath with
“amplification” and “concise explication … [with] intellectual as well as spiritual focus” (Miller, Puritan Mind 95). The terrors are a sign of fear of other possible nonconformity. The terrors undoubtedly are also a new understanding of Hester’s sin and her claim for her child. The new understanding enhances the public faith:
Faith is an act of the will and the understanding, never of the will alone.
The understanding does not assent to a thing merely because the thing is so, “but because it is enlightened to discern the Truth of it.” The Puritan preacher never loses a chance to insist that “we must fortify our
Understandings with all those Arguments, by which this Principle is established in the Hearts and Consciences of Men.” If it is impossible to establish some principles by reason, we can at least trample “upon all those Sophisms that are brought by Men’s corrupt Reasonings to enervate them.” In true Puritanism, faith can never remain mere spiritual
conviction; it must also be made articulate. (Miller, Puritan Mind 66-67;
emphasis mine)
The minister assumes an indispensable role in arguing, in a deeper sense, things into those understandable to the common people. The minister determines how things should be understood and thus controls the way the common people act. “To ‘The Preachers’ is attributed the idea of the father as governor of a little state and priest of a little church; accordingly, [Puritanism] is credited with the logical implication of this idea—a spiritually authoritarian household” (Todd 111; emphasis mine). That John Wilson employs his sermonic skills to arouse new terrors in the imagination of the common people and determines their ultimate understanding of Hester’s case denotes
“that thes unlarned [unlearned] men ware [were] the foolish things that God had chose
[chosen] to confound the wisdom of the wise … godliness and the gospel was a mystry [mystery] out of the reach of all human larning [learning] and natural understanding” (qtd. in Stavely 123). What Wilson does is a reinforced ideological incorporation of the common people against Hester. His strategy is a “ministerial negative voice” that is “a larger effort to enhance the clerical ability to persuade the laity” to follow authoritative guides to every matter in the community and to deny any impertinent and intemperate voice/speech (Stavely 125). The patriarchal authority turns from establishing Hester as a common target of anathema to maintaining its ruling status. From this transition, we can see that “what was always to remain the preferred style of social control [is] manipulation [of public understanding] rather than blunt bossing about, and an overarching public opinion [is thus formed] as the medium within which wayward particular [individual] opinions and actions would be contained and dissolved” (Stavely 125).
Hawthorne has Hester take center stage to demonstrate a breach in the
communal mentality and further points out the two most prominent elements of this Puritan theocracy. Hawthorne’s narration of Hester’s scaffold scene does not imply that the patriarchal authority is in great danger of being subverted but connotes that the pure father image is “always more wish than fact” (Leverenz 194).
