Written in the 1800s, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is the story of Hester Prynne whose husband is assumed to be lost at sea and then abandoned by her lover to give birth to a child outside of marriage, in the 1600s. Hawthorne gets to the point immediately with a public shaming scene where Prynne is made to stand in the middle of a town-square to be shamed for taking a lover while her husband was gone. In a Boston when women were expected to only raise their kids and support their husbands, she showed her character by not only taking up the responsibility of her unborn child but also single-handedly taking up the blame too.
In a hard-hitting introduction, Hawthorne makes it clear that Prynne, despite being condemned, was the heroine of his novel. Prynne meets her husband who joins in the criticism and also tried to persuade her to reveal her lover’s name so that he could vindicate his ego. His abandonment firmly put aside with remarkable ease, he takes up a new name — Roger Chillingworth — and begins a new life after arm-twisting Prynne into a deal where he would spare her lover, if she did not reveal her husband’s identity to the people — “One token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide another.”
In the course of the novel, Hawthorne exposes the levels of sham in the Puritanic society through the injustice meted out to Prynne. It is through these unjust acts that Hawthorne also tests and shows Prynne’s mettle as she accepts the repercussions of a ‘crime’ she was not solely responsible for, her husband’s frivolity and her lover’s indifference as she wears her scarlet ‘A’ and raises daughter Pearl with her meagre earnings.
But Hawthorne elevates Prynne to a pedestal when her lover is revealed to be the Minister of her church, Arthur Dimmesdale. Even when Dimmesdale is only able to accept his mistake partially and wear his scarlet letter under his shirt, Prynne inspires him about a better life in Europe. However, he dies soon after and she continues to live with her scarlet letter and her daughter and is later buried beside Dimmesdale.
But through her sorrow and misery, Prynne was what Puritanic America needed to realise that a woman had a bigger role to play in society. A resolute woman of courage, she leads life on her own terms, despite all that she is made to live with as Hawthorne writes: “She had wandered, without rule or guidance, into a moral wilderness. Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods.
The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers — stern and wild ones — and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.”
(The writer is a freelance journalist who spends her time eating, reading and sleeping, when not tackling deadlines)