The Never-Ending Confession
The Never-Ending Confession
The Scarlet Letter, a novel so imbued with the themes of sin, guilt, and confession, has an interesting confessional: the scaffold. Hester is taken to the scaffold early in the narrative and a confession is demanded of her, but she refuses that with silence. Her silence is in itself a powerful act, a moment of singular rebellion against the power structures which demand, in their attempts to impose “virtue” from above, a public knowledge of those who engage in certain actions deemed wrong and incorrect. The scaffold appears again towards the middle of the novel, as Dimmesdale, under the cover of night, goes there in attempt to make confession; he is not as strong as Hester, though, and tells Pearl, upon her asking if they three would stand there the next day at noon, only someday they will. The final scene of the scaffold confessional comes as Dimmesdale, weak and dying, leaves the procession on the holiday, drags himself, Hester, and Pearl, onto the scaffold, and finally brings to a close a scene seven years in the making. What seems most interesting about this scene is Chillingworth’s words to Dimmesdale that the scaffold, and presumably the public confession that takes place there, is the one place in the world he could have gone to escape the physician’s grip.
Hawthorne’s Puritan society is obsessed with this idea of public confession of sins, and Hawthorne seeks to remind the reader of that through the novel’s very conclusion; people from outside of Salem who are attending the holiday gather around Hester to newly stare at her letter. Pearl, in as much as she is a developed character, is used to show how Hester’s sin came to identify her: at the brookside, Pearl refuses to go to her mother, as she does not recognize her without the scarlet letter affixed to her dress and her hair covered in a cap. In this presentation of Hester, the passionless Victorian, as proposed in Cott’s essay, seems to present itself. Hawthorne is presenting the reader with his interpretation, from mid-nineteenth century America, of the Puritan era. Hester, ultimately, is presented in a totally desexualized manner, her dress drab, her hair hidden, her features dim and grey, and suggestive of a woman who has hidden herself behind an idea of self-control, of independence that manifests itself in her being totally non-sexual, a consequent of her one sexual misdeed.
In Hawthorne’s presentation of passionless Hester, even with the minister and the physician now both dead, she still cannot escape the confessional, as she continues to wear the scarlet letter, and to live not quite in Salem, but still on the fringes of town, staying in a place where her sin is known, yet she is still partially isolated. This seems the most curious aspect of the novel by far: Hester is clearly the heroine, and is presented as being much stronger and true to herself than Dimmesdale or the sinister Chillingworth, yet her strength never allows her to escape her public confession, nor does it ever allow her to reclaim her sexual self, to ever again not be the passionless, plain woman she has evolved into (save that one brief instant in the woods); she is clearly the heroine of the novel, yet even her character leaves, for the modern reader, something to be desired, a sense that she has not and never will escape the narrative of sin and guilt associated with a singular action so long ago.
Tags: confession, Hester Prynne, passionless, Puritan, scaffold, sin
March 8th, 2010 at 1:33 pm
The narrator of The Scarlet Letter tells us at the end of the novel that Hester’s return was of her own “free will.” Be sure to take a look at D.G.’s post about why Hester continues to wear the letter so that our discussion can reflect these fascinating points of differing interpretation.