SummaryChapter I: The Prison-Door
This first chapter contains little in the way of action,
instead setting the scene and introducing the first of many symbols
that will come to dominate the story. A crowd of somber, dreary-looking
people has gathered outside the door of a prison in seventeenth-century Boston.
The building's heavy oak door is studded with iron spikes, and the
prison appears to have been constructed to hold dangerous criminals.
No matter how optimistic the founders of new colonies may be, the
narrator tells us, they invariably provide for a prison and a cemetery
almost immediately. This is true of the citizens of Boston, who
built their prison some twenty years earlier.
The one incongruity in the otherwise drab scene is the
rosebush that grows next to the prison door. The narrator suggests
that it offers a reminder of Nature's kindness to the condemned;
for his tale, he says, it will provide either a sweet moral blossom
or else some relief in the face of unrelenting sorrow and gloom.
SummaryChapter II: The Market-Place
As the crowd watches, Hester Prynne, a young woman holding
an infant, emerges from the prison door and makes her way to a scaffold
(a raised platform), where she is to be publicly condemned. The women
in the crowd make disparaging comments about Hester; they particularly
criticize her for the ornateness of the embroidered badge on her
chesta letter A stitched in gold and scarlet. From the women's
conversation and Hester's reminiscences as she walks through the
crowd, we can deduce that she has committed adultery and has borne
an illegitimate child, and that the A on her dress stands for
Adulterer.
The beadle calls Hester forth. Children taunt her and
adults stare. Scenes from Hester's earlier life flash through her
mind: she sees her parents standing before their home in
rural England, then she sees a misshapen scholar, much older than
herself, whom she married and followed to continental Europe. But
now the present floods in upon her, and she inadvertently squeezes
the infant in her arms, causing it to cry out. She regards her current
fate with disbelief.
AnalysisChapters I–II
These chapters introduce the reader to Hester Prynne and
begin to explore the theme of sin, along with its connection to
knowledge and social order. The chapters' use of symbols, as well
as their depiction of the political reality of Hester Prynne's world,
testify to the contradictions inherent in Puritan society. This
is a world that has already fallen, that already knows sin: the
colonists are quick to establish a prison and a cemetery
in their Utopia, for they know that misbehavior, evil, and death
are unavoidable. This belief fits into the larger Puritan doctrine,
which puts heavy emphasis on the idea of original sinthe notion
that all people are born sinners because of the initial transgressions
of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
But the images of the chaptersthe public gatherings at
the prison and at the scaffold, both of which are located in central
common spacesalso speak to another Puritan belief: the belief that
sin not only permeates our world but that it should be actively
sought out and exposed so that it can be punished publicly. The
beadle reinforces this belief when he calls for a blessing on the
righteous Colony of the Massachusetts, where iniquity is dragged
out into the sunshine. His smug self-righteousness suggests that
Hester's persecution is fueled by more than the villagers' quest
for virtue. While exposing sin is meant to help the sinner and provide
an example for others, such exposure does more than merely protect
the community. Indeed, Hester becomes a scapegoat, and the public
nature of her punishment makes her an object for voyeuristic contemplation; it
also gives the townspeople, particularly the women, a chance to demonstrateor
convince themselves oftheir own piety by condemning her as loudly
as possible. Rather than seeing their own potential sinfulness in
Hester, the townspeople see her as someone whose transgressions
outweigh and obliterate their own errors.
Yet, unlike her fellow townspeople, Hester accepts her
humanity rather than struggles against it; in many ways, her sin
originated in her acknowledgment of her human need for love, following
her husband's unexplained failure to arrive in Boston and his probable death.
The women of the town criticize her for embroidering the scarlet
letter, the symbol of her shame, with such care and in such a flashy
manner: its ornateness seems to declare that she is proud, rather
than ashamed, of her sin. In reality, however, Hester simply accepts
the sin and its symbol as part of herself, just as she accepts her
child. And although she can hardly believe her present realities,
she takes them as they are rather than resisting them or trying to
atone for them.
Both the rosebush and Hester resist the kinds of fixed
interpretation that the narrator associates with religion. The narrator
offers multiple possibilities for the significance of the rosebush
near the prison door, as he puzzles over its survival in his source
manuscript. But, in the end, he rejects all of its possible meanings,
refusing to give the rosebush a definitive interpretation.
So, too, does the figure of Hester offer various options
for interpretation. The fact that she is a woman with a past, with
memories of a childhood in England, a marriage in Europe, and a
journey to America, means that, despite what the Puritan community
thinks, she cannot be defined solely in terms of a single action,
in terms of her great sin. Pearl, her child, is evidence of this:
her existence makes the scarlet letter redundant in that it is she
and not the snippet of fabric that is the true consequence of Hester's
actions. As Pearl matures in the coming chapters and her role in
Hester's life becomes more complex, the part Hester's sin plays
in defining her identity will become more difficult to determine.
For now, the infant's presence highlights the insignificance of
the community's attempt at punishment: Pearl is a sign of a larger,
more powerful order than that which the community is attempting
to assertbe it nature, biology, or a God untainted by the corruptions
of human religious practices. The fact that the townspeople focus
on the scarlet letter rather than on the human child underlines
their pettiness, and their failure to see the more real consequences
of Hester's action.
From this point forward, Hester will be formally, officially
set apart from the rest of society; yet these opening chapters imply
that, even before her acquisition of the scarlet letter, she had
always been unique. The text describes her appearance as more distinctive
than conventionally beautiful: she is tall and radiates a natural
nobility that sets her apart from the women of the town, with whom
she is immediately juxtaposed. Hester's physical isolation on the
scaffold thus only manifests an internal alienation that predates
the beginning of the plot.
This is the first of three important scenes involving
the scaffold. Each of these scenes will show a character taking
the first step toward a sort of Emersonian self-reliance, the kind
of self-reliance that would come to replace Puritan ideology as
the American ideal. In this scene, Hester confronts her realities
and discovers a new self that does not fit with her old conceptions
of herself. Puritan doctrine views reality as merely an obstacle
to a world beyond this one; Hester's need to embrace her current
situation (in part by literally embracing her daughter) implies
a profound separation from the ideals of that ideological system.
From now on, Hester will stand outside, if still surrounded by,
the Puritan order.