Chapter 16: A Forest Walk<\/strong><\/p>\nOn a \u00a0“chill and sombre” day, Hester is lurking \u00a0the forest with Pearl in the hopes that she will \u00a0run into Reverend Dimmesdale.<\/p>\n
If you’ll remember from last time, Hester is in a real pickle here. After seven years she is good and ready to tell Dimmesdale \u00a0the truth about \u00a0Chillingworth, which is that he is \u00a0her husband and has been plotting the Reverend’s slow descent \u00a0into the pits of hell for almost a decade. \u00a0She has no idea how Dimmesdale will react. Scenario one: He forgives her immediately and snaps out of his downward spiral, thus reclaiming his position as the number one \u00a0studmuffin \u00a0minister of the Northern Hemisphere. Scenario two: He \u00a0croaks on the spot. In either case, a sneak attack doesn’t seem like the \u00a0best strategy here.<\/p>\n
There are a handful of reasons this \u00a0rendez-vous is in the woods, and all of them include extended metaphors. The woods are wild and mysterious, the perfect spot for Mistress Hibbins’ Satan-approved debauchery and Hester + Dimmesdale’s sexcapades. It’s \u00a0the only place Hester feels she has “the whole wide world to breathe in,” so I’m not going out on on limb to say \u00a0Pearl was probably conceived in these woods. Now contrast \u00a0this with the town center: rife \u00a0in \u00a0the \u00a0governor’s rules and biases, controlled by the patriarchy, \u00a0dismally lacking in \u00a0checked privileges.<\/p>\n
Pearl observes \u00a0that the sunshine has been avoiding \u00a0Hester and her scarlet letter, and that it instead chooses to dance around Pearl, an emblem of innocence, with its warmth. I wouldn’t read into it \u00a0too much.<\/p>\n
As they wait around, Pearl \u00a0asks Hester \u00a0to tell her a \u00a0story about the Black Man, a figure who \u00a0haunts \u00a0the forest and forces \u00a0people to write their names in his book with their own blood. \u00a0Hawthorne was never one for subtlety. \u00a0This is a classic \u00a01600s superstition, so Hester doesn’t panic that her daughter has the imagination \u00a0of a serial killer, but does make it clear that she’s had \u00a0enough of this baloney. To shut her up, Hester tells her that the Black Man DID, in fact, place \u00a0the scarlet letter on her bosom. Pearl is satisfied with the answer, for now.<\/p>\n
They move past the topic of the devil’s \u00a0agenda, and \u00a0sit on<\/p>\n
a luxuriant heap of moss, which, at some epoch of the preceding century, had \u00a0been a gigantic pine, with its roots and trunk in the darksome shade, and its head aloft in the upper atmosphere.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
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