Summary—Chapter 3: The Recognition
In the crowd that surrounds the scaffold, Hester suddenly
spots her husband, who sent her to America but never fulfilled his
promise to follow her. Though he is dressed in a strange combination
of traditional European clothing and Native American dress, she
is struck by his wise countenance and recognizes his slightly deformed
shoulders. Hester’s husband (whom we will learn, in the next chapters,
is now calling himself Roger Chillingworth) gestures to Hester that she
should not reveal his identity. He then turns to a stranger in the crowd
and asks about Hester’s crime and punishment, explaining that he
has been held captive by Native Americans and has just arrived in
Boston. The stranger tells him that Hester is the wife of a learned
Englishman and had been living with him in Amsterdam when
he decided to emigrate to America. The learned man sent Hester to
America first and remained behind to settle his affairs, but he
never joined Hester in Boston. Chillingworth remarks that Hester’s
husband must have been foolish to think he could keep a young wife
happy, and he asks the stranger about the identity of the baby’s
father.
The stranger tells him that Hester refuses to reveal her
fellow sinner. As punishment, she has been sentenced to three hours
on the scaffold and a lifetime of wearing the scarlet letter on
her chest. The narrator then introduces us to the town fathers who
sit in judgment of Hester: Governor Bellingham, Reverend Wilson,
and Reverend Dimmesdale. Dimmesdale, a young minister who is renowned
for his eloquence, religious fervor, and theological expertise,
is delegated to demand that Hester reveal the name of her child’s
father. He tells her that she should not protect the man’s identity
out of pity or tenderness, but when she staunchly refuses he does
not press her further. Hester says that her child will seek a heavenly
father and will never know an earthly one. Reverend Wilson
then steps in and delivers a condemnatory sermon on sin, frequently
referring to Hester’s scarlet letter, which seems to the crowd to
glow and burn. Hester bears the sermon patiently, hushing Pearl
when she begins to scream. At the conclusion of the sermon, Hester
is led back into the prison.
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Chapter 3: The Recognition →
Summary—Chapter 4: The Interview
Hester and her husband come face to face for the first
time when he is called to her prison cell to provide medical assistance.
Chillingworth has promised the jailer that he can make Hester more
“amenable to just authority,” and he now offers her a cup of medicine. Hester
knows his true identity—his gaze makes her shudder—and she initially
refuses to drink his potion. She thinks that Chillingworth might
be poisoning her, but he assures her that he wants her to live so
that he can have his revenge. In the candid conversation that follows,
he chastises himself for thinking that he, a misshapen bookworm,
could keep a beautiful wife like Hester happy. He urges her to reveal
the identity of her lover, telling her that he will surely detect
signs of sympathy that will lead him to the guilty party. When she
refuses to tell her secret, he makes her promise that she will not reveal
to anyone his own identity either. His demoniacal grin and obvious
delight at her current tribulations lead Hester to burst out the
speculation that he may be the “Black Man”—the Devil in disguise—come
to lure her into a pact and damn her soul. Chillingworth replies
that it is not the well-being of her soul that his presence jeopardizes,
implying that he plans to seek out her unknown lover. He clearly
has revenge on his mind.
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Chapter 4: The Interview →
Analysis—Chapters 3–4
The town has made Hester into a “living sermon,” as Chillingworth puts
it, because she is stripped of her humanity and made to serve the
needs of the community. Her punishment is expressed in violent terms.
Reverend Wilson relates an argument he had with Dimmesdale about
whether to force Hester to confess in public. Dimmesdale spoke
of such an action in terms of a rape, arguing 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.”
The men who sit in judgment of Hester are not only hypocritical but
also ignorant. Bellingham, surrounded by the trappings of his office,
and Wilson, who looks like “the darkly engraved portraits which
we see prefixed to old volumes of sermons,” both occupy positions
where power is dependent upon self-portrayal and symbols. They know
little of human nature and judge using overarching precepts rather
than the specifics of an individual situation as their guides. The
narrator tells us that these ignorant men “had no right” to “meddle
with a question of human guilt, passion and anguish.” Dimmesdale,
on the other hand, seems to know something of the human heart. He
is compassionate toward Hester and is able to convince Bellingham
and Wilson to spare her any harsher punishment.
As part of its meditation on the concept of evil, the
text begins to elucidate Dimmesdale’s character for the reader.
The emerging portrait is not altogether positive. Although Dimmesdale
displays compassion and a sense of justice, he also seems spineless
and somewhat sinister. His efforts to get Hester to reveal her lover’s
identity involve a set of confusing instructions about following
her conscience and exposing her lover in order to save his soul.
The reader does not know why Dimmesdale declines to speak straightforwardly,
but Hester does. When it is later revealed that Dimmesdale is the
lover she seeks to protect, his speech becomes retrospectively ironic
and terribly cruel. In this way, The Scarlet Letter comes
to resemble a detective story: things have meaning only in the context
of later information. The larger implication of such a structure
is that lives have meaning only as a whole, and that an individual
event (Hester’s adultery, for example) must be examined in a framework
larger than that allowed by the categorical rules of religion. This
notion returns the reader to the book’s general theme of whether
it is ethically right to judge others.