The Scarlet Letter 537this examination with the novel’s first chapter,
“The Prison Door,” which opens with a “throng of
bearded men, in sad-colored garments and steeple-
crowned hats . . . assembled in front of a wooden
edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered
with oak, and studded with iron spikes.” Both the
prison and the people tell readers a great deal about
the Puritans and their laws—both are hard, stern,
and unyielding. The imagery Hawthorne uses in
this opening chapter remains consistent through-
out the novel. He repeatedly describes the Puritans
and their society though imagery of darkness and
hardness. The novel’s first sentence also links the
Puritans of Boston with Hawthorne’s own Puritan
ancestors, whom he describes in the novel’s intro-
ductory sketch, “The Custom-House.” Like his
heroine, Hester Prynne, Hawthorne also feels the
disapproval and the “scorn” of the “stern and black-
browed Puritans,” and like Hester, Hawthorne uses
his Scarlet Letter to challenge the Puritan beliefs,
attitudes, and laws.
Early in the novel the narrator emphasizes that
in this period when “the forms of authority were
felt to possess the sacredness of divine institutions,”
these Puritan leaders, though “doubtless good men,”
were incapable of “sitting in judgment on an err-
ing woman’s heart, and disentangling its mesh of
good and evil.” Not only are these men stern and
unsympathetic, the novel soon reveals their hypoc-
risy. Puritan hypocrisy is a theme that surfaces
frequently in Hawthorne’s work, and it is particu-
larly apparent in the community’s use of Hester’s
needlework. The narrator says that “Deep ruffs,
painfully wrought bands, and gorgeously embroi-
dered gloves . . . were readily allowed to individuals
dignified by rank or wealth, even while sumptuary
laws forbade these and similar extravagances to the
plebeian order.”
It is hypocrisy that finally dooms Dimmesdale.
The minister recognizes the value of publicly con-
fessing his sin. When they meet in the forest, he
tells Hester, “Happy are you, Hester, that wear the
scarlet letter openly upon your bosom! Mine burns
in secret!” and he later exclaims, “We are not, Hester,
the worst sinners in the world.” Chillingworth, he
realizes, has “violated . . . the sanctity of a human
heart,” a transgression that Hawthorne believed
was an unpardonable sin. Despite this revelation,
the minister remains unable to publicly confess his
own sin until the end of the novel. Earlier, when
Dimmesdale tells his congregants that he is “utterly
pollution and a lie,” the narrator says, “The minister
well knew—subtle, but remorseful hypocrite that he
was!—the light in which his vague confession would
be viewed. . . . He had spoken the very truth, and
transformed it into the veriest falsehood.” Weak-
ness dooms Dimmesdale to hypocrisy; he finds it
impossible to live outside of the “iron framework” of
Puritan society, and he confesses only in his dying
moments.
In contrast to Dimmesdale, Hester’s sin is clearly
manifest in both the “A” and in her daughter Pearl.
As the beadle leads Hester from the prison to the
scaffold in chapter 2, he calls Massachusetts Bay
Colony a place “where iniquity is dragged out into
the sunshine.” Another townsman describes it as “a
land where iniquity is searched out, and punished
in the sight of rulers and people.” The magistrates,
in placing the “A” on Hester’s chest, mean to make
her “a living sermon against sin.” Despite this, Hes-
ter remains a constant challenge to Puritan laws
and beliefs, as Hawthorne’s numerous comparisons
between Hester and Anne Hutchinson emphasize.
A Puritan woman, Hutchinson gained a following
when she began to hold weekly meetings to discuss
sermons in her home. In defiance of Puritan beliefs,
she began to preach salvation through faith and
God’s revelation to the individual through inner
experience. Her popularity and her perceived heresy
brought about a political crisis, and she was eventu-
ally banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony for
antinomianism (being opposed to religious author-
ity). If it were not for Pearl, the narrator says, Hester
“might have come down to us in history, hand in
hand with Anne Hutchinson, as the foundress of a
religious sect.” Like Hutchinson, Hester finds that
“the world’s law was no law for her.” While Hester
and her beliefs do not bring about the political
upheaval that Hutchinson did, even at the novel’s
end she comforts other outcasts with “her firm
belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world
should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven’s own time,
a new truth would be revealed.” And by the novel’s
end she seems to have brought about some change