I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Musings, I write freely and wanderingly about some topic that’s on my mind.
As I make plans for my Library of an Adulteress artwork, I’m studying the plots of the books I’m going to include. Today: The Scarlet Letter.
In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s historical novel The Scarlet Letter: A Romance, published in 1850, and set in the 1640s in the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony, Hester Prynne is sentenced to wearing a scarlet letter ‘A’ for having conceived a child with a man to whom she is not married.
While in prison for her crime, for a period of about eight or nine months, Hester uses her exceptional needlework skills to embroider a beautiful letter ‘A’ to wear. Made of a fine red cloth and surrounded with elaborate embroidery and flourishes of gold thread, it violates the town’s sumptuary laws that limit extravagance.
Why did Hester make it so luxe and beautiful? She turned her “crime” into a striking piece of art and a representation of her skills. She took control of her own narrative. Even as she is shunned by her community, her spirit and creativity could prevail. The beauty of the letter contrasted with the ugliness of her public humiliation. Every time the townspeople were made aware of her sin, in looking at the ‘A’, they were also looking at her artistic skill.
Over time, her acts of charity and nursing in the face of censure and isolation lead society to view her ‘A’ as a symbol not of her transgression but of her strength. From the novel:
The letter was the symbol of her calling. Such helpfulness was found in her,—so much power to do, and power to sympathize,—that many people refused to interpret the scarlet A by its original signification. They said that it meant Able; so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman’s strength.
It is so interesting to me that a man wrote this, and almost two centuries ago.
Instead of showing Hester’s transgression leading her ruin, Hawthorne made her capable, compassionate, and grounded. Her experience did not destroy her. Instead, she emerged stronger through her challenges.
This is in sharp contrast to Anna Karenina, where her adulterous transgression leads to her eventual mental breakdown and suicide, not because her life became so terrible, but because she was unable to accept what had happened, and make the best life out of what she had.