The Scarlet Letter 15-22: Notes

I. Chapter Abstract

1. Chapter 15 - Hester was certain that she hates Chillingworth after they ran into each other in the forest. Then she had an impulse to tell her child, Pearl, the meaning behind the scarlet letter A. However, at last, Hester lied to Pearl about it. This is the first time she tried to hide the shame of the letter A from others.
2. Chapter 16 - Hester decided to reveal Chillingworth's true identity to Dimmesdale, so she took Pearl and went into the forest to meet Dimmesdale. While they are waiting, Pearl talked about the Black-Man story she heard from others, and she questioned if the clergyman is the black man. After a while, they saw Dimmesdale making his way through the forest, suffering, and kept his hand over his heart.
3. Chapter 17 - Hester and Dimmesdale had a secret meeting in the forest. They finally decided to escape to Britain together.
4. Chapter 18 - They sat together, side by side, kept talking about their struggles during the past seven years. Hester tried to cheer Dimmesdale up so she told him not to look back but pursuing the happiness in the future. She took off the scarlet letter from her bosom and threw it into the nearby brook - stream of freshness and freedom ran through her entire body. The charm of womanhood beamed out of her. Then, Pearl came back into the scene.
5. Chapter 19 - Hester was introduced Pearl to the pastor. Pearl refused to cross the brook unless her mother put on the scarlet letter on her bosom again. Hester's womanhood faded after she put the letter A back on her chest. Pearl refused to show any friendliness to the priest because she was jealous that he took the spot beside her mother, which always belongs to her.
6. Chapter 20 - Dimmesdale felt everything and everyone on his way home seemed to be different. He regained his enthusiasm of life. When he got back, he refused Chillingworth's medical. So Chillingworth found out he had probably met Hester in the forest. Dimmesdale rewrote his papers for the Election Sermon with great passion.
7. Chapter 21 - Hester took Pearl to the procession. The shipmaster who own the ship Hester and Dimmesdale are going to take told Hester that Old Chillingworth is going with them.
8. Chapter 22 - Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale delivered the Election Sermon. People thought it was the best sermon he has ever made. However, Hester was surrounded my locals and visitors who were curious about the scarlet letter on her bosom.


II. Notes

· Hester's View on Her Relationship with Chillingworth:
o “She marveled how such scenes could have been! She marveled how ever have been wrought upon to marry him!” (159)
o “ ‘Yes, I hate him!’ repeated Hester, more bitterly than before. ‘He betrayed me! He has done me worse wrong than I did him!’ ” (159)

· Effects of the Scarlet Letter to Hester:
o “It may be that it was the talisman of a stern and severe, but yet a guardian spirit, who now forsook her; as recognizing that, in spite of his strict watch over her heart, some new evil had crept into it, or some old one had never been expelled.” (163-164)
o “The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set her free. The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread.” (180)
o “It was a forcible type of the moral solitude in which the scarlet letter enveloped its fated wearer; partly by her own reserve, and partly by the instinctive, though no longer so unkindly, withdrawal of her fellow-creatures.” (210)
- The scarlet letter isolated Hester from the common society, which was seen as the morality.

· Pearl’s Existence in Relationship with the Scarlet Letter:
o “Pearl took some eel-grass, and imitated, as best as she could, on her own bosom, the decoration with which she was so familiar on her mother’s. A letter, - the letter A, - but freshly green, instead of scarlet!” (161)
o “The child bent her chin upon her breast […] as if the one only thing for which she had been sent into the world was to make out its hidden import.” (161)

· Relationship Between Pearl and Hester:
o “If little Pearl were entertained with faith and trust, as a spirit messenger no less than an earthly child, might it not be her errand to soothe away the sorrow that lay cold in her mother’s heart, and converted it into a tomb? – and to help her to overcome the passion, once so wild, and even yet neither dead nor asleep, but only imprisoned within the same tomb-like heart?” (163)
o “In her was visible the tie that united them.”
- Pearl is the tie between Hester and Dimmesdale
o “Children will not abide any, the slightest, change in the accustomed aspect of things that are daily before their eyes.” (189)

· Pearl’s Characteristic Description Collage:
o “[…] a sense of new and untransmitted vigor in Pearl’s nature, as this never-failing vivacity of spirits” (166)
o “She had not the disease of sadness” (166)
o “It was certainly a doubtful charm, imparting a hard, metallic luster to the child’s character. She wanted – what some people want throughout life – a grief that should deeply touch her, and thus humanize and make her capable of sympathy.” (166)
- Pearl’s defective personality was completed when she kissed on her dying father’s lips and her tears fell upon her father’s cheek. (see 229)
o “Jealousy that seems instinctive with every petted child towards a dangerous rival, or from whatever caprice of her freakish nature. Pearl would show no favor to the clergyman.” (191)

· Dimmesdale’s Physical and Emotional Descriptions:
o Before his meeting with Hester in the wood
- “He looked haggard and feeble, and betrayed a nerveless despondency in his air” (170)
- “There was a listlessness in his gait” (170)
- “Death was too definite an object to be wished for or avoided.” (170)
o During his meeting with Hester
- “It was fear, and tremulously, and, as it were, by a slow, reluctant necessity, that Arthur Dimmesdale put forth his hand, chill as death, and touched the chill hand of Hester Prynne.” (170)
- “All of God’s gifts that were the choicest have become the ministers of spiritual torment” (172)
o After they decide to flee to Britain
- “The decision once made, a glow of strange enjoyment threw its flickering brightness over the trouble of his breast. It was the exhilarating effect […] his spirit rose.” (170)
- Of a deeply religious temperament, there was inevitably a tinge of the devotional in his mood.” (170)
o Back to the town
- “The excitement of Mr. Dimmesdale’s feelings, as he returned from his interview with Hester, lent him unaccustomed physical energy, and hurried him townward at a rapid pace.” (194)
- “He took an impression of change from the series of familiar objects that presented themselves.” (194)
- “Another man had returned out of the forest: a wiser one; with a knowledge of hidden mysteries which the simplicity of the former never could have reached.” (200)
- “He fancied himself inspired [when writing the papers]” (202)
o Walking in the procession
- “There was no feebleness of step, as at other times; his frame was not bent; nor did his hand rest ominously upon his heart.” (213)
- “His strength seemed not of the body. It might be spiritual, and imparted to him by angelic ministrations.” (213-214)
o Delivering Election Sermon
o After the sermon in the crowd
o On the scaffold

· Hester’s Physical and Emotional Descriptions:
o During her meeting with Dimmesdale
- “All the world had frowned on her, - for seven long years had it frowned upon this lonely woman – and still she bore in all, nor ever once turned away her firm, sad eyes. Heaven, likewise, had frowned upon her, and she had not died. But the frown of this pale, weak, sinful, and sorrow-stricken man was what Hester could not bear, and live!” (176)
- “ ‘Let us not look back, answered Hester Prynne. ‘The past is gone! Wherefore should we linger upon it now?’ ” (182)
- “There played around her mouth, and beamed out of her eyes, a radiant and tender smile, that seemed gushing from the very heart of womanhood.” (183)
o In the procession
- “Her spirit sank with the idea that all must have been a delusion, and that, vividly as she had dreamed it, there could be no real bond betwixt the clergyman and herself.” (214)
o Listening to the Election Sermon
o After the sermon in the crowd

· The Love Between Hester and Dimmesdale:
o “Such was the ruin to which she had brought the man […] still so passionately loved.” (174)
o “ Hester: ‘Thou shalt not go alone!’ ” (179)
o “If this be the path to a better life, as Hester would persuade me, I surely give up no fairer prospect by pursuing it! Neither can I any longer live without her companionship; so powerful is she to sustain, - so tender to soothe!” (181)
o “O Hester, thou art my better angel!” (182)
o “Pacify her, if thou lovest me!” (189)
o “Hester Prynne listened with such intentness, and sympathized so intimately, that the sermon had throughout a meaning for her, entirely apart from its indistinguishable words.” (217)

· Differences Between Hester and Dimmesdale:
o “Dimmesdale: ‘Happy are you, Hester, that wear the scarlet letter openly upon your bosom! Mine burns in secret!’ ” (173)
o “She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness” vs. “At the head of the social system, as the clergymen of that day stood, he was only the more trammeled by its regulations, its principles, and even its prejudices” (180)
o “She could scarcely forgive him […] for being able so completely to withdraw himself from their mutual world; while she groped darkly, and stretched forth her cold hands, and found him not.” (215)

· Things that Hester and Dimmesdale Share:
o “The grasp, cold as it was, took away what was dreariest in the interview. They now felt themselves, at least, inhabitants of the same sphere.” (171)
- Facing the same difficulty; suffering from the same sin.
o “Dimmesdale: ‘May God forgive us both! We are not, Hester, the worst sinners in the world. There is one worse than even the polluted priest!’ ” (176)
- The same enemy to face.
o “Here, seen only by his eyes, the scarlet letter need not burn into the bosom of the fallen woman! Here, seen only by her eyes, Arthur Dimmesdale, false to God and man, might be, for one moment, true!” (176-177)
- They understand each other.
o “Pearl was the oneness of their being […] when they beheld at once the material union and the spiritual idea, in whom they met, and were to dwell immortally together?” (186)
- The visual thing they share: Pearl
o “The minister’s own will, and Hester’s will, and the fate that grew between them, had wrought this transformation.” (195)
o “What imagination would have been irreverent enough to surmise that the same scorching stigma was on them both!” (221)

· Chillingworth Characteristic Analysis:
o “Dimmesdale: ‘That old man’s revenge has been blacker than my sin. He has violated, in cold blood, the sanctity of a human heart.’ ” (176)
o “Hester: ‘He will doubtless seek other means of satiating his dark passion.’ ” (177)

· Miscellaneous Collection on Society and Religion:
o “Hester: ‘What hast thou to do with all these iron men, and their opinions? They have kept thy better part in bondage too long already!’ ” (178)
- A sick form of peer pressure
o “His sympathy and fellowship with wicked morals, and the world of perverted spirits” (199)
- When you live in a world that is deformed, being normal (virtuous) would be seen as abnormal (wrong).
o “After sustaining the gaze of penance, and something which it was a stern religion to endure, she now, for one last time more, encountered it freely agony into a kind of triumph.’ ” (203)
- A society that use religion to judge a person’s reputation and fame
o “The Puritans compressed whatever mirth and public joy they deemed allowable to human infirmity.” (206)
o “It was an age when what we call talent had far less consideration than now, but the massive materials which produce stability and dignity of character a great deal more.” (212)
- Inequality of the society