summary: part three: MORALITY

Here's a visual of the scaffold from the introductary scene when Hester had to stand there before the town. This is where Dimmesdale ends up in the following scene...

Rev. Dimmesdale suffers from his “secret burden” for years, longing to reveal his “black secret” but not having the courage to confess (99). Late one night, he is driven by guilt into the town and ends up on the scaffold, where sinners stand to be judged and jeered at by the Puritans.

“Without any effort of his will, or power to restrain himself, he shrieked aloud; an outcry that went pealing through the night, and was beaten back from one house to another, and reverberated from the hills in the background; as if a company of devils, detecting so much misery and terror in it, had make a plaything of the sound, and were bandying it to and fro” (102).

Dimmesdale is frozen in horror, thinking the whole town will have heard and come find him standing on that guilty spot, where Hester and the infant Pearl once had to stand for three hours as part of the punishment for the adultery. Ironically, Hester and Pearl happen to pass by at this time on their way home from the deathbed of a governor, where Hester had been measuring to make him a garment for the funeral.

Over time, Hester had become part of the community again by offering her services as a seamstress and helper. Though many have forgiven her and even forgotten about her adultery, Hester never becomes “one of them” again, for she never was one of them to begin with. Her individualistic nature is fundamentally different from the Puritan code, and along with Pearl, Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, remain Other for it.

Dimmesdale calls Hester and Pearl to join him on the scaffold, and the the three stand there holding hands. Pearl asks him to stand there with them the next day, before everyone, but Dimmesdale refuses. Suddenly, there is a meteor event that lights up the whole night-scene: “all were visible, but with a singularity of aspect that seemed to give another moral interpretation to the things of this world than they had ever borne before” (106). Here, Hawthorne shows a distinct aspect of American Romanticism, in his primary use of natural phenomena and morality.

Looking at the sky, Dimmesdale sees a giant, red letter A. The next day, the whole town is talking about the A, imagining it to mean Angel, for the governor had just passed away at that time. It is implied that Dimmesdale, imagined quite a different, more personal meaning.

Hawthorne definitely deals with a darker Romanticism (in my opinion) in the sense that it deals with the relationships between Nature, morality, psychology, the soul and the body.