The Scarlet Letter 1

The Scarlet Letter

My Dialectical Journal

Chapter 1

Entry One

In the first chapter of ‘The Scarlet Letter’ the author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, describes the location of the story. One of the main pictured objects ‘on the virgin soil’ (ll 9) is a prison. Hawthorne calls it ‘the black flower of civilized society’ (ll 27). 

A prison is a place, where people are sent to when they did something against rules or laws as punishment and mostly, these people have an evil attitude and an sinister charisma. If you’d ask someone to paint convicts only with colors, I am sure, everyone would use the colors gray and black. This is likely to be the reason for the choice of the word ‘Black’ for the description of the flower.

But why did Hawthorne call the jail a flower at all? Maybe he chose this word because the Puritans’ idea of their new colony was a Utopia what is pointed out by the author ironically (‘whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project’ (ll 6-7)). Maybe he compares the new city with a field of flowers (flowers stand for happiness, brightness and beauty). The prison is like a black sheep in that pretended perfect world, the only place in and around Boston, where the founders couldn’t hide the imperfections of their creation.

But another interpretation might be that he chose the flower because it grew from the society. The society is to blame for the fact that the world needs buildings at all, where people are sent to for penalizing them.