The Scarlet Letter 11

The Scarlet Letter

Chapter Five

Entry Eleven

“It may seem marvellous, that this woman should still call that place her home, where, and where only, she must needs be the type of shame.” 

Chapter Five raises the question, why Hester does not leave to find her joy somewhere else. The laws of the Puritan settlement don’t bind her to Boston, so she could move wherever she would want to.

But she refuses to go. Hawthorne gives us several reasons for that:
To begin with, “Her sin, her ignominy, were the roots which she had struck into the soil.”

Again, this is a hint to nature.

By cheating on his husband in Boston, she bound herself to this place. It is like an invisible, magic tie that pulls her to the origin of her shame. She could have moved to England, her birth place “where happy infancy and stainless maidenhood seemed yet to be in her mother’s keeping”, but “the chain that bound her here was on iron links, and galling to her inmost soul, but never could be broken.” It might have been a good decision to go away merely for Pearl’s sake. She could have been growing up without anyone having prejudices against her and her mother.

The second reason, the book gives us, is that she feels connected to the man she had sinned with, and that her love to him makes her stay and bear all the shame lying on her in this town.

But Hester does not admit this secret to herself and “grew pale whenever it struggled out of her heart, like a serpent from its hole.”

This is the second time, that a snake is mentioned by Hawthorne. After Roger Chillingworth recognizes her at the market place, his facial features are describe as a snake that is gliding swiftly over his face. And now Hawthorne characterizes the rising reminder of her sinful night as a snake. Furthermore, there is another line that hints to Chillingworth:

“Over and over again, the tempter of souls (metaphor for devil) had thrust this idea upon Hester’s contemplation, and laughed at the passionate and desperate joy with which she seized, and then strove to cast it from her.”

There is one more answer Hawthorne gives us for the question why she stays in Boston. This is the one she forces herself to believe:

So she hopes for mercy from heaven because she endures all the pain the Bostoner’s harming her. 

In my opinion, there is one more possibility as an answer. She has always been a strong woman and she never let someone see her insecurities, so she won’t do now.

Hester won’t give in and let the inhabitants win over her destiny because that would be beneath her.

“Here, she said to herself, had been the scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly punishment; and so, perchance, the torture of her daily shame would at length purge her soul, and work out another purity than that which she had lost; more saint-like, because the result of martyrdom.”

So Hester’s husband is both the snake and the devil. It seems as if he is the ruler of her mind and possesses every thought she makes. He wants her to remember her infamy and that she disgraced him.