The Scarlet Letter 12

The Scarlet Letter

Chapter Five

Entry Twelve

In the fifth chapter, Hester is released from prison and returns home. Her home is a cottage standing at the outskirts of Boston.

To have something to survive, she sews clothes, and soon she provides the entire town with her beautiful craft. She produces everything except for wedding stuff. A woman like her, sinful to the core because of adultery is not allowed to encounter love and marriage in the Purian society. The inhabitants show an atonishing interest in her clothes, either because the feel sorry for this beautiful castoff, or they are fascinated in some way by the morbid vibrancy of the garments.

Anyway, she is making a successful business out of her talent, so she doesn’t have to worry about pulling through.

Hester could have a reasonably normal life, if she wouldn’t punish herself again and again.

She made the prettiest clothest for the town’s people, but Her daughter instead was dressed up very fancy.

“her own dress was of the coarsest materials and the most sombre hue; with only that one ornament,—the scarlet letter,—which it was her doom to wear.”

In my opinion she could point out with this, that it is HER sin, and not the sin of her daughter. She creates a distance between Pearl and her own guilt by differing their looks.

Moreover, she punishes herself by spending all her free time in charity work. She does this to avoid any kind of enjoyment in her life.

But the inhabitants punish her too. They show whenever it is possible their resentment:

“Every gesture, every word, and even the silence of those with whom she came in contact, implied, and often expressed, that she was banished, and as much alone as if she inhabited another sphere, or communicated with the common nature by other organs and senses than the rest of human kind.”

So Hester has a lonely life and the only contact person she has is her daughter.

In the next post I will explain, why that fact doesn’t make her less lonely.