Chapter 1The Prison Door

A throng of bearded men in sad-coloured garments and grey pointed hats, and women, some wearing hoods and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden building, the door of which was made of heavy oak and studded with iron spikes.

The founders of any new colony, regardless of whatever Utopia of virtue and happiness they might originally plan, soon recognize that one of their first practical necessities is to build a cemetery and a prison.

In accordance with this rule, the forefathers of Boston built the first prison, and marked out the first burial ground, on Isaac Johnson’s land, near his grave, which subsequently became the old churchyard of King’s Chapel.

Fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of Boston, the wooden jail was already marked with weather stains, which gave its gloomy front an even darker appearance. The rust on the heavy ironwork of its oak door looked more antique than anything else in the New World. Like all that relates to crime, it seemed to never have looked new.

Between this ugly prison and the tracks of the street was a grass plot, overgrown with weeds and unsightly vegetation that flourished in the same soil that had produced the black flower of civilized society--a prison.

But on one side of the door, almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, in full bloom in this month of June, which offered its fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came out to face his doom. At least Nature had a deep heart and could pity him, even if man could not.

This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has survived for over two hundred years; but whether it merely survived in the harsh wilderness, or whether, as there is evidence for believing, it sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson as she entered the prison door, we shall not attempt to determine.

Finding the rose-bush on the threshold of our story, the subject of whom is now about to exit from that prison door, we cannot help but pluck one of its flowers and present it to the reader. Let us hope it may symbolize some sweet moral blossom, or provide some relief for a tale of human frailty and sorrow.

Chapter 2The Market-Place

On a certain summer morning over two centuries ago, the grass plot in front of the jail in Prison Lane was crowded with a large number of the inhabitants of Boston, all with their eyes intently fastened on the iron-clamped oaken door.

At a later period in the history of New England, the grim expression of these bearded faces would have indicated some awful business at hand--perhaps the execution of some rioted culprit, on whom the verdict and sentence had been pronounced.

But here, instead, among the severe Puritans of Boston, this scene might indicate that a lazy servant or rebellious child was to be corrected at the whipping post; or that a Quaker was forced to leave town; or a vagrant Indian, whom the white man’s liquor had made riotous in the streets, was to be driven back into the forest with lashes of the whip.

It might be, too, that a witch, like old Mistress Hibbins, the bitter-tempered widow of the magistrate, was to die upon the gallows.

In any case, the solemn faces of the spectators suited people to whom religion and law were almost identical, and so intertwined that both the mildest and severest acts of public punishment were both honored and awful.

The sympathy that a sinner on the scaffold might look for in these bystanders was meager and cold. On the other hand, a penalty which we might ridicule today would, back then, be regarded as deserving as death itself.

When our story begins, it is to be noted that the women, of whom there were several in the crowd, appeared to be quite interested in the punishment to be inflicted. This Puritan age was not so refined women could not step out in public and wedge their often substantial bodies into the throng nearest to the scaffold at an execution.

Those English-born and bred women were morally and physically coarser than their fair descendants; for, during the next six or seven generations, each mother passed on to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate beauty, and a slighter physical frame--though not a less solid and forceful character--than her own.

The women who now stood around the prison door were less than two generations removed from the reign of the man-like Queen Elizabeth. These were her countrywomen--and their bodies and morals reflected the beef and ale of England.

The bright morning sun, therefore, shone on women with broad shoulders, well-developed busts, and ruddy cheeks that had ripened in England and had not yet grown paler or thinner in the atmosphere of New England. There was, moreover, a boldness in the speech among these matrons that would startle us today.

“Good wives,” said a hard-featured dame of fifty, “I’ll give you a piece of my mind. It would good if we women, being of mature age and church members in good repute, should be in charge of punishing sinners such as this Hester Prynne. What think you, gossips? If that hussy received her judgment from the five of us, would she come off with such a light sentence as the worshipful magistrates have awarded? I think not.”

“People say,” said another, “that the Reverend Master Dimmesdale, her godly pastor, takes it very grievously to heart that such a scandal should have come upon his congregation.”

“The magistrates are God-fearing gentlemen, but overly merciful--that is the truth,” added a third older matron. “At the very least, they should have put the brand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne’s forehead. Madame Hester would have winced at that, I warrant. But the naughty sinner will little care what they put upon the bosom of her gown. Why, look, she may cover it with a brooch or such heathen adornment and walk the streets as brave as ever.”

“Ah,” interposed a young wife, more softly, holding a child by the hand, “she may cover the mark as she will, but the pain of it will be always in her heart.”

“Why do we talk of marks and brands, whether on the bosom of her gown or the flesh of her forehead?” cried another female, the ugliest of these self-proclaimed judges. “This woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die. Is there not a law for it? Truly there is, both in the Scripture and the statute book. Then let the magistrates, who have not enforced it, thank themselves if their own wives and daughters go astray.”

“Have mercy on us, good wife,” exclaimed a man in the crowd. “Is there no virtue in women except that which comes from fear of the gallows? Hush now, gossips, for the lock is turning in the prison-door, and here comes Mistress Prynne herself.”

The door of the jail was flung open, and from inside appeared, like a black shadow emerging into sunshine, the grim and gristly town beadle, with a sword by his side, and his staff of office in his hand. This parish official’s appearance represented the whole dismal severity of the Puritanic code of law, which it was his business to administer to the offender.

He stretched forth the official staff in his left hand, and laid his right upon the shoulder of a young woman, whom he brought forward to the threshold of the prison door. She repelled him--an action of natural dignity and force of character--and stepped into the open air by her own free will.

She held a child in her arms, a baby of three months old, who winked and turned its little face away from the bright light of day--because up till now, the baby had only been acquainted with the grey twilight of a dungeon and the darkness of the prison.

When the young mother stood fully revealed before the crowd, her first impulse was to clasp the infant closely to her bosom--not from motherly affection, but so she might conceal something that was fastened onto her dress.

A moment later, however, wisely judging that one symbol of her shame would not hide the other, she took the baby on her arm. Then with a burning blush, but yet a haughty smile, anda glance that refused to be ashamed, she looked around at her townspeople and neighbours.

On the breast of her fancy black dress, in fine red cloth, surrounded by elaborate embroidery of gold thread, appeared the letter A. It was artistically done, with gorgeous luxury of imagination. Its splendor was in accordance with the fashion of the day, but greatly beyond what was allowed by the regulations of the Puritan colony.

The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam. Her face was beautiful, with a rich complexion, a prominent forehead, and deep black eyes. She was ladylike, too, with feminine dignity rather than delicate grace.

And never had Hester Prynne appeared more ladylike than when she stepped from the prison. Those who knew her, and expected her to be dimmed by her disaster, were astonished and even startled to see how her beauty shone out, and made a halo of her misfortune and disgrace.

It may be true that the sensitive observer saw something exquisitely painful in it. Her fancy dress, which she had made for her prison stay, seemed to express the attitude of her spirit and the desperate recklessness of her mood.

But the point which drew all eyes and transformed her--so that both men and women who knew Hester Prynne were now impressed as if they saw her for the first time--was that scarlet letter, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the realm of ordinary humans and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.

“She has good skill at her needle, that’s certain,” remarked one of her female spectators, “but did ever a woman, before this brazen hussy, show it in such a manner as that? Why, gossips, what does it do, except to laugh in the faces of our godly magistrates and make pride out of punishment?”

“It would be well,” muttered the most iron-faced old dame, “if we stripped Madame Hester’s rich gown off her dainty shoulders; and as for the red letter which she has stitched so curiously, I’ll give her a rag of my own flannel to make a more suitable one!”

“Oh, peace, neighbours--peace!” whispered their youngest companion. “Do not let her hear you! There is not a stitch in that embroidered letter that she did not feel in her heart.”

The grim beadle now made a gesture with his staff.

“Make way, good people--make way, in the King’s name!” cried he. “Make way, and I promise you, Mistress Prynne shall be put where man, woman, and child may have a fair sight of her brave apparel from this time till an hour past noon. It is a blessing on the righteous colony of Massachusetts, where sin is dragged out into the sunshine! Come along, Madame Hester, and show your scarlet letter in the market-place!”

The crowd of spectators immediately parted. Hester Prynne, followed by the beadle, led the procession of stern-browed men and unkindly-faced women toward the place appointed for her punishment.

A crowd of eager and curious schoolboys, understanding little of the matter at hand except that they were given a half-holiday, ran before her, turning their heads continually to stare into her face, at the winking baby, and at the shameful letter on her breast.

It was no great distance, in those days, from the prison-door to the market-place. From the prisoner’s point of view, however, it might be considered a journey of some length--for haughty as her demeanor was, Hester Prynne perhaps experienced agony from every footstep of those that thronged to see her, as if her heart had been flung into the street for them all to trample on.

The marvelous and merciful quality of human nature is such that a sufferer never feels the intensity of torture when it occurs--it is afterwards that the pain stings.

With a serene manner, therefore, Hester Prynne passed through this portion of her ordeal and came to a scaffold at the western end of the market-place. It stood nearly beneath the roof of Boston’s oldest church, and appeared to be a permanent structure.

In fact, this scaffold was part of a punishment machine which, today, is merely of historical interest. But in the old days of the Puritans, it was as effective a way to promote good citizenship as the guillotine was among the terrorists of France.

It was, in short, the pillory. Above the platform rose the wooden frame of that instrument of discipline. The holes were designed to lock the human head and hands in its tight grasp and hold them up to public gaze. The very ideal of disgrace came to life and was made obvious in this contrivance of wood and iron.

There can be no greater outrage against a man than to prevent the culprit from hiding his face for shame, as this punishment did. In Hester Prynne’s instance, however, as frequently occurred in other cases, her sentence required that she should stand a certain time upon the platform, but without her head being confined.

Knowing her part well, she ascended the flight of wooden steps, and was thus displayed to the surrounding multitude, at about the height of a man’s shoulders above the street.

Had there been a Catholic among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen, in this beautiful woman with the infant at her bosom, a reminder of the Virgin Mary--that sacred image of sinless motherhood, whose infant was to redeem the world. Here, by contrast, the taint of deepest sin darkened this woman’s beauty, and the world was more lost for the infant she had borne.

This spectacle of guilt and shame inspired a sense of awe. The solemn presence of the governor, several of his counselors, a judge, a general, and the ministers of the town, all of whom sat or stood in a balcony of the meeting-house, looking down upon the platform, gave the event earnest meaning. Accordingly, the crowd was somber and grave.

The unhappy sinner held up as best a woman might, under the heavy weight of a thousand unrelenting eyes, all fastened upon her, and concentrated at her bosom. It was almost an intolerable burden to bear.

Hester Prynne had an impulsive and passionate nature, and she had prepared herself for loud, venomous insults from the crowd. But their solemn mood was much more terrible. She rather wished those rigid faces had instead been full of laughter, so that she could have repaid them with a bitter and disdainful smile.

But the silence made her feel, at moments, that she would shriek out with the full power of her lungs, and cast herself from the scaffold down upon the ground, or else go mad at once.

Yet there were moments when the whole scene seemed to vanish from her eyes. Her mind and her memory were uncannily active, and kept bringing up other scenes and other faces than those glowering upon her from beneath the brims of those steeple-crowned hats.

Reminiscences--trifling and immaterial, of infancy and school days, sports, childish quarrels, and her maiden years--came swarming back upon her, one picture precisely as vivid as another. Possibly, it was her spirit relieving her from the cruel weight and hardness of reality.

Standing on that miserable scaffold, she saw again her happy infancy in her native village in Old England; her home, a poverty-stricken, decayed house of grey stone, but with a half-ruined shield of arms over the door, a token of her family’s long-ago gentility.

She saw her father’s face, with its bold forehead, and the white beard that flowed over the old-fashioned Elizabethan ruff collar; her mother’s face, too, with the look of attentive and anxious love, even after her death. She saw her own face, glowing with girlish beauty, and illuminating the mirror at which she gazed.

Then she beheld another face, of a man well-advanced in years, a pale, thin, scholar-like face, with eyes dim and bleary from poring over many ponderous books in the lamp-light. Yet those same eyes had a strange, penetrating power when they were used to read the human soul. His body was slightly deformed, with the left shoulder a trifle higher than the right.

Next her in memory’s picture gallery, she saw a great European city, with ancient buildings of quaint architecture, the intricate and narrow roads, the tall, grey houses, and the huge cathedrals. Here a new life had awaited her upon her marriage to the misshapen scholar--a new life that became more like a tuft of green moss on a crumbling wall.

Lastly, she came back the rude market-place of the Puritan settlement, with all the townspeople assembled, and leveling their stern gaze at her, as she stood on the scaffold of the pillory, an infant on her arm, and the letter A, in scarlet, fantastically embroidered with gold thread upon her bosom.

Could it be true? She clutched the child so fiercely to her breast that it let out a cry. She turned her eyes downward at the scarlet letter, and even touched it with her finger, to assure herself that the infant and the shame were real. Yes, these were her realities--all else had vanished!

Puritan Boston in the 1600’s. Beautiful, defiant Hester Prynne commits adultery, refuses to name the father of her illegitimate child, and is condemned to wear a scarlet ‘A’ on her breast for the rest of her life. Her character becomes the first true heroine of American fiction, and the first American novel to explore the moral struggle with sin, guilt, and pride.

W A Y N E    J O S E P H S O N

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