The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Nathaniel Hawthorne · a romance in twenty-four chapters, with the introductory sketch “The Custom-House” · Ticknor, Reed and Fields, Boston, 1850 · scored on Hawthorne’s English as published, sketch and romance together, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Psychological romance organised on one symbol; historical romance, Gothic tale and moral allegory turned inward, with a comic autobiographical sketch as its frame
Mythos
The fallen pair and the child of the fall; the godly town against the wilderness where the Black Man walks; the healer turned devil; the sign that changes with the eye that reads it
Phase
About seven years in Puritan Boston, from Hester’s exposure on the scaffold to the Election Sermon, with a coda over many years; framed by the Salem Custom House of the late 1840s
Presentation
Fiction; an introductory sketch in its author’s own voice and a romance in twenty-four titled chapters, the last a Conclusion; carried mostly by narration and analysis, with little dialogue
Register
From the sketch’s comic, self-mocking essay to the Gothic of the leech, the dread of the midnight vigil and the balanced, periodic sentence of moral analysis
Scale
Four figures, one town and one sign; the colony’s magistrates and church behind them
Governing Proposition
In the Boston of the 1640s a young wife, her husband long absent, bears a child and is made to wear a scarlet letter on her breast; she will not name the father, who is her own minister, and her husband, returned in secret as a physician, fastens on the minister’s hidden guilt. The wager of the romance is that a sign’s meaning is made by the eye that reads it, that a concealed sin eats the one who conceals it while open shame can free the mind it was meant to discipline, and that a story held between the actual and the imaginary can show this without settling a single one of its marvels.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book opens not in Boston but in Salem, in its author’s own voice. “The Custom-House” is a sketch of the port’s custom house in the late 1840s, where Hawthorne held the post of Surveyor: its drowsing officials, the old inspector who remembers his dinners, a wharf where trade has dwindled. It is comic and self-mocking, an essay in a register the romance that follows will never use. Behind the comedy stand the writer’s ancestors, the Puritan magistrates who persecuted in their day, whose heir now sits among idle officials writing stories, and the sketch lets him imagine what they would make of him.
In an attic of the custom house, among old papers, he finds a faded piece of scarlet cloth, worked in gold thread into the shape of a capital A, and with it an earlier surveyor’s manuscript telling the story of Hester Prynne. He lays the letter on his breast and feels it burn. Then the politics of 1849 turn him out of office, and he calls himself the “decapitated Surveyor”. Before the romance begins its author has stood on a small scaffold of his own, put out of his post with his town looking on, and has carried the sign home to make a book of it.
The sketch gives the book its theory. Romance, it says, needs “a Neutral Territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet”. Every marvel in what follows will be held there, between the fact and its interpretation. Hawthorne issued the sketch as the book’s introduction, and in a short preface to the second edition, dated within weeks of the first, he declined to remove or change it. It belongs to the work, and it carries the found manuscript, the inherited guilt and the theory of romance; it is also the longest stretch of the book that the romance could do without.
Movement II
The romance begins at a prison door in the young town of Boston, where a crowd is waiting. Beside the door grows a wild rose, and the prison is “the black flower of civilized society” (I). The book starts after the transgression, which it never shows. What it shows is the community’s answer to it, and a single emblem set beside the door: the rose on one side, the iron-bound building on the other, and the reader asked to keep both in view.
Hester Prynne comes out carrying an infant, with the letter on her breast, embroidered in “fantastic flourishes of gold thread” (II), and is made to stand on the scaffold in the market-place before the town. Seen there with her child, the narrator says, she might have put a Papist in mind of the image of the Virgin. The Reverend John Wilson and her own young minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, call on her to name the father. She will not. At the edge of the crowd stands a stranger she knows: her husband, arrived too late, who has lived as a captive among the Indians.
In the prison he comes to her as a physician, under the name of Roger Chillingworth, and binds her to keep his identity secret; the man who wronged him he will find for himself (IV). Released, Hester lives in a cottage at the edge of the town, between the settlement and the forest, and keeps herself and her child by her needle (V). Her work clothes the town that shuns her. The first scaffold has exposed one of the pair, with the child in her arms; the other stands on the balcony above her, among the magistrates, and says nothing.
Movement III
The child is Pearl, a wild, quick, beautiful girl given to tantrums and to strange questions, who decks herself with flowers and fixes her eyes on the letter. She is drawn as a child and as a sign at once: “the scarlet letter endowed with life” (VII). At the Governor’s hall the magistrates consider whether the child should be taken from her mother. Hester appeals to the minister, and Dimmesdale pleads for her; she keeps Pearl (VII, VIII). As she leaves, Mistress Hibbins calls from a window to invite her into the forest, and Hester answers that she would have gone, had they taken the child.
Chillingworth, now the town’s physician, attaches himself to the ailing minister and comes to live in the same house (IX). The leech probes his patient as a miner digs for gold, and one day, while the minister sleeps, he opens his vestment and sees something on his breast that the book does not name (X). The minister fasts, keeps vigils and scourges himself, and preaches his own guilt in general terms to a congregation that reveres him the more for it (XI). These chapters turn one situation, the physician at the secret, and turn it at more length than the turn requires.
Then the second scaffold (XII). At midnight the minister climbs the empty platform where Hester stood years before. Hester and Pearl, coming home from Governor Winthrop’s deathbed, join him there, the three hand in hand, and Pearl asks whether he will stand with them at noon the next day. He will not. A meteor lights the sky in the shape of a great letter, and beneath it the physician stands watching. Next day the town says the sky showed an A for Angel, for the dead governor. The marvel is given two readings and allowed to keep both.
Movement IV
Seven years have passed. Hester’s help in sickness and trouble has softened the town, and many now say the letter means “Able” (XIII). But “The scarlet letter had not done its office” (XIII). Outside the community’s life she has thought freely, of the whole order of society and the place of women in it, thoughts the narrator says her forefathers would have held a deadlier crime than the one the letter marks. Exclusion, meant to discipline her, has made her the freest mind in Boston.
She seeks out Chillingworth by the shore and finds that years of revenge have turned the scholar into a fiend (XIV). Then, in the forest, she meets the minister on its path (XVI, XVII). She tells him who the physician is. He names the husband’s sin as blacker than their own, one that has “violated, in cold blood, the sanctity of a human heart” (XVII), and she answers for what they did: “What we did had a consecration of its own” (XVII). They resolve to leave the colony together by sea.
Hester unclasps the letter and throws it among the leaves, takes off her cap and lets down her hair, and sunshine floods the forest (XVIII). The wilderness that the godly town fears as the Black Man’s ground is the one place in the book where the pair speak as what they are. But Pearl, called across the brook to join them, will not come. She stands on the far side and points at her mother’s breast until Hester picks up the letter and fastens it on again (XIX). When the minister kisses her brow she runs to the brook and washes the kiss away.
Movement V
The minister walks back to the town in a maze, beset by impulses to blasphemy and mischief, a man who has worn one face too long and no longer knows which is true (XX). He writes a new Election Sermon through the night. On the holiday the town gathers in the market-place, with sailors and Indians in the crowd (XXI), and the captain of the ship that is to carry the pair away tells Hester that the physician has taken passage too. The holiday chapters bring every figure into one square.
The minister preaches the Election Sermon, the triumph of his life (XXII). Then, as the procession leaves the meeting-house, he turns to the scaffold, calls Hester and the child to him, and mounts it with them before the whole people (XXIII). Chillingworth tries to stop him and fails: there was no place in the world where the minister could have escaped him, save this one. Dimmesdale confesses, tears open the band on his breast, and dies on the platform. Pearl kisses him, and the narrator says a spell is broken. The third scaffold unites the three in public, by day.
The witnesses disagree (XXIV). Some saw a letter on the minister’s breast and explain it in different ways; some say they saw nothing, and that he died to teach that all are sinners. The book does not decide. Chillingworth withers within the year and leaves his property to Pearl. Hester goes away with her child, and in time comes back alone and takes up the letter of her own will, a counsellor to women in trouble, promising them a revelation that will come through some woman yet to be. The narrator draws one moral, “Be true! Be true! Be true!” (XXIV), and the book ends on the stone Hester shares with the minister: “On a field, sable, the letter A, gules” (XXIV).
Act III · The Twelve
The romance proper is among the most economical novels of its century: four figures, one town, one sign. Three scaffold scenes are the load-bearing beams, in chapters II, XII and XXIII of twenty-four, and almost every chapter between them turns one relation of the triangle. Take out the forest meeting (XVI to XIX) and the last scaffold has no cause; take out Pearl and the letter has no living answer, since she is “the scarlet letter endowed with life” (VII). Two charges stand. The chapters on the leech and his patient (IX to XI) restate one situation at more length than the turn requires, and the narrator glosses what the scene has already shown. The larger charge is the frame: “The Custom-House” is required for what it does, the found manuscript, the inherited guilt and the theory of romance, but not at its length, and the portraits of the old inspectors are a comic essay the romance could lose.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a concealed sin does not stay in the past; it eats the one who hides it, and his public virtue becomes the instrument of his torment. Dimmesdale’s congregation reveres him the more as his self-accusations grow, and he knows why: “No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true” (XX). Second, the book ranks the sins against its society’s ranking: the coldest wrong is not the adultery but the husband’s revenge, which “has violated, in cold blood, the sanctity of a human heart” (XVII). Third, exclusion frees the mind it meant to discipline: “The scarlet letter had not done its office” (XIII), and Hester thinks what no woman in Boston dares. Held below the top because the narrator draws back from the last disclosure, and the Conclusion defers Hester’s vision to a woman yet to come.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Height comes in a dark register, and often enough to carry the book. The ceiling is the midnight vigil (XII): the minister on the empty scaffold, Hester and Pearl joining hands with him, and a meteor drawing a great letter in the sky over the sleeping town, with the physician’s face lit beneath it. The forest rises the other way: Hester unclasps the letter and throws it aside, lets down her hair, and sunshine floods the wood (XVIII). The last scaffold (XXIII) is dreadful and grand, the minister calling the woman and the child to him before the whole holiday crowd and dying there. Smaller heights: the prison door and its wild rose (I), Pearl at the brook refusing to cross until her mother takes the letter back (XIX). Held below the higher reaches because the long analytic middle runs level, and the narrator’s commentary sometimes lowers a height it has just reached.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Myth built, and built on one object. The letter is load-bearing from the first chapter to the last line: embroidered by its wearer with “fantastic flourishes of gold thread” (II), read by the town as the mark of an adulteress and later as “Able” (XIII), seen burning in the sky, found or not found on the minister’s breast, and carved at last on a shared stone. Around it the archetypes stand in the structure, not in allusion: the fallen pair and the child of the fall; the wilderness where the Black Man walks, against the godly town; the healer turned devil, a Mephistopheles who lives in his victim’s house; the woman on the scaffold with her infant, in whom, the narrator says, a Papist might have seen an image of the Virgin. The particulars stay particular: Hester’s needle, Pearl’s tantrums, the minister’s hand at his heart. Held a step from the top because the allegory sometimes explains itself.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance is Scott’s historical romance, the Gothic novel and its American line in Charles Brockden Brown, the Puritan histories, and Hawthorne’s own tales. The turn: a novel that begins after the transgression, which is never shown; that makes its fallen woman the moral and intellectual centre and gives her the freedom of thought her community denies; that turns the Gothic inward, from the haunted house to the haunted heart; and that refuses to settle its own marvels, offering the meteor and the mark on the minister’s breast each with another reading beside it. The stake was real: the book was attacked in its first years as immoral, and “The Custom-House” cost its author the good will of his town. Held below the top because the machinery of Gothic and allegory is inherited, not broken: the turn is made with tools the tradition supplied.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The three scaffolds make the book’s argument as architecture: the first exposes one of the pair, the second unites the three in secret at night, the third in public by day, and the progress from hidden to shown is the moral the book argues. The romance form, which the sketch defines as “a Neutral Territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet”, is the instrument of its central knowledge: that a sign’s meaning is made by the eye that reads it, so every marvel must be kept between fact and interpretation. The frame enacts the same knowledge on its author, who finds the faded letter in an attic, feels it burn on his breast, and is himself put out of office, the “decapitated Surveyor”. Held below the top because the narrator’s glosses sometimes step outside the form to tell what it shows.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: more than a century and a half of reading that has not exhausted the book. Melville wrote of Hawthorne in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (1850) and dedicated Moby-Dick to him (1851); Henry James’s Hawthorne (1879) took its measure for a later generation; D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) read it against its own surface; F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941) set it at the centre of the American canon; Frederick Crews read it psychoanalytically in The Sins of the Fathers, and Sacvan Bercovitch politically in The Office of The Scarlet Letter (1991). The text holds its questions open: whether anything was on Dimmesdale’s breast; whether Hester’s return to wear the letter is surrender or sovereignty; whether Pearl is a child or a sign; whether the book condemns the Puritans or keeps their law. Held a step down because its open questions are many but its world is small.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The field is American literature of the nineteenth century, with the English-language novel as its wider ground. The force is a demonstration: that American fiction could reach the first rank by a means of its own, the psychological romance organised on a symbol, rather than by imitating the English novel of manners, which the country’s thin social fabric could not support. The book made the moral history of the Puritan settlement a subject for serious art and made interior guilt a novel’s whole action. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Melville’s turn to the symbol in the year after it, with the dedication of Moby-Dick as witness; James’s long engagement with Hawthorne; the American tradition of romance later critics traced through Faulkner; and direct answers in John Updike’s A Month of Sundays (1975), Roger’s Version (1986) and S. (1988). Held below the top because its reach in the European novel is slight, and the reorganisation it made was of one national literature.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over 176 years. Form: the text survives whole as published; the first and second editions differ only by the new preface, and nothing is lost or contested. Presence: in print without a break since 1850, and taught for more than a century in American schools and universities, where it has long been among the most assigned of all novels; filmed by Victor Sjöström with Lillian Gish (1926), by Wim Wenders (1973) and by Roland Joffé (1995); its title a phrase in the language. It has outlived its conditions: Puritan discipline and the Salem quarrel over patronage are history, and the book is read for what they pressed on. Held short of the widest presence because its reach outside the English-speaking world is narrower than that of the most widely read novels of its century, and much of its presence rests on the classroom.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on Hawthorne’s English, with no translation between. The construction is masterly: the scaffolds placed at the second, twelfth and twenty-third chapters; the letter’s meanings advanced chapter by chapter; Pearl’s half-wild speech used to press the question no adult will ask; the holiday chapters (XXI to XXIII) bringing every thread into one crowded square, with a ship’s captain carrying the news that the physician has taken passage too. The prose is balanced, periodic and exact, and it can turn a phrase into an emblem: the prison as “the black flower of civilized society” (I). The sketch shows another command, a comic, self-mocking essayist’s voice. Charged: the narrator’s hedging and moralising, which sometimes says twice what the scene has said once; dialogue stiffened by an archaic “thee” and “thou” beyond what the period needs; and Chillingworth’s turn to fiend, drawn in Gothic colours cruder than the rest.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the old inspector of the Custom House remembering his dinners, a comic grotesque of the 1840s, and Dimmesdale dying on the scaffold in the 1640s. One law governs them: the relation of the outward sign to the inward fact, and the cost of a life that keeps them apart. The sketch’s officials are the decayed heirs of the Puritan magistrates, and the author who wears the found letter and is turned out of office stands on a small scaffold of his own. Within the romance the law is kept to the end: every marvel is offered with its natural reading beside it, so the book’s physics never breaks into the supernatural or flattens into report. The range is real, comedy, Gothic, psychological analysis, the town holiday and the forest, but narrower than the widest novels, and narrowness is not coherence; the frame’s comedy is also a register the romance never returns to.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Achieved and integrated for a short novel, through one sign. Consciousness: the minister’s vigils and self-scourging, Hester’s thought in exclusion (XIII). The family: a mother and child, a father unnamed, a husband returned in disguise; Pearl’s claim on both her parents is the book’s last question. The state: a theocratic magistracy deciding whether Hester may keep her child (VII, VIII). The sacred: sin, confession, election, the Election Sermon itself. Labour: Hester’s needlework, which clothes the town that shuns her, and the idle labour of the Custom House. History: the founding of Boston and the death of Winthrop, and in the frame the author’s ancestors and the politics of 1849. The natural order: forest, brook, sea and wild rose. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the social world, a chorus more than a field: economy, class and the wider colony are present only at the edge.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Archetypal Deep and The Bottomless Well at 9.0. A text whole as published, in print without a break since 1850 and taught for more than a century; a myth built on one object, the letter, load-bearing from the first chapter to the last line; and more than a century and a half of reading, from Melville and James to Lawrence, Matthiessen and Bercovitch, that has not settled what was on the minister’s breast.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.0. Consciousness, the family, the state, the sacred, labour, history and the natural order are held through one sign, but the social world is a chorus more than a field: economy, class and the wider colony are present only at the edge. Next above it, The Inevitable at 8.3, held by the leech chapters (IX to XI), which restate one situation, and by the length of “The Custom-House” beyond what the romance requires of it.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.1, The Archetypal Deep at 9.0, The Unconcealment at 8.9, Pressure on Tradition at 8.9 and The Swerve at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by two tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.3, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.7, short of the 9.0 the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, A Romance, published by Ticknor, Reed and Fields, Boston, in March 1850. It is scored as the book Hawthorne published: the introductory sketch “The Custom-House” and the twenty-four chapters of the romance, from “The Prison-Door” (I) to “Conclusion” (XXIV). The sketch is part of the work, since Hawthorne issued it as the book’s introduction and, in the short preface to the second edition, dated March 1850, declined to remove or change it; that preface is named as context and is not scored. No text of the book was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Hawthorne’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain. Citations are by chapter, in Roman numerals, and by “The Custom-House” for the sketch. The writings of Melville, James, Lawrence, Matthiessen, Crews and Bercovitch, Updike’s three novels and the three films are cited as the record of the book’s reception and are not part of the work. The share of dialogue is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged. Facts that could not be verified, among them the book’s word count and the share of it taken by the sketch, an earlier appearance of an embroidered letter in Hawthorne’s tales, the authorship of the first attacks on the book, the date of Crews’s study and the extent of the book’s translation, are not given.