Question 1

What does the scarlet letter symbolize?

Accepted Answer

The scarlet letter 'A' begins as a mark of Adultery — the crime for which Hester has been publicly shamed — and is transformed by the novel's action into something much more complex. By the end of the novel, the townspeople have come to read it as Able, in recognition of Hester's competence and charity; Hester herself has transformed its meaning through the embroidery she has applied to it, which is so beautiful that it turns the mark of shame into something aesthetically remarkable. The letter also appears in the sky (as a meteor forming the shape of an A), on Dimmesdale's chest (self-inflicted, it seems), and is the subject of Pearl's constant fascination with her mother. The letter's instability as a sign — its capacity to mean different things to different people at different times — is the novel's central formal principle as well as its primary subject.

Question 2

Who is Roger Chillingworth and why is he important?

Accepted Answer

Roger Chillingworth is Hester's husband — a learned, elderly man who arrives in Boston just as Hester is being publicly displayed and who conceals his identity, taking the name Chillingworth (a name that indicates his moral coldness). He becomes Dimmesdale's doctor and friend, gradually discovering that Dimmesdale is Pearl's father, and devotes himself to tormenting Dimmesdale — keeping him alive and suffering rather than letting him confess and find peace. Hawthorne identifies Chillingworth as the novel's primary villain, though all three adult characters bear moral responsibility for what happens. Chillingworth's sin — the sustained, deliberate torture of another human being, motivated by cold revenge rather than hot passion — is presented as greater than the passion that produced Hester and Dimmesdale's sin.

Question 3

What happens at the end of The Scarlet Letter?

Accepted Answer

Dimmesdale, after a powerful election-day sermon, summons Hester and Pearl to the scaffold in the town square — the same scaffold where Hester stood at the novel's opening — and publicly confesses his sin, dying in Hester's arms. It is ambiguous whether he voluntarily tears open his robe to reveal the mark on his own chest or whether the mark is there: many witnesses see it, some deny it. Chillingworth, robbed of his victim, dies within a year. Pearl, finally acknowledged by her father, inherits Chillingworth's wealth and grows up, marries, and lives in Europe — the one character who escapes the novel's American moral world. Hester returns to Boston years later and resumes wearing the scarlet letter voluntarily, becoming a counselor to women in distress, until she dies and is buried near Dimmesdale under a tombstone bearing the letter A.

Question 4

Is The Scarlet Letter sympathetic to Hester?

Accepted Answer

The Scarlet Letter is one of the most consistently sympathetic treatments of an adulteress in nineteenth-century fiction — Hester is the novel's moral center, the person who bears her situation with the most dignity, who does the most good, and who grows in wisdom through her suffering, while the men around her are diminished by theirs. Hawthorne, who was descended from Puritan judges involved in the Salem witch trials and who felt ambivalent about his Puritan heritage, was writing partly to humanize the people his ancestors had condemned. The novel is not simply an anti-Puritan polemic — it takes the Puritan moral framework seriously — but it is clearly more sympathetic to Hester's sin of passion than to Chillingworth's sin of cold, premeditated revenge.

The Scarlet Letter Reading Order

Complete The Scarlet Letter Book List