What Does Hester Threaten to Do at the End of Chapter 14?

Advisor: Lucinda MacKethan, Professor Emerita, Department of English language, 
North Carolina Country University; National Humanities Center Fellow
© 2016 National Humanities Center

What does the scarlet A practice for Hester Prynne?

Agreement

By deepening her emotional sympathy and by allowing her to liberate her thinking from Puritan orthodoxy, Hester Prynne's blood-red letter, meant to exclude her from the community, functions ironically as the agent of her inclusion.

"The Scarlet Letter," by Hugues Merle, 1861

Text

The Scarlet Alphabetic character, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850.

Text Type

Literary Fiction; novel; Romanticism

Text Complexity

Grades eleven-CCR complexity bands.

For more than data on text complexity come across these resource from achievethecore.org.

In the Text Analysis section, Tier 2 vocabulary words are defined in pop-ups, and Tier 3 words are explained in brackets.

Click here for standards and skills for this lesson.

10

Common Cadre State Standards

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9–10.ane (Cite evidence to support explicit and inferential references)
• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.nine–10.2 (Determine evolution of a theme over the class of a text…)
• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9–x.iii (Analyze how complex characters develop…)
• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9–x.4 (Pregnant of words and phrases… figurative and connotative…)

Instructor'south Note

When critics focus on the carmine A that Hester Prynne wears in The Scarlet Letter, they often concentrate on ferreting out the symbol's complex and contradictory meanings. This lesson takes some other tack: it explores not the alphabetic character'south meanings but rather an aspect of its office. Information technology is relatively piece of cake to say what the "token of her shame" does to Hester. Information technology isolates her from her neighbors; information technology intensifies her guilt; it kills her spirit, robs her of her beauty, subjects her to insult and ridicule, and inflicts deep pain and anguish. In light of all that, it is a claiming to say what the letter does for her.

This lesson argues that the letter of the alphabet, meant to exclude her from the Puritan community, functions ironically as the amanuensis of her inclusion. Information technology makes this case through a close reading of iii brief passages. The offset illustrates how the wearing of the letter deepens Hester's emotional understanding. It allows her to sense moral weaknesses and failings beneath the outwardly unblemished virtue of her neighbors and teaches her that her sinfulness is not unique. The second illustrates how her punishment deepens her intellectual understanding. The isolation the letter imposes upon her gives her the disquisitional perspective to liberate herself from the oppressive orthodoxy of Puritan New England and provides a hopeful, optimistic vision the transcends the grim theology of Boston's magistrates and divines. The 3rd passage shows how these emotional and intellectual qualities combine to brand her, upon returning to her remote cottage, the customs's sought-after advisor and comforter. Non only can she lend a sympathetic ear to the woes of her neighbors, particularly women, but she can likewise instill hope with a vision of a brighter futurity. By forcing her to contemplate daily the reality of sin and by leading her to question the harsh morality of Puritanism, the crimson letter bestows upon her the emotional and intellectual depth that brings Boston'due south troubled and perplexed to her door.

This lesson is divided into two parts, both accessible below. The teacher's guide includes a background note, an exercise that allows students to explore vocabulary in context, and the text analysis with answers to the shut reading questions. The student version, an interactive PDF, includes all of the above, except for the answers to the close reading questions.

Instructor'southward Guide

Background

Groundwork Questions

1. What kind of text are we dealing with?
2. When was it written?
3. Who wrote it?
4. For what audience was it intended?
5. For what purpose was information technology written?

For symbol hunters, reading Nathaniel Hawthorne's novels and brusque stories is like going on a grand safari. On virtually every page a big, inviting target lumbers into view. What does the pink ribbon mean in "Immature Goodman Brown," or the plant and the fountain in "Rappaccini'due south Daughter," or Georgiana's blemish in "The Birthmark"? The biggest Hawthorne trophy is that first-class red A Hester Prynne wears on her dress in The Cherry-red Letter. Critics take devoted a lot of fourth dimension and ink to ferreting out all the meanings of that complex and contradictory symbol. Perchance your instructor has asked you to join that hunt. Here's a hint: Hawthorne suggests near all of the A's meanings early in the novel when he introduces Hester as she emerges from jail.

In this lesson nosotros are not going to concentrate on what the A means. Rather, we are going to consider what it does. Clearly, it does a lot to Hester. It exiles her and Pearl to a lonely existence in a remote cottage. It subjects her to malice, scorn, and insult. In a thousand means, the narrator tells us, "did she feel the innumerable throbs of anguish that had been so cunningly contrived for her by the undying, ever-active sentence of the Puritan tribunal." The "crimson-hot make" consumes the joy and grace of her personality and even works a "sorry transformation" on her beauty.

Just does the A doing anything for Hester?

Really, information technology does. Hester could relieve some of the suffering inflicted past the wearing of the A simply past leaving Boston. No i is forcing her to stay. Yet she remains, even though she knows that she will be the get-to example every time the topics of shame, guilt, and sin come up, as they often did in Puritan Boston. She stays, the narrator says, because an "irresistible" feeling binds her to the "spot where… [a] smashing… event has given the color to" her life. Moreover, "there dwelt" in Boston "1 with whom she deemed herself connected in a wedlock." While these may take been her existent reasons for remaining, she, according to the narrator, half deludes herself into thinking that by enduring "the torture of her daily shame," she will "at length purge her soul." For whatever reasons, Hester feels spring to the scene of her sin. Afterwards Dimmesdale and Chillingworth die, she does go out, merely to return years later to take up again "her long-forsaken shame." She moves back into her cottage, but at present, instead of being isolated in that location, she is embraced by the community as a counsellor and comforter to the sorrowful and perplexed. Ironically, it is the scarlet A, the symbol of her exclusion, that enables her to fill up that function. Just how it does that is the subject of this lesson.

Text Analysis

Excerpt one, from Chapter V: Hester at her Needle

Close Reading Questions

Activity: Vocabulary
Learn definitions past exploring how words are used in context.

1. To what is the narrator referring when he mentions "the piddling earth" with which Hester is "outwardly connected"?
He is referring to the Puritan community.

ii. "Walking to and fro, with those lone footsteps, in the lilliputian world with which she was outwardly connected" — what do those lines advise almost Hester and about her relationship to the Puritan community?
The pacing "to and fro" suggests she is given to deep, perhaps compulsive, thought. The "lonely footsteps" propose the isolation in which she lives. That she is only "outwardly" continued to the Puritan customs suggests that inwardly, ie. emotionally and intellectually, she is alienated from it. As we shall encounter in the assay of excerpt 3, all of these attributes — the deep thinking, the isolation, and the alienation — will, in the cease, function ironically to integrate her into Puritan Boston.

3. With what "new sense" does the cherry-red letter endow Hester?
The sense to detect sin in the hearts of others.

iv. How does the narrator use the word "sympathetic"?
It is important for students to sympathize that the narrator uses "sympathetic" not in the colloquial sense of feeling pity for someone but rather in the sense of feeling with someone, sharing an emotional and intellectual bond.

5. What alternating explanations does the narrator offer to account for Hester's new sensation of the sins of others?
Information technology is either the work of Satan designed to undermine Hester's faith, or she senses that other people are sinners, too, because they, in fact, are.

6. Nosotros can restate the explanations the narrator poses as a question: Is Hester's sense that other people are sinners like herself a simulated perception planted in her mind past Satan, or is it true?

• How does Hester reply that question? She is not certain. She wants to aspect her intimations to the devil — "What evil thing is at hand?" — but, as we run across in the last sentence, she is struggling with the idea that others are really as guilty as she is.
• How does the narrator answer that question? He seems to believe that it is the devil's handiwork: "O Fiend… wouldst thou leave zippo… for this poor sinner to revere?"
• How does Hawthorne the author and we the readers answer that question? Both Hawthorne and we know that other people are sinners, like Hester.

7. Neither Hester nor the narrator understands her new perceptions. Ironically, as readers, we do: they are existent and true. Nosotros share the implied viewpoint of the author. Based on our viewpoint, what tin can nosotros say the scarlet letter has done for Hester?
Our viewpoint, shared with the author, enables us to see that her perceptions are accurate. Thus we know that, by showing her that her sinfulness is in no style unique, the letter has given her insight into homo nature. Information technology has deepened her emotional maturity and created a sympathetic bond betwixt her and her swain sinners. Equally nosotros shall encounter in the analysis of excerpt iii, this bond will exist an important chemical element in her reintegration into the Puritan community.

…
Walking to and fro, with those lonely footsteps, in the petty globe with which she was outwardly connected, information technology now and and then appeared to Hester, — if altogether fancy, information technology was even so also stiff to be resisted, — she felt or fancied, then, that the reddish letter had endowed her with a new sense. She shuddered to believe, all the same could not help believing, that it gave her a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts. She was terror-stricken by the revelations that were thus made. What were they? Could they be other than the insidious whispers of the bad affections [Satan], who would fain take persuaded the struggling woman, as yet only half his victim, that the outward guise of purity was just a prevarication, and that, if truth were everywhere to be shown, a carmine letter would blaze forth on many a bosom also Hester Prynne's? Or, must she receive those intimations — then obscure, yet then distinct — equally truth? In all her miserable experience, there was nothing else then awful and so loathsome as this sense. It perplexed, every bit well as shocked her, by the irreverent inopportuneness of the occasions that brought information technology into vivid action. Sometimes, the cerise infamy upon her chest would requite a sympathetic throb, as she passed near a venerable minister or magistrate, the model of piety and justice, to whom that age of antique reverence looked up, as to a mortal man in fellowship with angels. "What evil thing is at hand?" would Hester say to herself. Lifting her reluctant optics, there would exist nil man within the scope of view, salvage the class of this earthly saint! Again, a mystic sisterhood would contumaciously assert itself, every bit she met the sanctified pout of some matron, who, according to the rumor of all tongues, had kept common cold snow within her bosom throughout life. That unsunned snow in the matron's bosom, and the burning shame on Hester Prynne'due south, — what had the two in common? Or, over again, the electrical thrill would requite her warning, — "Behold, Hester, hither is a companion!" — and, looking up, she would detect the eyes of a young maiden glancing at the ruby-red alphabetic character, shyly and aside, and speedily averted, with a faint, chill carmine in her cheeks; as if her purity were somewhat sullied past that momentary glance. O Fiend, whose talisman was that fatal symbol, wouldst thou leave nothing, whether in youth or age, for this poor sinner to revere? — Such loss of faith is always one of the saddest results of sin. Be it accustomed every bit a proof that all was not corrupt in this poor victim of her own frailty, and man's hard law, that Hester Prynne yet struggled to believe that no young man-mortal was guilty like herself.

Excerpt two, from Affiliate XIII: Another View of Hester

Close Reading Questions

viii. In the commencement sentence the narrator explains that Hester's position in society rather than the actual letter itself had a "powerful and peculiar" effect on her mind. How would you characterize her position in the society of Boston?
She is an outcast, forced to exist on the margin of Boston club. She is solitary, aware that she cannot depend on her neighbors and aware, too, that she volition never again be fully a part of her community.

9. What does the narrator mean when he says Hester "bandage away the fragment of a broken chain"?
He means that Hester wants no connection with the society that has exiled her. The connection, the "chain," is broken, and she wants no vestige, no "fragment," of information technology in her life. She has declared her independence from Puritan society.

ten. How has Hester's position in social club affected her?
It has acquired her emotional life to wane and her intellectual life to get more vigorous.

11. How would you characterize Hester's new intellectual life?
Her thinking has become liberated from the oppressive orthodoxy of Puritanism: "The world's police was no law for her mind."

12. The story is set up in the 1640s. Thus when the narrator refers to the assuming, speculative, revolutionary age whose spirit comes to Hester from "the other side of the Atlantic," he is referring to such developments as the works of French philosopher Rene Descartes, published in the 1630s and 40s, that shook the foundations of Western thought, and the advancement of the scientific revolution begun in the early decades of the 1600s that challenged God-centered explanations of natural phenomena. Why would the Puritan forefathers have considered speculating on the ideas of such an age "a deadlier crime" than infidelity?
Adultery strikes at the social and moral society of the Puritan community, which is serious enough. Yet, the broad-ranging, speculative thought in which Hester engages questions "the whole arrangement of ancient prejudice [and]… principle." In other words, it challenges the very intellectual and theological foundations of Puritan society, a far more grave threat to say-so than sexual transgressions. Moreover, infidelity can exist discovered, specially if a child results from the human relationship, and then tin can be dealt with publicly. Heretical thought, on the other paw, is a individual "sin," easily hidden, and insidious in the "harm" it can do organized religion.

xiii. The narrator does not judge Hester's intellectual rebellion. He simply tells us that information technology would identify her in danger if it were known to her neighbors. How are we as readers to sympathize Hester's new style of thinking? Is it sinful?
Hawthorne's portrayal of Puritan club is decidedly unsympathetic. Thus nearly anything that would evangelize ane of its victims from its oppressive orthodoxy is to be welcomed. Hester's intellectual liberation is not a sin. Information technology is a triumph.

fourteen. On the footing of this passage, what has the scarlet A done for Hester?
Past placing her in lone isolation beyond the purview of the enforcers of orthodoxy, the letter has opened for her the intellectual space she needs to liberate her mind and transcend the oppressive world view of Puritan New England. Equally we shall see in the analysis of excerpt 3, this critical perspective will also be an chemical element in her integration into the Puritan community.

…
The effect of the symbol — or rather, of the position in respect to society that was indicated by information technology — on the heed of Hester Prynne herself, was powerful and peculiar.
…
Much of the marble coldness of Hester's impression [the manner she appeared to others] was to be attributed to the circumstance that her life had turned, in a corking measure, from passion and feeling, to idea. Standing alone in the world, — lonely, every bit to whatever dependence on guild, and with piffling Pearl to be guided and protected, — alone, and hopeless of retrieving her position, fifty-fifty had she not scorned to consider it desirable, — she cast abroad the fragment of a cleaved chain. The world's constabulary was no law for her heed. It was an age in which the human intellect, newly emancipated, had taken a more active and a wider range than for many centuries before. Men of the sword had overthrown nobles and kings. Men bolder than these had overthrown and rearranged — not really, simply within the sphere of theory, which was their most real abode — the whole system of ancient prejudice, wherewith was linked much of aboriginal principle. Hester Prynne imbibed this spirit. She causeless a freedom of speculation, then common enough on the other side of the Atlantic, but which our forefathers, had they known of it, would take held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the cherry alphabetic character. In her lonesome cottage, by the sea-shore, thoughts visited her, such as dared to enter no other dwelling in New England; shadowy guests, that would have been as perilous as demons to their entertainer, could they take been seen then much every bit knocking at her door.

Excerpt 3, from Chapter XXIV: Conclusion

Close Reading Questions

15. How does the meaning of the ruddy A change?
Instead of beingness a "stigma," inspiring "scorn and bitterness," it becomes a "type" or symbol of "awe" and "reverence." In other words the A goes from being something negative to something positive.

16. Why does the pregnant of the letter change?
The exemplary life Hester leads changes the community's mental attitude toward her and, in plow, its perception of the ruby A. The narrator describes this transformation in chapter XIII, "Some other View of Hester," in which he notes that she made no claims upon the community, ie. was "cocky-devoted," and ministered to those in need, ie. was "toilsome." In the eyes of the community, her behavior changes the letter from a "token… of… sin" to a symbol of her "good deeds." Presumably, she resumes her good deeds upon her render to Boston.

17. Why practise her neighbors seek her comfort and counsel when afflicted with "sorrows and perplexities"?
They come across in her an honest, selfless person, someone in whom they can confide without worrying that she volition plow their revelations into gossip for her own advantage. Moreover, suffering "mighty troubles" themselves, they see her equally one who has too suffered "mighty troubles," someone who would possess a "sympathetic knowledge" of their "subconscious sin." (See excerpt ane.)

eighteen. Why would women exist especially inclined to confide in her?
She, similar them, has endured the "trials of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful passion." Her centre, too, has been "unyielded," given in requited love. Once again, they sense a sympathetic bond with her.

19. The sympathy and agreement her neighbors detect in her bring them to her door and make her function of the customs once again. In what fashion is this reintegration attributable to the scarlet A?
As nosotros noted in our analysis of excerpt one, the alphabetic character endows her with a sympathetic understanding of the failings of others, and it is that understanding that causes her neighbors to embrace her.

xx. In add-on to emotional comfort, Hester offers the women who come to her a vision of a new social order that will rearrange relationships between men and women to the benefit of both. In what way is this new vision attributable to the scarlet A?
To develop that vision, Hester needed the intellectual space to critique Puritan order and to imagine some other, more liberated way to live. As we noted in our analysis of excerpt 2, the isolation the letter imposed on her gave her that infinite and allowed her to transcend the orthodoxy of Puritan New England.

21. How has the scarlet A functioned equally the agent of Hester's inclusion into Puritan Boston, and why is that function ironic?
The crimson letter makes information technology possible for her to reach the emotional and intellectual depth that creates a role for herself inside the Puritan community. While she still lives physically on Boston'southward fringe, the letter has, in a sense, stretched the boondocks's purlieus to include her isolated cottage. Its function is ironic because information technology was intended to marking her equally one to exist shunned and exiled.

Simply there was a more existent life for Hester Prynne, here, in New England…. Here had been her sin; here, her sorrow; and hither was nevertheless to be her penitence. She had returned, therefore, and resumed, — of her own gratuitous volition, for non the sternest magistrate of that iron period would have imposed information technology, — resumed the symbol of which we have related so dark a tale. Never subsequently did it quit her bosom. But, in the lapse of the toilsome, thoughtful, and cocky-devoted years that fabricated up Hester's life, the scarlet letter of the alphabet ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world's scorn and bitterness, and became a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence as well. And, every bit Hester Prynne had no selfish ends, nor lived in whatever mensurate for her own profit and enjoyment, people brought all their sorrows and perplexities, and besought her counsel, as one who had herself gone through a mighty trouble. Women, more particularly, — in the continually recurring trials of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful passion, — or with the dreary burden of a heart unyielded, considering unvalued and unsought, — came to Hester's cottage, enervating why they were so wretched, and what the remedy! Hester comforted and counselled them, as all-time she might. She assured them, too, of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own fourth dimension, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and adult female on a surer ground of common happiness. Before in life, Hester had vainly imagined that she herself might be the destined prophetess, but had long since recognized the impossibility that any mission of divine and mysterious truth should be confided to a adult female stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or even burdened with a life-long sorrow. The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed, just lofty, pure, and cute; and wise; moreover, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy; and showing how sacred love should make united states of america happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such an end!

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Follow-Up Assignment

As we have seen in The Ruddy Letter, seventeenth-century Puritan New England enforced private morality through public shaming. We might call up that such penalisation is a thing of the past, but, in fact, public shaming has been making a comeback in contempo years. In 2013, for example, a guess in Cleveland, Ohio, sentenced a man who threatened two law officers to stand on a street corner several hours a day with a sign around his neck that non but apologized to the policemen but also proclaimed the human being to be an idiot. Judges who have doled out such punishments argue that they are an efficient and inexpensive way to deal with depression-level law-breaking. Critics maintain that they practice not address the causes of criminal behavior. Do you call back public shaming should become a standard punishment for lawbreakers in our society? Write an essay defending your position.

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Vocabulary Pop-Ups

• potent: strong
• endowed: given
• insidious: subtly harmful
• fain: gladly
• guise: appearance
• intimations: hints
• obscure: faint
• loathsome: icky
• perplexed: confused
• inopportuneness: inappropriateness
• vivid: lively
• infamy: evil thing
• venerable: respected
• reluctant: unwilling
• mystic: spiritual
• contumaciously: rebelliously
• sanctified: blessed
• talisman: sign
• frailty: weakness

• scorned: rejected
• abode: dwelling place
• imbibed: drank in
• stigmatized: fabricated shameful
• penitence: regret for misdeeds
• quit: leave
• lapse: passage of time
• toilsome: wearying
• stigma: sign of shame
• contemptuousness: disrespect
• type: symbol
• awe: fright
• perplexities: confused thoughts
• besought: asked for
• recurring: repeating
• vainly: with excess pride
• ethereal: spiritual
• medium: means

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Source: https://americainclass.org/hesters-a-the-red-badge-of-wisdom/

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