The Scarlet Letter Chapters 13 - 18 Commentary

Commentary: Because of public and personal pressures, the central relationships change critically during these few weeks in 1649. Over the couse of seven years the community has largely forgiven Hester. Satisfied the scarlet letter has done its work, the magistrates think she might safely remove it.

The townspeople now see Hester far more graciously but no more fully than in the past. Interpreting her letter to mean "Able," they view it as a source of strength. Some even call her a saint because she cares constantly for the sick and the poor, refusing payment and barely acknowledging their thanks. In her charity Hester is Boston's best and truest Christian. In mind and spirit, though, she has become its greatest adversay, strengthened by everything she has endured. When she comtemplates the injustices she has suffered and that she sees all women suffer in a world designed by men, Hester's thoughts are at once courageous and heretical. The letter which isolates her is also her shield and teacher. She has become a stone-faced woman of no emotion. Her warm, tanned face in the past is now pale and marble-like. Hester is now a nun in the strictest order.

The Chapters six through eleven focused on Chillingworth's doctoring of Dimmesdale, in which, confined in the prison-like Puritan home, both men become increasingly consumed by their secret obsessions, increasingly sick. This section of the book focuses on Hester and her power to cure not only the physical ills of those in the community, but the spiritual afflictions of Chillingworth and Dimmesdale as well.

Hester holds herself responsible for the minister's shocking deterioration. First, she confronts her husband, Chillingworth, to say she will no longer keep his secret. but he has become a moral monstrosity, living only to torture Dimmesdale. Hester claims all four are trapped and lost. here Chillingworth for a moment sees himself as he once was, and for a moment we recover our sympathy for him. Hester suggests the cure, the way out of the maze: turning from revenge to forgiveness. But Chillingworth turns away from the possibility of redemption. Chlaiming that they are controlled by fate, Chillingworth rejects Hester's cure. Neither Hester's decision nor her despair can affect his vengefulness.

Leaving the doctor to search the ground for medicinal roots and grubs, Hester admits that "be it a sin or no, I hate the man." She decides she will break her promise and tell her lover that the doctor is her husband.

But as Hester challenged Chillingworth, Pearl challenges her mother to reveal the meaning of the scarlet letter. Although she asks like a relentless child, Pearl wants to hear the adult truth and this Hester refuses to utter. Enraged and tormented, she answers first with an obvious lie. Pearl continues her incessand yet telling questions about what the "A" means, and whether Hester has met the Man in Black who stops people in thw woods. We first see Dimmesdale, as a figure in black, painfully making way through woods glorious with sunlight. Hester comes to him as if in a dream; from Dimmesdale's perspective, we hear her voice intermingled with the sound of the brook, and see her image intermingled with the beauty of the woods.

Yet she is real and gradually draws him to speak openly in the shade of a large tree. Dimmesdale reveals to her that the awful hypocrisy of his life -- in which the more he is reverenced by the people of Boston, the more he is miserable within -- is killing him. Hester's life has been the exact opposite whereas Dimmesdale's garments cover what he really is, Hester's "A" proclaims it openly; whereas Dimmesdale has chosen to maintain the appearances of pious convention, and withered, Hester, ostracized and shunned by society, has been taught by solitude, and thrived.

Hester and Dimmesdale exchange confessions in the wilderness where they became lovers long ago. She puts an end to the only deception she is guilty of, by telling Dimmesdale the truth. Then, with all the power and honesty of her nature, Hester makes the case for life: to grant himself a future the minister must flee New England -- if not alone, then with Hester and Pearl. Undoing the scarlet letter, Hester says the past itself is just as easily undone. For a moment she is freed, made young and womanyly again. She takes off her hair covering. Dimmesdale yields to her plea, her beauty and her passion. But Pearl refuses to tolerate her mother's transformation. So, to appease her furious child and soothe her frightened lover, Hester puts the letter on again, feeling the weight of society upon her bosom.

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