The Scarlet Letter

"Like many people, I had read The Scarlet Letter as a tragic love story and a cautionary tale about the wages of sin. Hester Prynne wears the scarlet A after her pregnancy exposes her “lawless passion” – her love affair with the minister Arthur Dimmesdale. When her husband Roger Prynne shows up (after having been presumed drowned at sea), he conceals his identity so as not to be shamed as the husband of a “faithless woman”. Calling himself Roger Chillingworth, he threatens Hester that if she exposes him he will expose her lover, whom he sets out to discover and destroy. When I reread The Scarlet Letter in the midst of my research with girls and women, I discovered a far more radical book. I hadn’t noticed that the word “patriarchy” runs through the novel – “patriarchal personage”, “patriarchal privilege”, “patriarchal deacon”, along with a scathing depiction of patriarchs in the opening chapter. The love story is beset with contradictions that continue to afflict American society: The tension between a radical Protestant vision of an unmediated relationship with God (who can be worshipped by anyone, anywhere – at home, in the forest, as well as in church) and the existence of an all-male clerical hierarchy; between the vision of a democratic society – a shining city on the hill – and the continuation of patriarchal privilege and power. I hadn’t recognised Hester as a resister. Yet midway through the novel (where the word “adultery” is never mentioned), we are told that many people said that the A meant “Able; so strong was Hester Prynne with a woman’s strength”. Living outside the framework of Puritanism, Hester sees the frame. With “a mind of native courage and activity”, she realises that the Puritan settlement was once a forest floor that, built up in one way, could be “torn down and built up anew”. She sees that “very nature of the opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit, which has become like nature”, could be “essentially modified”, and that of woman, too. What had been taken as God-given was a human construction; what was construed as nature were habits that had come to seem “like nature”. Hester is a visionary. In the final chapter, she articulates her “firm belief” that at some future time, when the world has grown ripe for it, “a new truth would be revealed in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness”. It struck me that this might be that time. When Tina Packer, then artistic director of Shakespeare & Company, asked me to turn the novel into a play, I jumped at the chance. My son Jonathan joined me in writing the play, which we are now turning into a libretto for Pearl , an opera where we tell the story from the point of view of Hester’s daughter grown up. In the novel, seven-year-old Pearl sees what most of the adults (the Goodwives and the Puritans) cannot discern – the connection between her mother and the minister. She’s like the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes and also many of the children in my research. The Scarlet Letter is a tragic love story, but it’s also a story about resistance and transformation. Hester cannot free her lover from the grip of patriarchy – Dimmesdale, a man of nature (of dale) becomes dim, just as Chillingworth, a man of worth, becomes chilling. But she does free her daughter to live outside Puritanism."