Guilt in the wilderness

It was in 1850 that Nathanial Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter, his fictional reconstruction of certain events two centuries earlier in a primitive Boston that was then little more than a village. He based his novel, or "romance" as he called it, on a mysterious letter "A" made of cloth and a bunch of old papers and documents, all of which he uncovered in the Salem Custom House where he was employed, unhappily, as Surveyer of the Revenue.

The Scarlet Letter is the sort of book you read in school, and, in fact, I last read it when I was a college sophomore. But this past week, I saw Intiman Theatre's dramatization of the story, and was both enticed and puzzled into re-reading the book. Enticed, because the play nicely evoked with spare staging the atmosphere of Puritan Massachusetts, and recalled to mind the mysterious spiritual and psychological world inhabited by its inhabitants. Puzzled, because the climactic scene in Intiman's play was the Rev. Dimmesdale's dying speech from the same scaffold where Hester had received her "A" seven years earlier, a speech in which he essentially told his Puritan audience that nothing but love matters, that only love survives death, and that the moral rules they found so important to their lives were nothing more than meaningless and hurtful man-made restraints on love, rules that would die with the flesh.

To paraphrase, as I recall Dimmesdale's speech from the play, love between two human beings is always good; no one should ever tell another person who to love or not love. Really? This theme sounds shiny, modern and contemporary, but it doesn't sound like a speech that would come from the mouth of a clergyman who was overwhelmed with a sense of guilt -- or from anyone else, for that matter -- in the Boston of the 1640's. And more to the point, I suppose, it doesn't even sound like something a well-received author would have written in the America of 1850 -- not even Hawthorne, who often surprises one with his modern "feel," and with his fascination for human psychology and historical romanticism.

So I sat down and re-read The Scarlet Letter. And I liked it very much! The Scarlet Letter, like so many "classics," is really too good a book to waste on college kids who are frantically trying to absorb information to regurgitate back on examinations. The book's sense of the Puritan world as a very alien society, but one populated by human types common to every era, is there, just as I recalled. Also conveyed are: The feel of a society whose primary goal, at least nominally, is the salvation of souls rather than business and entertainment. Life in a small theocratic town (representing Christian civilization) surrounded by a vast primeval forest (representing heathenism, witches, and the Devil and his worshippers). The daily preoccupation with sin, guilt, repentance, forgiveness. One's daily closeness to heaven and hell.

What I didn't find was a sense by anyone -- including Hester Prynne (the wearer of the scarlet letter) or her guilty, one-time lover, Rev. Dimmesdale -- that sin is merely an illusion, that actions don't have consequences, or that love necessarily conquers all.

Rev. Dimmesdale gives his final speech on the scaffold, all right, confessing his long-secret liaison with Hester -- just as as he does in the play. But in the book, the speech did not represent a joyful shout of triumph over conventional morality, but a hard-won defeat of Hester's betrayed husband, a veritable fiend who had sought to secure Dimmesdale's ultimate damnation as his cruel revenge, and -- more critically -- Dimmesdale's healing end to his seven years of hypocrisy and his fearful hope for -- but hardly certainty of -- final salvation.

His speech ended, Dimmesdale gives his final farewell to Hester and their little daughter. And he then dies, his soul perhaps saved but his body consumed by his years of concealed guilt, leaving his survivors to make their way in life as best they can.

The Scarlet Letter may not immediately appeal to our modern tastes. Lots of talk about Satan, perhaps, but no romantically inclined vampires or werewolves. But it's an absorbing read, a good story, and a dramatic picture of the Puritan society that contributed to the birth of our present civilization.