"You Cannot Fix the Scarlet Letter on My Breast!": Women Reading, Writing, And Reshaping the Sexual Culture of Victorian America‪.‬

At the end of the nineteenth-century cautionary tale, The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne described the ultimate fate of the central characters of his novel. After a deathbed confession and reconciliation with little Pearl, the fruit of his illicit affair with Hester Prynne, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale dies and meets his maker. Deprived of the object of his anger, Roger Chillingworth, the cuckolded husband, loses his desire for revenge, and thus his reason to live, and quickly follows Dimmesdale into the grave. Hester soon after takes her leave from the site of her crime, only to return to New England years later and resume her role as moral outsider by voluntarily wearing the symbol of her shame, the scarlet A. In her later years, however, as Hawthorne noted, "the scarlet letter 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 too." In fact, Hester became a counselor to the local women who confessed the "sorrows and perplexities" they experienced because they, like she, had acted on their "sinful" passions or complained of the loneliness they felt because they were deprived of the opportunity to do so. They "came to Hester's cottage," as Hawthorne observed, "demanding why they were so wretched, and what the remedy!" Hester listened to their tales of emotional frustration and calmed their distress, assuring them "of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period ... a new truth would be revealed ... [that would] establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness." (1) In Hawthorne's hands, the scarlet A worn by Hester Prynne had two functions. It was a warning to Victorian society of the evils of hypocrisy and the destructive power of intolerance. It was also a vivid reminder to women of the consequences of sexual transgression. For in spite of her early hope that she would be the catalyst for this new emotional dispensation, Hawthorne gloomily concluded that the role of "angel and apostle of the coming revelation" would be reserved for a woman who is "lofty, pure, and beautiful," rather than one, like Prynne, who was "stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or even burdened with a life-long sorrow." (2)