The Scarlet Letter

Hester Prynne's term of confinement was now at an end. Her

prison-door was thrown open, and she came forth into the

sunshine, which, falling on all alike, seemed, to her sick and

morbid heart, as if meant for no other purpose than to reveal

the scarlet letter on her breast. Perhaps there was a more real

torture in her first unattended footsteps from the threshold of

the prison than even in the procession and spectacle that have

been described, where she was made the common infamy, at which

all mankind was summoned to point its finger. Then, she was

supported by an unnatural tension of the nerves, and by all the

combative energy of her character, which enabled her to convert

the scene into a kind of lurid triumph. It was, moreover, a

separate and insulated event, to occur but once in her lifetime,

and to meet which, therefore, reckless of economy, she might

call up the vital strength that would have sufficed for many

quiet years.

The very law that condemned her--a giant of stern

features but with vigour to support, as well as to annihilate,

in his iron arm--had held her up through the terrible ordeal of

her ignominy. But now, with this unattended walk from her prison

door, began the daily custom; and she must either sustain and

carry it forward by the ordinary resources of her nature, or

sink beneath it. She could no longer borrow from the future to

help her through the present grief. Tomorrow would bring its own

trial with it; so would the next day, and so would the next:

each its own trial, and yet the very same that was now so

unutterably grievous to be borne. The days of the far-off future

would toil onward, still with the same burden for her to take

up, and bear along with her, but never to fling down; for the

accumulating days and added years would pile up their misery

upon the heap of shame. Throughout them all, giving up her

individuality, she would become the general symbol at which the

preacher and moralist might point, and in which they might

vivify and embody their images of woman's frailty and sinful

passion. Thus the young and pure would be taught to look at her,

with the scarlet letter flaming on her breast--at her, the child

of honourable parents--at her, the mother of a babe that would

hereafter be a woman--at her, who had once been innocent--as the

figure, the body, the reality of sin. And over her grave, the

infamy that she must carry thither would be her only monument.

It may seem marvellous that, with the world before her--kept by

no restrictive clause of her condemnation within the limits of

the Puritan settlement, so remote and so obscure--free to return

to her birth-place, or to any other European land, and there

hide her character and identity under a new exterior, as

completely as if emerging into another state of being--and

having also the passes of the dark, inscrutable forest open to

her, where the wildness of her nature might assimilate itself

with a people whose customs and life were alien from the law

that had condemned her--it may seem marvellous that this woman

should still call that place her home, where, and where only,

she must needs be the type of shame. But there is a fatality, a

feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of

doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger

around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and

marked event has given the colour to their lifetime; and, still

the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it. Her

sin, her ignominy, were the roots which she had struck into the

soil. It was as if a new birth, with stronger assimilations than

the first, had converted the forest-land, still so uncongenial

to every other pilgrim and wanderer, into Hester Prynne's wild

and dreary, but life-long home. All other scenes of earth--even

that village of rural England, where happy infancy and stainless

maidenhood seemed yet to be in her mother's keeping, like

garments put off long ago--were foreign to her, in comparison.

The chain that bound her here was of iron links, and galling to

her inmost soul, but could never be broken.