The Scarlet Letter: Chapter 3
Scarlet Letter: Chapter 3
Chapter 3: The Recognition
In Chapter 3, Hester recognizes her husband in the back of the crowd of people who are standing and watching her on the scaffold. It is the first time they have seen each other in several years, because he had sent her to the colony before him, and then when he was on his way to follow, his ship got shipwrecked and he was delayed.
The reader is given the information that this man is her husband, or at least her lover from her flashbacks to her past in the end of Chapter 2, because of the sentence (in Chapter 3), “one of this man’s shoulders rose higher than the other”, which Hester had previously described in her description of this man during her flashbacks or visions from her past in Chapter 2.
In Chapter 3, I thought that it was interesting when the narrator was given an opinion in the sentence… “He looked like the darkly engraved portraits which we see prefixed to old volumes of sermons; and had no more right than one of those portraits would have, to step forth, as he now did, and meddle with a question of human guilt, passion, and anguish.”
The underlined line in this quotation shows that the narrator has an opinion about what is going on in the story, because he is outraged that the clergyman (John Wilson) was meddling in business which he had no right to (in the narrator’s opinion).
In the sentence on page 59: “him who tempted you to this grievous fall” I got more of an understanding that Hester was not blamed for the whole affair of adultery, but she became pregnant, and the people in the town were able to identify her as having committed adultery. In this sentence, it is displayed that the town and the community does not just believe that Hester made the choice to commit adultery, and her partner in this sin was not guilty of sinning, but rather, they were able to identify her of committing the act because she became pregnant as a result and her partner, on the other hand, was unidentified and Hester refused to speak his name.
Later on in the chapter, Reverend Dimmesdale, the man who committed adultery with Hester is forced to preach to her and tell her to speak the name of he who sinned with her, which is actually him. I thought this passage was very cleverly written by the author (Hawthorne) in that, if I had not known that Dimmesdale was the man who sinned with Hester ahead of time, I do not think I would have been able to pick out the subtle clues about Hester and Dimmesdale which point to the fact that Dimmesdale was in fact the person who committed adultery with Hester. Little things like the way that Dimmesdale passionately talks to Hester and the fact that he is very nervous and he hesitates to talk to her about her crime and speaking the name of he who committed the crime with her, and also, his reaction of relief and happiness at the fact that she would not speak the man’s name, point out the fact that Dimmesdale is, in fact, the person who sinned with Hester.
At the end of Chapter 3, there are two main sentences that describe the symbolic resonance of the scarlet letter:
“seemed to derive its scarlet hue from the flames of the internal pit”
This sentence suggests that, not only does the scarlet letter represent sin itself, as well as the result of committing a sin, but it is also apparent in this sentence that the scarlet letter represents hell and damnation to hell, which, in a Puritan society, is basically the worst thing that can possibly happen to anyone, and everyone (in a Puritan community) works hard to achieve the exact opposite of that, which is salvation. This sentence gives the scarlet letter new meaning as a symbol in the story, because to longer does it represent sin and shame, but it represents hell itself, and damnation to hell is the worst thing that can happen to someone in a Puritan society.
“the scarlet letter threw a lurid gleam along the dark passage-way of the interior.”
This sentence does not necessarily bring new resonance to the scarlet letter, to the extent that the previous sentence does, but it definitely gives it a new meaning in that it makes it more powerful. Not only does it represent sin and hell, but it also glows with power and it almost spreads its sin and power through the prison. This sentence gives me a vivid picture of the scene that it describes, the idea of the scarlet letter glowing down a dark hallway. I think this sentence displays an example of the imagery that is used by Hawthorne to create vivid images in the readers mind.
