The women think that the Magistrate's punishment for Hester Prynne is not harsh enough, "God-fearing gentlemen, but merciful over much". Hester went by herself from prison, she held her baby and realized that one token of shame cannot hide another, she is strong, proud, and defiant. Why does Chillingworth ask Hester to keep his identity a secret? He does not want to encounter the disgraces of the husband of a faithless woman.
But it may also be for other reasons. He does not want to hear all the talk about his wife being unfaithful. The Black Man is a euphemism for Satan in this book.
Hester considers the scarlet letter A to be the Black Man's mark, and Pearl wonders aloud if the Black Man left his brand on Dimmesdale's heart. Our narrator loves to compare Chillingworth to Satan as well. The usual punishment for adultery is death; however, the magistracy of Massachusetts decided not to sentence death to Hester because they felt that she was "strongly tempted to her fall" and that "her husband may be at the bottom of the sea.
As punishment, she has been sentenced to three hours on the scaffold and a lifetime of wearing the scarlet letter on her chest. The basic story line of the story is that Hester Prynne commits adultery with the minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, after she finds out that her husband is announced dead, since he was missing for seven years.
Her husband forbids her from telling anyone that they were married because he does not want to be taken for a fool. When chapter two begins, Hester Prynne has been found guilty of adultery. She has born a child of this liaison and is in prison with the baby, something horrifying by today's standards.
As part of her punishment, she must stand on the scaffolding and be viewed by the townspeople, shamed for her sin. Why does Hester agree to keep Chillingworth's identity a secret? She only accepts to do it perhaps out of fear, or because she knows that disclosing this information would make matters worse for everybody involved. Chillingworth has been living with the Indians in the wild. He places his fingers against his lip indicating to keep his identity and presence a secret.
Chillingworth assures Hester he will not harm her and takes partial blame by claiming he should not have married such a young woman expecting her to be faithful. She is required to wear a scarlet "A" on her dress when she is in front of the townspeople to shame her. The letter "A " stands for adulteress, although this is never said explicitly in the novel. When the husband sees Hester's shame, he asks a man in the crowd about her and is told the story of his wife's adultery.
In Puritan society, adultery was not seen merely as a matter between the two parties but as a breach of contract between those individuals and the community. Even if a husband wanted his adulterous wife to be saved, she could be sentenced to die as a result of the community's obligations to its moral and legal statutes. A Boston law provided for death as punishment the scaffold then was used only for executions, not the pillory , and in , Mary Latham and James Britton were reported in John Winthrop's journal to have been put to death for adultery.
But corporal punishment, or whipping, was the usual punishment in Puritan Massachusetts for adultery, signaling that the ultimate possible punishment offered by the Bible and the law was too harsh. Hawthorne's ancestor, Major John Hathorne, was magistrate in Salem in , and he ordered a woman named Hester Craford to be severely whipped in public after she gave birth to an illegitimate child.
Later, even these punishments subsided. A Plymouth law of called for the display of an A on the dress. Hawthorne recorded this case in his journal, and it became the subject of his story, "Endicott and the Red Cross," in which a Salem woman, required to wear the red letter A , added wonderful embroidery to it. Now, however, it seemed that the Puritan communities had found themselves in the difficult place of punishing adultery too leniently, because many found the embroidery of the A too light a sentence, but whipping and execution too harsh.
The Scarlet Letter offers a way of looking at adultery that would let people suffer appropriately for their own sins without forcing the society to worry about which punishment was proper, that is, redefining it as a private matter in which the society had no compelling interest to get involved. Again, the admonition of Jesus in the case of an adulteress, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone," had not become a guiding principle in the law pertaining to sexual acts.
But Hawthorne was moving minds to agree that if adultery was a crime, it was a crime of the heart that need not be punished by society, since it had its own consequences in the guilt, shame, and suffering accompanied by personal indiscretion.
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