The Scarlet Letter: A Romance -Section 05 - The Market-Place

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Dream Ario Books presents section five of The Scarlet Letter
by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Chapter two The market place, the grass
plot before the jail in Prison Lane, on a certain
summer morning not less than two centuries ago, was occupied
by a pretty large number of the inhabitants of Boston,

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all with their eyes intently fastened on the iron clamped
oaken door. Amongst any other population or at a later
period in the history of New England, the grim rigidity
that petrified the bearded physiognomies of these good people would
have augured some awful business in hand. It could have
betokened nothing short of the anticipated execution of some noted culprit,

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on whom the sentence of a legal tribunal had but
confirmed the verdict of public sentiment. But in that early
severity of the Puritan character, an inference of this kind
could not so indubitably be drawn. It might be that
a sluggish bond servant, or an undutiful child whom his
parents had given over to the civil authority was to

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be corrected at the whipping post. It might be that
an Antinomian, a Quaker, or other heterodox religionist was to
be scourged out of the town, or an idle or
vagrant Indian whom the white man's firewater had made riotous
about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into
the shadow of the forest. It might be too that

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a witch like old Mistress Hibbins, the bitter tempered widow
of the magistrate, was to die upon the gallows. In
either case, there was very much the same solemnity of
demeanor on the part of the spectators as befitted a
people among whom religion and law were almost identical, and
in whose character both were so thoroughly interfused that the

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mildest and severest acts of public discipline were alike made
venerable and awful. Meager, indeed, and cold was the sympathy
that a transgressor might look for from such bystanders as
the scaffold. On the other hand, a penalty, which in
our days would infer a degree of mocking, infamy and ridicule,

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might then be invested with almost as stern a dignity
as the punishment of death itself. It was a circumstance
to be noted on the summer morning, when our story
begins its course, that the women, of whom there were
several in the crowd, appeared to take a peculiar interest
in whatever penal infliction might be expected to ensue. The

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age had not so much refinement that any sense of
impropriety restrained the wearers of petticoat and farthingale from stepping
forth into the public ways and wedging their not unsubstantial persons,
if occasion were into the throng nearest of the scaffold
at an execution. Morally well as materially, there was a

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course of fiber in those wives and maidens of old
English birth and breeding than in their fair descendants, separated
from them by a series of six or seven generations.
Four throughout that chain of ancestry, every successive mother had
transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate

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and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not
character of less force and solidity than her own. The
women who were now standing about the prison door stood
within less than half a century of the period when
the man like Elizabeth had been the not altogether unsuitable
representative of the sex. They were her countrywomen and the

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beef and ale of their native land, with a moral diet,
not a whit more refined, entered largely into their composition.
The bright morning sun therefore shone on broad shoulders and
well developed busts, and on round and ruddy cheeks that
had ripened in the far off island, and had hardly
yet grown paler or thinner in the atmosphere of New England.

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There was moreover, a boldness and rotundity of speech among
these matrons, as most of them seemed to be, that
would startle us at the present day, whether in respect
to its purport or its volume of tone. Good wives,
said a hard featured dame of fifty, I'll tell ye
a piece of my mind. It would be greatly for

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the public behoof if we women, being of maturer age
and church members in good repute, should have the handling
of such malefactresses as this Hester Prynne. What think ye gossips?
If the hussy stood up for judgment before us five
that are now here and are not together, would she
come off with such a sentence as the worshipful magistrates

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have awarded Marry I trow not people say? Said another
that the Reverend Master Dimmesdale, a godly pastor, takes it
very grievously to heart that such a scandal should have
come upon his congregation. The magistrates are god fearing gentleman,
but merciful over much. That is a truth, added a

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third autumnal matron. At the very least they should have
put the brand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne's forehead.
Madame Hester would have winced at that, I warrant me.
But she the naughty baggage. Little will she care what
they put upon the bodice of her gown. Why look you,
She may cover it with a brooch or suchlike heathenish adornment,

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and so walk the streets as brave as ever. Ah,
but interposed more softly a young wife holding a child
by the hand. Let her cover the mark as she will.
The pang of it will always be in her heart.
What do we talk of marks and brands, whether on
the bodice of her gown or the flesh of her forehead?

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Cried another female, the ugliest as well as the most
pitiless of these self constituted judges. This woman has brought
shame upon us all and ought to die. Is there
not law for it? Truly? There is both in the
scripture and the statute book. Then let the magistrates, who
have made it of no effect, thank themselves if their

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own wives and daughters go astray. Mercy on us, good wife,
exclaimed a man in the crowd. Is there no virtue
in woman save what springs from a wholesome fear of
the gallows? That is the hardest word. Yet Hush now, gossips,
for the lock is turning in the prison door, and
here comes Mistress Prynne herself, the door of the jail

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being flung open from within. There appeared, in the first place,
like a black shadow emerging into sunshine, the grim and
grisly presence of the town beadle. With a sword by
his side and his staff of office in his hand.
This personage prefigured and represented, in his aspect the whole

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dismal severity of the Puritanic code of law, which it
was his business to administer in its final and closest
application to the offender. Stretching forth the official staff in
his left hand, he laid his right upon the shoulder
of a young woman, whom he thus drew forward, until
on the threshold of the prison door, she repelled him

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by an action marked with natural dignity and force of character,
and stepped into the open air, as if by her
own free will. She bore in her arms a child,
a baby of some three months old, who winked and
turned aside its little face from the too vivid light
of day, because its existence heretofore had brought it acquaintance

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only with the gray twilight of a dungeon or other
darksome apartment of the prison. When the young woman, the
mother of this child, stood fully revealed before the crowd,
it seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the
infant closely to her bosom, not so much by an
impulse of motherly affection as that she might thereby conceal

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a certain token, which was wrought or fastened into her dress.
In a moment, however, wisely judging that one token of
her shame would but poorly serve to hide another, she
took the baby on her arm, and, with a burning
blush and yet a haughty smile and a glance that
would not be abashed, looked around at her townspeople and neighbors.

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On the breast of her gown in fine red cloth
surrounded with an elaborate embroidery, and fantastic flourishes of gold
thread appeared the letter A. It was so artistically done,
and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy,
that it had all the effect of a last and

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fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore, and which
was of a splendor in accordance with the tape of
the age, but greatly beyond what was allowed by the
sumptuary regulations of the colony. The young woman was tall,
with a figure of perfect elegance on a large scale.
She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it

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threw off the sunshine with a gleam, and a face, which,
besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion,
had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep
black eyes. She was ladylike, too, after the manner of
the feminine gentility of those days, characterized by a certain

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state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent and
indescribable grace which is now recognized as its indication, and
never had hester Prynne appeared more ladylike in the antique
interpretation of the term than as she issued from the prison.
Those who had before known her, and had expected to

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behold her dimmed and obscure, c ccured by a disastrous cloud,
were astonished and even startled to perceive how her beauty
shone out and made a halo of the misfortune and
ignominy in which she was enveloped. It may be true
that to a sensitive observer there was something exquisitely painful
in it. Her attire, which indeed she had wrought for

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the occasion in prison, and had modeled much after her
own fancy, seemed to express the attitude of her spirit,
the desperate recklessness of her mood, by its wild and
picturesque peculiarity. But the point which drew all eyes, and
as it were, transfigured the wearer, so that both men

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and women who had been familiarly acquainted with hester Prynne
were now impressed, as if they beheld her for the
first time. Was that scarlet letter so fantastically embroidered and
illuminated upon her bosom it had the effect of a spell,
taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity and

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enclosing her in a sphere by herself. She hath good
skill at her needle. That's certain remarked one of her
female spectators. But did ever a woman before this brazen
hussey contrive such a way of showing it? Why gossips,
What is it but to laugh in the faces of
our godly magistrates and make a pride out of what

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they worthy gentlemen meant for a punishment it were well
muttered the most iron visaged of the old dames. If
we stripped Madame Hester's rich gown off her dainty shoulders.
And as for the red letter which she hath stitched
so curiously, I'll bestow a rag of mine own rheumatic
flannel to make a fitter one. Oh, peace, neighbors, Peace,

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whispered their youngest companion. Do not let her hear you
not a stitch in that embroidered letter, but she has
felt it in her heart. Rim Beadle now made a
gesture with his staff, make way, good people, make way
in the King's name, cried he open a passage, And
I promise ye, Mistress Prynne, shall be set where man,

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woman and child may have a fair sight of her
brave apparel from this time till an hour past Meridian.
A blessing on the righteous colony of the Massachusetts, where
iniquity is dragged out into the sunshine. Come along, Madame Hester,
and show your scarlet letter in the market place. Elaine
was forthwith opened through the crowd of spectators, preceded by

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the beadle, and attended by an irregular procession of stern
browed men and unkindly visaged women. Hester Prynne set forth
towards the place appointed for her punishment. A crowd of
eager and curious schoolboys, understanding little of the matter in
hand except that it gave them a half holiday, ran
before her progress, turning their heads continually to stare into

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her face and at the winking baby in her arms,
and at the ignominious letter on her breast. It was
no great distance in those days from the prison door
to the market place, measured by the prisoner's experience. However,
it might be reckoned a journey of some length. For
haughty as her demeanor was, she perchance underwent an agony

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from every footstep of those that thronged to see her,
as if her heart had been flung into the street
for them all to spurn and trample upon. In our nature, however,
there is a provision alike marvelous and merciful, that the
sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures
by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that

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rankles after it with an almost serene deportment. Therefore, Hester
Prynne passed through this portion of her ordeal and came
to a sort of scaffold at the western extremity of
the market place. It stood nearly beneath the eaves of
Boston's earliest church, and appeared to be a fixture there.

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In fact, this scaffold constituted a portion of a penal machine, which, now,
for two or three generations past, has been merely historical
and traditionary among us, but was held in the old
time to be as effectual an agent in the promotion
of good citizenship as ever was the guillotine among the
terrorists of France. It was, in short, the platform of

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the pillory, and above it rose the framework of that
instrument of discipline, so fashioned as to confine the human
head in its tight grasp, and thus hold it up
to the public gaze. The very ideal of ignominy was
embodied and made manifest in this contrivance of wood and iron.
There can be no outrage, methinks, against our common nature,

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whatever be the delinquencies of the individual, no outrage more
flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his face
for shame, as it was the essence of this punishment
to do. In hester Prynne's instance, however, as not unfrequently
in other cases, her sentence bore that she should stand
a certain time upon the platform, but without undergoing that

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gripe around the neck and confinement of the head, the
proneness to which was the most devilish characteristic of this
ugly engine. Knowing well her part, she ascended a flight
of wooden steps, and was thus displayed to the surrounding
multitude at about the height of a man's shoulders above
the crowd. Had there been a papist among the crowd

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of Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful woman,
so picturesque in her attire and mean, and with the
infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of
the image of divine maternity, which so many illustrious painters
have vied with one another to represent something which should
remind him. Indeed, but only by contrast of that sin

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could image of sinless motherhood whose infant was to redeem
the world. Here there was the taint of deepest sin
in the most sacred quality of human life, working such
effect that the world was only the darker for this
woman's beauty, and the more lost for the infant that
she had borne. The scene was not without a mixture

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of awe, such as must always invest the spectacle of
guilt and shame in a fellow creature. Before society shall
have grown corrupt enough to smile instead of shuddering at it.
The witnesses of hester Prynne's disgrace had not yet passed
beyond their simplicity. They were stern enough to look upon
her death had that been the sentence, without a murmur

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at its severity, but had none of the heartlessness of
another social state, which would find only a theme for
jest and an exhibition like the present. Even had there
been a disposition to turn the matter into ridicule, it
must have been repressed and overpowered by the solemn presence
of men no less dignified than the governor and several

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of his counselors, a judge, a general, and the ministers
of the town, all of whom sat or stood in
a balcony of the meetinghouse, looking down upon the platform.
When such personages could constitute a part of the spectacle
without risking the majesty or reverence of rank and office,
it was safely to be inferred that the infliction of

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a legal sentence would have an earnest and effectual meaning. Accordingly,
the crowd was somber and grave. The unhappy culprit sustained
herself as best a woman might, under the heavy weight
of a thousand, unrelenting eyes, all fastened upon her and
concentrated at her bosom. It was almost intolerable to be

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borne of an impulsive and passionate nature. She had fortified
herself to encounter the stings and venomous stabs of public
contumerly wreeking itself in every variety of insult. But there
was a quality so much more terrible in the solemn
mood of the popular mind, that she longed rather to
behold all those rigid countenances contorted with scornful merriment, and

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herself the object. Had a roar of laughter burst from
the multitude, each man, each woman, each little shrill voiced child,
contributing their individual parts. Hester Prynne might have repaid them
all with a bitter and disdainful smile. But under the
leaden infliction which it was her doom to endure, she

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felt at moments as if she must needs shriek out
with the full power of her lungs and cast herself
from the scaffold down upon the ground, or else go
mad at once. Yet there were intervals when the whole
scene in which she was the most conspicuous object seemed
to vanish from her eyes, or at least glimmered indistinctly

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before them, like a mass of imperfectly shaped and spectral images.
Her mind, and especially her memory, was preternaturally active, and
kept bringing up other scenes than this roughly hewn street
of a little town on the edge of the western wilderness.
Other faces than were lowering upon her from beneath the

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brims of those steeple crowned hats. Reminiscences, the most trifling
and immaterial passages of infancy and school days, sports, childish quarrels,
and the little domestic traits of her maiden years came
swarming back upon her, intermingled with recollections of whatever was

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gravest in her subsequent life. One picture precisely as vivid
as another, as if all were of similar importance, or
all alike a play. Possibly it was an instinctive device
of her spirit to relieve itself by the exhibition of
these phantasmogoric forms from the cruel weight and hardness of

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the reality. Be that as it might. The scaffold of
the pillory was a point of view that revealed to
hester Prynne the entire track along which she had been
treading since her happy infancy. Standing on that miserable eminence,
she saw again her native village in Old England, and
her paternal home, a decayed house of gray stone, with

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a poverty stricken aspect, but retaining a half obliterated shield
of arms over the portal in token of antique gentility.
She saw her father's face with its bold brow and
reverend white beard that flowed over the old fashioned Elizabethan ruff.
Her mother's too, with the look of heedful and anxious love,

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which it always wore in her remembrance, and which even
since her death, had so often laid the impediment of
a gentle remonstrance in her daughter's pathway. She saw her
own face glowing with girlish beauty, and illuminating all the
interior of the dusky mirror in which she had been
wont to gaze at it. There she beheld another countenance

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of a man well stricken in years, a pale, thin,
scholarlike visage, with eyes dim and bleared by the lamp
light that had served them to pour over many ponderous books.
Yet those same bleared optics had a strange penetrating power
when it was their owner's purpose to read the human soul.

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This figure of the study and the cloister, as hester
Prynne's womanly fancy failed not to recall, was slightly deformed,
with the left shoulder a trifle higher than the right.
Next rose before her in memory's picture gallery, the intricate
and narrow thoroughfares, the tall gray houses, the huge cathedrals

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and the public edifices ancient in date and quaint in
architecture of a continental city, when new life had awaited her,
still in connection with the misshapen scholar, a new life
but feeding itself on time worn materials, like a tuft
of green moss on a crumbling wall. Lastly, in lieu

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of these shifting scenes, came back the rude market place
of the Puritan settlement, with all the townspeople assembled and
leveling their stern regards at Hester Prynne, Yes, at herself,
who stood on the scaffold of the pillory, an infant
on her arm, and the letter A in scarlet fantastically
embroidered with gold thread upon her bosom. Could it be true?

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She clutched the child so fiercely to her breast that
it sent forth a cry. She turned her eyes downward
at the scarlet letter, and even touched it with her
finger to assure herself that the infant and the shame
were real. Yes, these were her realities. All else had vanished.

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End of Section five Dream Audiobooks. Hopes you have enjoyed
this program.