Be true! Be true! Be true!
The phrase "Be true! Be true! Be true!" is the final moral verdict of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, delivered by the narrator in the Conclusion as the single sentence extracted from the "poor minister's miserable experience." It commands an absolute fidelity of self-revelation: "Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!" This injunction is the novel's ethical climax, the principle that the entire narrative has been designed to prove through the contrasted fates of its three central characters.
Origin and Context
The words appear in the penultimate paragraph of the Conclusion, after the narrator has reviewed the conflicting accounts of what was witnessed on the scaffold. Some spectators denied that any mark existed on Dimmesdale's breast, preferring to interpret his dying act as a parable of human unworthiness rather than a confession of literal sin. Against this charitable revision, the narrator asserts the authority of "a manuscript of old date, drawn up from the verbal testimony of individuals" that confirms the view taken in the foregoing pages. It is from this manuscript tradition—the same that records Hester Prynne's story—that the moral is drawn. The narrator does not claim the maxim as his own invention; he presents it as the meaning that "presses upon us" from the minister's experience, as if the tale itself, rather than the teller, has generated the imperative.
The Contrast with Dimmesdale's Hypocrisy
The command to "Be true!" gains its force from the seven-year deception that has consumed Arthur Dimmesdale. He has stood before his congregation as a "miracle of holiness," his voice "tremulously sweet, rich, deep, and broken," while knowing himself to be "utterly a pollution and a lie." His public confessions—declaring himself "altogether vile, a viler companion of the vilest, the worst of sinners"—are heard by his flock as evidence of his exceptional sanctity, not as the literal truth they are. The narrator observes that the minister "had spoken the very truth, and transformed it into the veriest falsehood." This paradox is the disease that the maxim is meant to cure: a truth uttered in a context that guarantees it will be misunderstood is no truth at all. Dimmesdale's hand over his heart, the gesture that becomes his involuntary signature, is the physical emblem of this failed truth-telling—a secret that announces itself only by being concealed.
Hester's Alternative: The Discipline of the Scarlet Letter
Hester Prynne, by contrast, lives under the discipline of the scarlet letter, which the narrator describes as having "disciplined her to truth, though it be the truth of red-hot iron entering into the soul." She cannot hide; the letter is "the general symbol at which the preacher and moralist might point." Yet this enforced openness, however cruel, spares her the minister's particular agony. When she meets Dimmesdale in the forest, she tells him: "What we did had a consecration of its own." She has not lied about the central fact of her life. The narrator notes that "in all the seven bygone years, Hester Prynne had never before been false to the symbol on her bosom"—until, in that same forest interview, she evades Pearl's question about the letter's meaning by calling it mere gold thread. The moment she lies, the talisman of her guardian spirit seems to forsake her. The maxim thus applies to her as well: even the woman who wears her shame openly can fail the test of truth.
The Maxim as a Structural Principle
The imperative "Be true!" is not merely a moral tag but a structural principle that governs the novel's plot. Every major crisis arises from a failure of truth-telling. Hester's initial silence about her partner in sin sets the entire machinery of concealment in motion. Roger Chillingworth's decision to hide his identity—"to withdraw his name from the roll of mankind"—transforms him from a wronged husband into a fiend. Dimmesdale's refusal to confess turns his life into a "life of ghastly emptiness." The narrator's own position as editor of Surveyor Pue's manuscript, insisting on "the authenticity of the outline" while freely inventing motives and passions, mirrors the same tension: the story itself is a negotiation between what is known and what is imagined. The maxim, then, is the novel's answer to its own epistemological problem—how to live when the whole truth can never be fully told.
The Ending and the Unfinished Work of Truth
After Dimmesdale's death, Hester returns to New England of her own free will and resumes the scarlet letter, though "not the sternest magistrate of that iron period would have imposed it." She takes up the symbol again as a freely chosen act of truth-telling, not as a punishment. The letter ceases to be a stigma and becomes "a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence too." Women come to her cottage with their sorrows, and she counsels them, assuring them of her belief that "at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness." The maxim "Be true!" thus points forward to a revelation that has not yet arrived. Hester herself, the narrator says, had once imagined she might be the "destined prophetess" of this new truth, but recognized the impossibility that such a mission could be confided to "a woman stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or even burdened with a life-long sorrow." The command to be true is therefore both the novel's final word and an acknowledgment that the full truth—the one that would redeem the relation between men and women—remains to be spoken by someone else, in some other time.
