The Prison Door and the Rose Bush
The prison door and the wild rose-bush together form the symbolic threshold of The Scarlet Letter, establishing the novel's central tension between the stern, unforgiving legal and moral order of Puritan society and the natural world's capacity for pity, beauty, and grace. The prison, an ugly edifice of iron and oak, represents the black flower of civilized society, while the rose-bush, rooted at its threshold, offers a fragile, fragrant token of Nature's kindness to the condemned. This symbolic pairing recurs throughout the narrative, linking the scaffold, the Governor's mansion, the forest, and the meteor-lit sky, and ultimately framing Hester Prynne's scarlet letter as a badge of shame that, like the rose, can be transformed into a symbol of compassion and counsel.
The Prison Door: The Black Flower of Civilization
The prison door is introduced in the novel's first chapter as a heavily timbered oak portal studded with iron spikes, set in a wooden edifice that is already, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of Boston, marked with weather-stains and other indications of age. The rust on its ponderous iron-work looks more antique than anything else in the New World, and the building itself seems never to have known a youthful era, as if it were as old as crime itself. Before this ugly edifice, between it and the wheel-track of the street, lies a grass-plot much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern, and other unsightly vegetation, which evidently finds something congenial in the soil that has so early borne the black flower of civilized society—a prison. The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule, the forefathers of Boston built the first prison-house somewhere in the vicinity of Cornhill almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground on Isaac Johnson's lot, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel. The prison door thus stands as the first institutional structure of the settlement, a grim necessity that precedes even the church in the ordering of society.
The Wild Rose-Bush: Nature's Token of Pity
On one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, grows a wild rose-bush, covered in the month of June with its delicate gems. This rose-bush might be imagined to offer its fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he goes in, and to the condemned criminal as he comes forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him. The narrator notes that the rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history, but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it, or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson as she entered the prison-door, the narrator declines to determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of the narrative, which is about to issue from that inauspicious portal, the narrator plucks one of its flowers and presents it to the reader, hoping it may serve to symbolize some sweet moral blossom that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.
Recurrence and Transformation of the Symbol
The prison door and the rose-bush do not remain isolated images; they recur and transform throughout the novel, linking key scenes and characters. The scaffold of the pillory, which stands at the western extremity of the market-place beneath the eaves of Boston's earliest church, is itself a penal machine that confines the human head in its tight grasp, holding it up to public gaze—the very ideal of ignominy embodied in wood and iron. When Hester Prynne emerges from the prison door, she steps onto this scaffold, and the rose-bush's promise of pity is tested against the crowd's grim rigidity. Later, when Pearl is asked who made her, she perversely answers that she was not made at all, but plucked by her mother off the bush of wild roses that grew by the prison-door—a phantasy probably suggested by the near proximity of Governor Bellingham's red roses and her recollection of the prison rose-bush. The Governor's mansion itself, with its glittering stucco and cabalistic figures, is a bright wonder that Pearl wants to strip of its sunshine, but Hester tells her she must gather her own sunshine. The forest, where Hester and Dimmesdale meet, is a moral wilderness imaged by the narrow, hemmed-in footpath, and the brook that runs through it babbles a melancholy tale, like the voice of a young child spending its infancy without playfulness. The meteor that lights up the sky during Dimmesdale's vigil is interpreted by the sexton as a portent of Governor Winthrop's translation to an angel, the letter A standing for Angel, while the minister himself sees it as a revelation of his own guilt. Even the herbs that Roger Chillingworth gathers from a grave in the burial-ground are said to typify some hideous secret buried with the dead man, and the black weeds that spring up out of a buried heart make manifest an outspoken crime. The scarlet letter itself, originally a badge of shame, becomes a symbol of Hester's calling as a Sister of Mercy, and the rose-bush's promise of pity is finally realized in Hester's role as a counselor to women in trouble, though the prison door remains the point of origin for her long penance.
The Prison Door and the Rose-Bush as Narrative Frame
The prison door and the rose-bush also function as a narrative frame, enclosing the story within the larger context of the Custom-House discovery. The narrator, while burrowing into the heaped-up rubbish in the Custom-House, finds a small package containing a scarlet letter—a capital A, each limb precisely three inches and a quarter in length, wrought with wonderful skill of needlework in a now forgotten art. This rag of scarlet cloth, much worn and faded, with traces of gold embroidery greatly frayed and defaced, is the very symbol that Hester Prynne wore. The narrator also finds a small roll of dingy paper containing a reasonably complete explanation of the whole affair, recorded by the old Surveyor, Jonathan Pue. The prison door and the rose-bush thus become the threshold not only of the story but of the narrator's own imaginative engagement with the past, as he brings his mouldy and moth-eaten lucubrations before the public. The rose-bush, plucked and presented to the reader, serves as a sweet moral blossom that may relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow, while the prison door remains the inauspicious portal from which the narrative issues. In the end, after many years, a new grave is delved near an old and sunken one in the burial-ground beside King's Chapel, and one tombstone serves for both, bearing a device: "On a field, sable, the letter A, gules." The prison door and the rose-bush, the black flower of civilization and the token of Nature's pity, are thus finally subsumed into the enduring symbol of the scarlet letter itself.
