The Scarlet Letter Punishment

The Scarlet Letter Punishment is the sentence imposed on Hester Prynne by the Puritan magistrates of Boston, requiring her to stand on the scaffold for three hours and thereafter to wear a scarlet letter 'A' on her bosom for the remainder of her natural life. This punishment, which combines public humiliation with a permanent mark of shame, becomes the central symbol of the novel and the defining condition of Hester's existence, shaping her identity, her relationships, and her eventual transformation from an outcast into a figure of communal reverence.

Origins and Legal Framework

The sentence was pronounced by the magistrates of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who, according to the townsman who explained the case to the stranger in the marketplace, had "not been bold to put in force the extremity of our righteous law"—the penalty for adultery being death. Instead, in what the townsman called "great mercy and tenderness of heart," they doomed Hester Prynne "to stand only a space of three hours on the platform of the pillory, and then and thereafter, for the remainder of her natural life to wear a mark of shame upon her bosom." The stranger, later revealed to be Roger Chillingworth, called this "a wise sentence," adding that "thus she will be a living sermon against sin, until the ignominious letter be engraved upon her tombstone." The scaffold itself was a portion of a penal machine, the pillory, which 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." In Hester's case, however, her sentence specified that she should stand upon the platform "without undergoing that gripe about the neck and confinement of the head" that was the most devilish characteristic of the engine.

The Public Exposure

On the summer morning when the sentence was first executed, Hester Prynne emerged from the prison door with a baby of some three months old in her arms and the scarlet letter on her breast. The women of the crowd, who had gathered before the prison, expressed a range of opinions about the punishment. One hard-featured dame of fifty declared that if the women of mature age and church-members in good repute had the handling of such malefactresses, the sentence would have been harsher. Another said the magistrates were "merciful overmuch" and should have put "the brand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne's forehead." A third, the ugliest and most pitiless, cried that the woman "ought to die." The young wife, holding a child by the hand, offered a softer view: "let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be always in her heart." Hester was led by the beadle through a lane opened in the crowd, preceded by the beadle and attended by an irregular procession of stern-browed men and unkindly visaged women, to the scaffold at the western extremity of the marketplace. There she stood for three hours, the object of a thousand unrelenting eyes, while the Reverend John Wilson delivered a discourse on sin with continual reference to the ignominious letter.

The Daily Burden

After her release from prison, Hester Prynne faced the daily reality of the punishment. The unattended walk from the prison door began "the daily custom," and she could no longer borrow from the future to help her through the present grief. "Tomorrow would bring its own trial with it; so would the next day, and so would the next: each its own trial, and yet the very same that was now so unutterably grievous to be borne." The accumulating days and added years would pile up their misery upon the heap of shame, and throughout them all, giving up her individuality, she would become "the general symbol at which the preacher and moralist might point." The punishment was not merely physical but psychological: clergymen paused in the streets to address words of exhortation; if she entered a church, she often found herself the text of the discourse; children, having imbibed from their parents a vague idea of something horrible, pursued her at a distance with shrill cries. "From first to last, in short, Hester Prynne had always this dreadful agony in feeling a human eye upon the token; the spot never grew callous; it seemed, on the contrary, to grow more sensitive with daily torture."

Transformation of the Symbol

Over the course of seven years, the meaning of the scarlet letter began to change in the eyes of the community. Hester's blameless purity of life, her uncomplaining submission to the worst usage, and her self-devoted service in times of pestilence and calamity gradually won her a species of general regard. "Many people refused to interpret the scarlet A by its original signification. They said that it meant Abel, so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman's strength." The letter became "the taper of the sick chamber," and its wearer was seen as a self-ordained Sister of Mercy. Yet the effect on Hester herself was powerful and peculiar. "All the light and graceful foliage of her character had been withered up by this red-hot brand," and her rich and luxuriant hair was either cut off or so completely hidden by a cap that not a shining lock ever gushed into the sunshine. "Much of the marble coldness of Hester's impression was to be attributed to the circumstance that her life had turned, in a great measure, from passion and feeling to thought." The scarlet letter had not done its office of producing repentance; instead, it had set her free to speculate on matters that would have been considered a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the letter.

The Final Revelation and Aftermath

At the climax of the novel, Arthur Dimmesdale, after delivering the Election Sermon, ascends the scaffold with Hester and Pearl and reveals the scarlet letter imprinted on his own breast. He tells the people that "with all its mysterious horror, it is but the shadow of what he bears on his own breast, and that even this, his own red stigma, is no more than the type of what has seared his inmost heart." After his death, Hester Prynne leaves Boston with Pearl, but eventually returns and resumes the scarlet letter of her own free will. "Never afterwards did it quit her bosom." In the lapse of the toilsome, thoughtful, and self-devoted years that made up Hester's life, the scarlet letter ceased to be a stigma that attracted the world's scorn and bitterness and became "a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence too." People brought all their sorrows and perplexities to her, beseeching her counsel, and she comforted them, assuring them of her firm belief that at some brighter period a new truth would be revealed to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness. Her grave, near an old and sunken one in the burial-ground beside King's Chapel, bears a simple slab of slate with an engraved escutcheon whose device is described in heraldic terms: "On a field, sable, the letter A, gules."