Angel

In the moral universe of The Scarlet Letter, the Angel is less a character than a threshold figure—a being whose imagined presence defines the distance between human frailty and divine perfection. Hawthorne invokes angels repeatedly to measure the gap between what people appear to be and what they are, and to suggest a realm of judgment and mercy that lies beyond the reach of Puritan law. The angelic appears in three distinct registers: as a metaphor for the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale's saintly reputation, as a contrast to the demonic forces that haunt the narrative, and as a final, ambiguous symbol that reinterprets the scarlet letter itself.

The Angel as a Measure of Human Sanctity

The people of Boston habitually describe their young minister in angelic terms. When Dimmesdale first appears in the marketplace, his admirers speak of his "dewy purity of thought" as affecting them "like the speech of an angel" . This comparison is not casual; it reflects the community's conviction that Dimmesdale is "a miracle of holiness," a being whose very footsteps are sanctified . The narrator notes that the aged members of his flock believe he will "go heavenward before them" and instruct their children to bury their bones close to "their young pastor's holy grave" . Yet this angelic reputation is built on a lie. Dimmesdale himself is tormented by the contrast: he imagines standing before his congregation and declaring himself "utterly a pollution and a lie," but the people hear his self-condemnation and only "reverence him the more" . The angelic label thus becomes a cage, trapping him in a performance of holiness that he knows to be false.

The Angelic and the Demonic in the Moral Landscape

Angels also appear in the novel's visionary and psychological landscapes, often in direct opposition to demonic figures. During Dimmesdale's midnight vigil on the scaffold, he experiences a series of hallucinations: "a herd of diabolic shapes" that mock him, and then "a group of shining angels, who flew upward heavily, as sorrow-laden" . The angels are sorrowful, not triumphant—a detail that suggests the weight of Dimmesdale's hidden sin burdens even the celestial. Later, when the meteor blazes across the sky, the sexton interprets the great red letter as standing for "Angel," because Governor Winthrop "was made an angel this past night" . This reading transforms a symbol of shame into a sign of heavenly translation, but it is a misreading: the letter is the same one that burns on Hester's breast and, invisibly, on Dimmesdale's. The angelic interpretation is a comforting fiction that the community imposes on a terrifying portent.

The Scarlet Letter Transformed into an Angelic Sign

Over the course of the novel, the scarlet letter itself undergoes a transformation that brings it into the orbit of the angelic. Hester Prynne, through years of charitable work, becomes "self-ordained a Sister of Mercy," and many people begin to say that the scarlet A stands for "Abel," not for "Adultery" . The letter, once a mark of infamy, acquires "the effect of the cross on a nun's bosom," imparting "a kind of sacredness" to its wearer . This is not a full redemption—Hester remains an outcast—but it is a shift in the community's perception that echoes the angelic: the letter becomes a symbol of something sorrowed over and looked upon "with awe, yet with reverence too" . In the final description of Hester's tombstone, the heraldic device—"On a field, sable, the letter A, gules" —fixes the letter in a permanent, almost sacred form, a dark field with a single glowing point of light, as if the scarlet letter had become a kind of star or angelic sign.

The Angel as an Unattainable Ideal

Yet the angelic remains fundamentally unattainable for the novel's human characters. Hester herself, in her later years, reflects that the "angel and apostle of the coming revelation"—the one who will establish a new truth about the relation between man and woman—must be "a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure, and beautiful, and wise" . She recognizes that she cannot be that figure, because she is "stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or even burdened with a life-long sorrow" . The angelic is reserved for a future that Hester will not see. The novel thus uses the figure of the Angel to mark the limits of human possibility: it is what people imagine Dimmesdale to be, what the community wishes the scarlet letter to mean, and what Hester knows she can never become. The Angel hovers at the edge of the narrative, a reminder of a purity that remains, in this world, always just out of reach.