Governor Bellingham's mansion

Governor Bellingham's mansion stands as the most prominent domestic structure in seventeenth-century Boston, a large wooden house built in the Elizabethan style that its owner, a former governor and current magistrate, transplanted from his native England. The edifice is notable for its glittering exterior: the walls are overspread with a kind of stucco into which fragments of broken glass are plentifully intermixed, so that when the sunshine falls aslant over the front, it sparkles as if diamonds had been flung against it by the double handful. This brilliancy, the narrator remarks, might have befitted Aladdin's palace rather than the mansion of a grave old Puritan ruler. The house is further decorated with strange and seemingly cabalistic figures and diagrams drawn into the stucco when newly laid, now grown hard and durable for the admiration of after times. The door is arched, flanked on each side by a narrow tower or projection containing lattice-windows with wooden shutters, and a heavy iron hammer hangs at the portal for summoning entry.

Interior and Furnishings

Inside, the hall is wide and reasonably lofty, extending through the whole depth of the house and forming a medium of general communication with all other apartments. At one end, the room is lighted by the windows of the two towers; at the other, a deep, cushioned embrasure window provides more powerful illumination. On the cushion lies a folio tome, probably the Chronicles of England or other substantial literature. The furniture consists of ponderous chairs with backs elaborately carved with wreaths of oaken flowers, and a table in the same taste, all from the Elizabethan age or earlier, heirlooms transferred from the Governor's paternal home. On the table stands a large pewter tankard, at the bottom of which the frothy remnant of a recent draught of ale remains. On the wall hangs a row of portraits representing the forefathers of the Bellingham lineage, some in armour, others in stately ruffs and robes of peace, all characterized by sternness and severity as if they were ghosts rather than pictures. At about the centre of the oaken panels is suspended a suit of mail of the most modern date, manufactured by a skilful armourer in London the same year the Governor came to New England. It includes a steel head-piece, a cuirass, a gorget, greaves, a pair of gauntlets, and a sword, all so highly burnished as to glow with white radiance and scatter illumination about the floor. This panoply has been worn by the Governor on many a solemn muster and training field and glittered at the head of a regiment in the Pequod War, for though bred a lawyer, the exigencies of the new country have transformed him into a soldier as well as a statesman and ruler.

The Garden and Its Significance

The garden, visible from the hall's bow-window, is a rude and immature attempt at shrubbery, with the proprietor having already relinquished as hopeless the effort to perpetuate the native English taste for ornamental gardening on this side of the Atlantic. Cabbages grow in plain sight, and a pumpkin-vine has run across the intervening space to deposit one of its gigantic products directly beneath the hall window, as if to warn the Governor that this great lump of vegetable gold is as rich an ornament as New England earth will offer him. A few rose-bushes and a number of apple-trees, probably the descendants of those planted by the Reverend Mr. Blackstone, the first settler of the peninsula, complete the landscape. It is for a red rose from these bushes that little Pearl cries when she first sees the garden, and her mother must hush her because the Governor and his guests are approaching.

The Scene of Hester's Plea

The mansion is the setting for the most critical confrontation in Hester Prynne's early life in Boston: the attempt by Governor Bellingham, the Reverend John Wilson, and others to take Pearl away from her. Hester arrives at the mansion to deliver a pair of embroidered gloves she has fringed for the Governor, but her true purpose is to plead for her child. She is admitted into the hall, where she and Pearl wait. When the Governor, Mr. Wilson, Arthur Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth enter from the garden, the scene unfolds in the great hall. Pearl, standing outside the window, is examined by Mr. Wilson and gives her famously perverse answer that she was plucked from the rose-bush by the prison door. Hester, desperate, turns to Dimmesdale, who speaks eloquently in her behalf, arguing that the child is both a blessing and a retribution and must remain with her mother. The Governor, persuaded, allows Hester to keep Pearl, though he insists the child be examined in the catechism and sent to school. The polished breastplate of the suit of mail in the hall plays a symbolic role: when Pearl looks into it, she sees the scarlet letter reflected in exaggerated and gigantic proportions, so that Hester seems absolutely hidden behind it, and the child's own naughty merriment is reflected with such intensity that Hester feels it cannot be the image of her own child but of an imp seeking to mould itself into Pearl's shape.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

The mansion functions as a microcosm of the Puritan establishment's power and its contradictions. It is a place of worldly display—the glittering stucco, the rich furnishings, the suit of armour—that coexists with the stern, frost-bitten aspect of its owner. The hall, with its portraits of severe ancestors and its gleaming armour, embodies the tension between the Governor's inherited English gentility and his role as a rigid Puritan magistrate. It is here that the community's authority, embodied in Bellingham and Wilson, confronts Hester's solitary defiance, and it is here that Dimmesdale, for the first time, publicly defends Hester and Pearl, revealing the depth of his connection to them. The mansion thus becomes the stage on which the struggle over Pearl's fate is resolved, and its architecture—the convex mirror of the breastplate, the window through which Pearl escapes Mr. Wilson's grasp—actively participates in the symbolic drama of the scarlet letter.