Hester Prynne's Return and Death

After many years abroad, Hester Prynne returned alone to the small thatched cottage on the outskirts of Boston and took up the scarlet letter once more, of her own free will, though no magistrate of that iron period would have imposed it. She had left New England with Pearl following Roger Chillingworth's death, and for years no authentic tidings of them reached the colony; only vague reports drifted across the sea like shapeless driftwood. But Pearl, now in the flush of early womanhood, did not return with her mother. Whether she had died young or had been softened into a woman's gentle happiness remained unknown, though letters bearing armorial seals and articles of comfort and luxury in the cottage suggested that Pearl was alive, married, happy, and mindful of her mother. Hester herself, however, found a more real life in New England, where her sin, her sorrow, and her penitence had all occurred, and she resumed the symbol that had so long defined her existence.

Return and Resumption of the Scarlet Letter

Hester Prynne's return was a quiet, almost spectral event. One afternoon, children at play near the shore beheld a tall woman in a gray robe approach the cottage door, which had never been opened in all the years of her absence. She paused on the threshold, turning partly round, as if the idea of entering alone the home of so intense a former life was more dreary than even she could bear. Her hesitation lasted only an instant, but it was long enough to display a scarlet letter on her breast. She entered, and the cottage became her dwelling once more. Never afterwards did the scarlet letter quit her bosom. In the toilsome, thoughtful, and self-devoted years that followed, the letter ceased to be a stigma that attracted the world's scorn and bitterness; it became a type of something to be sorrowed over, looked upon with awe, and yet with reverence too. People brought all their sorrows and perplexities to her, beseeching her counsel as one who had herself gone through a mighty trouble. Women especially—in the recurring trials of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful passion, or with the dreary burden of a heart unyielded because unvalued and unsought—came to Hester's cottage, demanding why they were so wretched and what the remedy. Hester comforted and counselled them as best she might, assuring them of her firm belief that at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, a new truth would be revealed to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness.

Death and the Shared Grave

After many, many years, a new grave was dug near an old and sunken one in the burial-ground beside which King's Chapel has since been built. It was near that old and sunken grave, yet with a space between, as if the dust of the two sleepers had no right to mingle. Yet one tombstone served for both. All around were monuments carved with armorial bearings, but on this simple slab of slate there appeared the semblance of an engraved escutcheon bearing a device: "ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES." The grave was Hester Prynne's, and the old sunken one beside it was Arthur Dimmesdale's. The space between them, even in death, marked the separation that had defined their lives, yet the single stone united them under the symbol that had been both their shame and their redemption.

Narrative Role and Significance

Hester Prynne's return and death complete the novel's meditation on sin, punishment, and the possibility of redemption within a rigid social order. Her voluntary resumption of the scarlet letter, long after any external authority would have required it, transforms the symbol from a badge of infamy into a mark of wisdom and compassion. She becomes a counselor to women, a prophetess of a future in which the relation between the sexes might be founded on mutual happiness rather than on the harsh laws of Puritan society. Yet her own story ends in solitude and ambiguity: Pearl is gone, the minister is dead, and Hester lies in a grave that is both joined to his and separated from it. The shared tombstone, with its heraldic device of the scarlet letter, offers no resolution but only a somber emblem of a life lived under the sign of transgression and endurance. The novel's final words—"ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES"—leave the reader with the image of a dark field lit by a single red letter, a fitting conclusion to a tale of human frailty and sorrow.