The Hunt
What does the A in The Scarlet Letter stand for? You are probably thinking of one particular word. I searched the entire text for it, and it never appears. Not once. This is a full summary of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, so it spoils everything, the ending included.
So I tracked the letter itself. It shows up in seven forms, and each one changes what the letter means. You get the plot with the A as your guide, three scaffold scenes, and counts. Every count is mine.
Which Edition
I read the Project Gutenberg text, ebook number twenty-five thousand, three hundred and forty-four. Its title page says Boston, James R. Osgood and Company, eighteen seventy-eight. It also prints a preface to the second edition, dated Salem, March thirtieth, eighteen fifty. I give no first publication date, because I could not source one twice.
By my count the text runs about eighty-four thousand words, from the first page of the introduction to the last line. I left out the license, contents, preface and picture list. That leaves twenty-four chapters, plus a long introduction called The Custom-House.
That introduction is fifteen thousand words, about eighteen percent of the book. Here is how I treat it. The preface itself says the sketch could have been left out without loss to the book. So I will skip its portraits of sleepy old officers. One scene in it matters for our hunt, so I will cover that, and then it is chapters all the way.
A Number One
Here is the scene. The narrator says he is a surveyor at the Salem Custom-House. Upstairs, in a bare room with open rafters, he finds a package that belonged to an earlier surveyor, a man named Jonathan Pue. Inside are some papers and a faded rag of red cloth with traces of gold thread.
The cloth is shaped like a capital A. He measures it, and each side is three inches and a quarter. He holds it against his chest and feels a burning heat, as if it were red hot iron. He drops it.
Pue’s papers, he says, tell the story of a woman named Hester Prynne. He insists the outline is authentic, but he admits he took as much license with the motives and passions as if he had invented the facts. Then an election costs him his post, and he writes the tale. Real or not, I am treating all of it as part of the novel.
Scaffold One
Now the story itself. A summer morning in old Boston, and a crowd outside the prison door, where a wild rose bush grows. Out steps Hester Prynne, carrying a baby about three months old. On her dress is the letter A, in red cloth and gold thread. The women in the crowd grumble that she stitched it herself, to make a show of her punishment. That is A number two.
Her sentence is three hours on the scaffold in the market place, then the letter for the rest of her life. The town calls this merciful, because the law allows death. This is scaffold one, in chapters two and three, at noon. The ministers press her to name the baby’s father. The young minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, leans over the balcony and asks too. She answers one word. Never.
In the crowd stands a small man with one shoulder higher than the other. Hester knows him. He is her husband, who sent her ahead from Amsterdam and never followed. He puts a finger to his lips. In chapter four he treats her sick baby in the prison, takes the name Roger Chillingworth, and makes her swear to tell no one who he is. He will find the father himself, he says, and the man will be his.
Pearl’s Letter
Hester settles in a cottage by the shore and lives by her needle. Governors wear her work, though nobody ever asks her to embroider a bride’s veil. She names her baby Pearl, because the child cost everything she had.
And the first thing the baby ever notices is the letter. She grabs at the gold thread, smiling. As Pearl grows, Hester dresses her in red velvet with gold embroidery, and the narrator calls her the scarlet letter in another form, the letter given life. That is A number three, Pearl in her dress.
At three years old, Pearl is nearly taken away. In chapters seven and eight, Governor Bellingham and the ministers question the child. Pearl says nobody made her, and she was picked off the rose bush by the prison door. Hester tells them Pearl is the scarlet letter, only capable of being loved. Then she begs Dimmesdale to speak for her, and he does.
The Leech
Chapters nine to eleven belong to the doctor. Dimmesdale is getting sicker, always pressing a hand to his heart. Chillingworth becomes his physician, and then his housemate. One noon, while the minister sleeps in a chair, the doctor pulls his clothes aside and looks.
The book never says what he sees. It says only that Chillingworth reacts with wonder, joy and horror. From then on he plays on the minister like an instrument.
Meanwhile Dimmesdale whips himself in a locked closet, and his church adores him more every week. Hester wears her sin openly. He hides his.
Scaffold Two
Chapter twelve, scaffold two. A dark night in early May, near midnight. Dimmesdale climbs the platform alone, where nobody can see him. Then Hester and Pearl pass by, coming from the deathbed of Governor Winthrop, and he calls them up. The three stand there holding hands.
Pearl asks him to stand with them there tomorrow at noon. He says no, not then. Only on the great judgment day. Then a meteor lights the sky, and Dimmesdale sees a huge red A. The narrator says that is his own guilty mind, and another man might have seen another symbol.
Chillingworth steps out of the dark and leads the minister home. Next day the sexton returns Dimmesdale’s glove, found on the scaffold, and mentions the sign. The town reads the A as Angel, because Governor Winthrop died that night. That is A number four, and the first reading that is not shame.
Angel, Able and the Green A
The second reading comes in chapter thirteen. Seven years have passed, and Hester has nursed the sick. Many people now refuse the original meaning of the A. They say it stands for Able.
In chapter fourteen, Hester tells Chillingworth she will reveal him to the minister. He calls himself a fiend and says it is all fate. In chapter fifteen, Pearl makes a letter of her own from eel-grass, bright green, and pins it on her chest. She asks what the scarlet letter means, and why the minister keeps his hand over his heart.
Until now, Hester has never lied about the letter. Now she says she wears it for the sake of its gold thread. That is A number five, and the first lie.
The Forest
Chapters sixteen to nineteen are the forest. Hester meets Dimmesdale alone and tells him the doctor is her husband. He is furious, then he forgives her. They plan to flee to Europe on a ship that sails in a few days.
In chapter eighteen she tears off the letter and throws it among the dead leaves. She lets her hair fall loose, and the sun bursts through the trees. In chapter nineteen, Pearl will not cross the brook to join them. She points at her mother’s chest, screams, and waits until Hester picks the letter up and fastens it on again.
Only then does Pearl cross. She hugs her mother and kisses the letter too. Then she washes the minister’s kiss off in the brook.
Scaffold Three
In chapter twenty, Dimmesdale walks home a changed man, tempted to say something wicked to everyone he meets. He burns his sermon and writes a new one overnight. Then, on Election Day, the shipmaster tells Hester that the doctor has booked a cabin on their ship as well.
The procession arrives, with music, soldiers and magistrates. Dimmesdale walks with a strength nobody has seen in him and preaches the greatest sermon of his life. When he comes out, he can hardly stand. He stops at the scaffold and calls Hester and Pearl to him.
Chillingworth rushes through the crowd and begs him to stop. Dimmesdale climbs with Hester’s help and tells the town he is the sinner. Then he tears his clothing open at the chest. The book says it would be irreverent to describe what is revealed. Pearl kisses him, he says farewell, and he dies. It is just past noon, the hour Pearl once asked for.
The Last A
The Conclusion gives three versions of what the crowd saw. Most say a scarlet letter was printed on the minister’s flesh, and they argue about how it got there. Others say there was no mark at all, and he died that way to teach a lesson. That is A number six, and the book will not choose.
Chillingworth withers away and dies within the year, leaving Pearl a fortune. Hester and Pearl vanish. Years later Hester returns alone and puts the letter back on, though no one makes her.
The last A is on a slate gravestone, one slab for two graves, with a space between. A shield on it carries these words. On a field, sable, the letter A, gules. A red letter on black. That is number seven.
Counting the Letter
Now the counts. The phrase scarlet letter appears eighty-nine times in the twenty-four chapters. Split the story into four parts. Chapters one to eight, thirty-four times. Nine to fifteen, twenty. The forest, sixteen to nineteen, twelve. Twenty to twenty-four, twenty-three. Per ten thousand words, that is fifteen, ten, twelve and fourteen.
So the letter fades in the middle, while the book follows the doctor and the forest, then comes back. Three chapters never use the phrase at all, nine, twelve and twenty. I also counted the word sin and its forms, seventy-seven times, thirty-four of them in the first eight chapters.
Here is my reading, and it is an opinion. The A means whatever the person looking at it needs. The crowd sees shame, the sexton sees an angel, Pearl sees her mother, and Dimmesdale sees himself. Only Hester gets to choose it, at the very end. That is why I think the book never spells it out.
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