The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
“A man who confessed nothing rotted alive. A woman who confessed everything was reborn. Hawthorne wrote this about his own ancestors — and never forgave himself.”
Language Register
Deliberately archaic, Latinate construction, Puritan theological vocabulary — a prose that sounds as if it emerged from the seventeenth century even though it was written in 1850
Syntax Profile
Hawthorne writes long, nested sentences with multiple subordinate clauses — the syntax of a man thinking carefully about what he cannot say directly. His em-dashes interrupt main clauses with parenthetical doubts. His paragraphs often begin with an apparent certainty and end with its qualification. The prose itself enacts the novel's central argument about the impossibility of moral simplicity.
Figurative Language
Very high — but almost exclusively allegorical rather than metaphorical. Where Fitzgerald reaches for the fresh image, Hawthorne reaches for the embodied symbol. The rosebush, the letter, the scaffold, the forest, the brook are not metaphors — they are allegories, which carry their meanings deliberately and consistently throughout the entire text.
Era-Specific Language
Physician — but Hawthorne exploits the parasitic connotation entirely
Puritan civil authority — the intersection of church and state governance
Puritan church — deliberately austere, not a cathedral
Heraldic term for red — used in the final epitaph, placing Hester within the language of aristocratic legitimacy
Puritan term for the devil, associated with forest compacts and witchcraft — used repeatedly by Pearl and Mistress Hibbins
Favorable, auspicious — Hawthorne's vocabulary frequently employs Latinate terms that elevate the moral weight of ordinary events
How Characters Speak — Class & Identity
Hester Prynne
Formal, restrained, precise in speech — she rarely speaks at length, and when she does, the sentences are complete and considered. She does not appeal to emotion or class status; she appeals to logic and to love.
Hester speaks with the authority of someone who has learned that words cost. Seven years of enforced silence have made her an extremely economical speaker. Her directness is the directness of someone who has nothing left to perform.
Arthur Dimmesdale
Pulpit rhetoric deployed in private conversation — long, subordinate-clause-heavy sentences, theological framing of every personal statement. He cannot stop preaching even when he is confessing.
Dimmesdale's language is his concealment mechanism. He speaks in the register of the institution that protects him. Even in the forest, his most intimate speech has the cadence of a sermon.
Roger Chillingworth
Scholar's precision — qualified statements, conditional clauses, Latinate vocabulary. His speech sounds reasonable at every level. He never raises his voice.
The most educated speaker in the novel is the novel's most dangerous figure. Intelligence in service of revenge produces language that is always technically defensible. His courtesy is the courtesy of someone who has already won.
Pearl
Child's directness without social mediation — she says exactly what she perceives, uses the community's own vocabulary (Black Man, witch, devil) without the community's protective irony.
Pearl has not been socialized into the euphemisms that protect the community from its own knowledge. She is the only character who consistently tells the truth, and no one acts on what she says. Her speech is the novel's moral standard.
Governor Bellingham
The formal syntax of colonial authority — declarative, legislative, accustomed to announcing decisions rather than making arguments.
Bellingham embodies the Puritan magistracy's absolute confidence in its own judgment. He does not argue; he pronounces. The gap between his certainty and his information is the gap between Puritan law and human truth.
Narrator's Voice
Hawthorne's narrator is a peculiar construction — he speaks in the past tense about events that are themselves three centuries past, claims to be editing a found manuscript, and constantly introduces moral qualifications ('it seemed,' 'perhaps,' 'as some believed') that refuse to settle the novel's central ambiguities. The narrator knows more than any single character and less than he appears to — he is the voice of inherited guilt that cannot be fully articulated.
Tone Progression
Custom-House & Prison Door
Wry, elegiac, self-implicating
The author situating himself in the moral geography of the narrative. Ironic about his Custom House colleagues, anguished about his ancestry.
Chapters 1-12
Formal, allegorical, building pressure
The community's machinery of judgment in operation. Hawthorne's prose is deliberate, Latinate, controlled — the syntax of a society that controls everything.
Chapters 13-19
Warmer, more intimate, briefly lyrical
Hester's transformation and the forest scenes. The prose opens slightly — longer passages of interiority, the light-and-shadow of the wilderness.
Chapters 20-24
Accelerating then elegiac
Dimmesdale's compressed transformation, the urgency of Election Day, the quiet of the final chapter. The prose ends in heraldic permanence.
Stylistic Comparisons
- Herman Melville (Moby-Dick) — similarly dense, similarly allegorical, written by a close friend; where Hawthorne's allegory is theological and social, Melville's is cosmic
- John Milton (Paradise Lost) — Hawthorne's theological framework and his treatment of guilt and redemption are deeply Miltonic; the fall is always present
- Henry James — Hawthorne's careful, qualifying prose is the ancestor of James's late style; both refuse the declarative sentence when the conditional will do
Key Vocabulary from This Book
Notable words used in this text — click to see full definitions