Nathaniel Hawthorne/Nathaniel Hawthorne.iso/pc/articles/a1/t0004

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                                                          II                                                       55
                                            The Market-Place

THE GRASS-PLOT before the jail, in Prison Lane, on a certain summer
morning, not less than two centuries ago, was occupied by a pretty large
number of the inhabitants of Boston; all with their eyes intently fastened on
the iron-clamped oaken door. Amongst any other population, or at a later
period in the history of New England, the grim rigidity that petrified the
bearded physiognomies of these good people would have augured some
awful business in hand. It could have betokened nothing short of the
anticipated execution of some noted culprit, on whom the sentence of a legal
tribunal had but confirmed the verdict of public sentiment. But, in that early
severity of the Puritan character, an inference of this kind could not so
indubitably be drawn. It might be that a sluggish bond-servant, or an
undutiful child, whom his parents had given over to the civil authority, was
to be corrected at the whipping-post. It might be, that an Antinomian, a
Quaker, or other heterodox religionist, was to be scourged out of the town,
or an idle and vagrant Indian, whom the white man's fire-water had made
riotous about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into the shadow of
the forest. It might be, too, that a witch, like old Mistress Hibbins, the
bitter-tempered widow of the magistrate, was to die upon the gallows. In
either case, there was very much the same solemnity of demeanour on the
part of the spectators; as befitted a people amongst whom religion and law
were almost identical, and in whose character both were so thoroughly
interfused, that the mildest and the severest acts of public discipline were
alike made venerable and awful. Meagre, indeed, and cold, was the
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sympathy that a transgressor might look for, from such bystanders at the
scaffold. On the other hand, a penalty which, in our days, would infer a
degree of mocking infamy and ridicule, might then be invested with almost
as stern a dignity as the punishment of death itself.
     It was a circumstance to be noted, on the summer morning when our
story begins its course, that the women, of whom there were several in the
crowd, appeared to take a peculiar interest in whatever penal infliction might
be expected to ensue. The age had not so much refinement, that any sense
of impropriety restrained the wearers of petticoat and farthingale from
stepping forth into the public ways, and wedging their not unsubstantial
persons, if occasion were, into the throng nearest to the scaffold at an
execution. Morally, as well as materially, there was a coarser fibre in those
wives and maidens of old English birth and breeding, than in their fair
descendants, separated from them by a series of six or seven generations;
for, throughout that chain of ancestry, every successive mother has
transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty,
and a slighter physical frame, if not a character of less force and solidity,
than her own. The women, who were now standing about the prison-door,
stood within less than half a century of the period when the man-like
Elizabeth had been the not altogether unsuitable representative of the sex.
They were her countrywomen; and the beef and ale of their native land, with
a moral diet not a whit more refined, entered largely into their composition.
The bright morning sun, therefore, shone on broad shoulders and well-
developed busts, and on round and ruddy cheeks, that had ripened in the
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far-off island, and had hardly yet grown paler or thinner in the atmosphere
of New England. There was, moreover, a boldness and rotundity of speech
among these matrons, as most of them seemed to be, that would startle us at
the present day, whether in respect to its purport or its volume of tone.
     "Goodwives," said a hard-featured dame of fifty, "I'll tell ye a piece of
my mind. It would be greatly for the public behoof, if we women, being of
mature age and church-members in good repute, should have the handling
of such malefactresses as this Hester Prynne. What think ye, gossips? If the
hussy stood up for judgment before us five, that are now here in a knot
together, would she come off with such a sentence as the worshipful
magistrates have awarded? Marry, I trow not!"
     "People say," said another, "that the Reverend Master Dimmesdale, her
godly pastor, takes it very grievously to heart that such a scandal should
have come upon his congregation."
     "The magistrates are God-fearing gentlemen, but merciful overmuch,--
that is a truth," added a third autumnal matron. "At the very least, they
should have put the brand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne's forehead.
Madam Hester would have winced at that, I warrant me. But she,--the
naughty baggage,--little will she care what they put upon the bodice of her
gown! Why, look you, she may cover it with a brooch, or such like
heathenish adornment, and so walk the streets as brave as ever!"
     "Ah, but," interposed, more softly, a young wife, holding a child by the
hand, "let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be always in her
heart."
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     "What do we talk of marks and brands, whether on the bodice of her
gown, or the flesh of her forehead?" cried another female, the ugliest as
well as the most pitiless of these self-constituted judges. "This woman has
brought shame upon us all, and ought to die. Is there not law for it? Truly
there is, both in the Scripture and the statute-book. Then let the magistrates,
who have made it of no effect, thank themselves if their own wives and
daughters go astray!"
     "Mercy on us, goodwife," exclaimed a man in the crowd, "is there no
virtue in woman, save what springs from a wholesome fear of the gallows?
That is the hardest word yet! Hush, now, gossips; for the lock is turning in
the prison-door, and here comes Mistress Prynne herself."
     The door of the jail being flung open from within, there appeared, in the
first place, like a black shadow emerging into the sunshine, the grim and
grisly presence of the town-beadle, with a sword by his side and his staff of
office in his hand. This personage prefigured and represented in his aspect
the whole dismal severity of the Puritanic code of law, which it was his
business to administer in its final and closest application to the offender.
Stretching forth the official staff in his left hand, he laid his right upon the
shoulder of a young woman, whom he thus drew forward; until, on the
threshold of the prison-door, she repelled him, by an action marked with
natural dignity and force of character, and stepped into the open air, as if by
her own free-will. She bore in her arms a child, a baby of some three
months old, who winked and turned aside its little face from the too vivid
light of day; because its existence, heretofore, had brought it acquainted
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only with the gray twilight of a dungeon, or other darksome apartment of
the prison.
     When the young woman--the mother of this child--stood fully revealed
before the crowd, it seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the infant closely
to her bosom; not so much by an impulse of motherly affection, as that she
might thereby conceal a certain token, which was wrought or fastened into
her dress. In a moment, however, wisely judging that one token of her
shame would but poorly serve to hide another, she took the baby on her
arm, and, with a burning blush, and yet a haughty smile, and a glance that
would not be abashed, looked around at her townspeople and neighbours.
On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate
embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A. It
was so artistically done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance
of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the
apparel which she wore; and which was of a splendor in accordance with
the taste of the age, but greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary
regulations of the colony.
     The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance, on a large
scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the
sunshine with a gleam, and a face which, besides being beautiful from
regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness
belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. She was lady-like, too,
after the manner of the feminine gentility of those days; characterized by a
certain state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and
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indescribable grace, which is now recognized as its indication. And never
had Hester Prynne appeared more lady-like, in the antique interpretation of
the term, than as she issued from the prison. Those who had before known
her, and had expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous
cloud, were astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty shone
out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was
enveloped. It may be true, that, to a sensitive observer, there was something
exquisitely painful in it. Her attire, which, indeed, she had wrought for the
occasion, in prison, and had modelled much after her own fancy, seemed to
express the attitude of her spirit, the desperate recklessness of her mood, by
its wild and picturesque peculiarity. But the point which drew all eyes, and,
as it were, transfigured the wearer,--so that both men and women, who had
been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne, were now impressed as if
they beheld her for the first time,--was that SCARLET LETTER, so
fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It had the effect
of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and
inclosing her in a sphere by herself.
     "She hath good skill at her needle, that's certain," remarked one of the
female spectators; "but did ever a woman, before this brazen hussy,
contrive such a way of showing it! Why, gossips, what is it but to laugh in
the faces of our godly magistrates, and make a pride out of what they,
worthy gentlemen, meant for a punishment?"
     "It were well," muttered the most iron-visaged of the old dames, "if we
stripped Madam Hester's rich gown off her dainty shoulders; and as for the
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red letter, which she hath stitched so curiously, I'll bestow a rag of mine
own rheumatic flannel, to make a fitter one!"
     "O, peace, neighbours, peace!" whispered their youngest companion.
"Do not let her hear you! Not a stitch in that embroidered letter, but she has
felt it in her heart."
     The grim beadle now made a gesture with his staff.
     "Make way, good people, make way, in the King's name," cried he.
"Open a passage; and, I promise ye, Mistress Prynne shall be set where
man, woman, and child may have a fair sight of her brave apparel, from this
time till an hour past meridian. A blessing on the righteous Colony of the
Massachusetts, where iniquity is dragged out into the sunshine! Come
along, Madam Hester, and show your scarlet letter in the market-place!"
     A lane was forthwith opened through the crowd of spectators. Preceded
by the beadle, and attended by an irregular procession of stern-browed men
and unkindly-visaged women, Hester Prynne set forth towards the place
appointed for her punishment. A crowd of eager and curious school-boys,
understanding little of the matter in hand, except that it gave them a half-
holiday, ran before her progress, turning their heads continually to stare into
her face, and at the winking baby in her arms, and at the ignominious letter
on her breast. It was no great distance, in those days, from the prison-door
to the market-place. Measured by the prisoner's experience, however, it
might be reckoned a journey of some length; for, haughty as her demeanour
was, she perchance underwent an agony from every footstep of those that
thronged to see her, as if her heart had been flung into the street for them all
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to spurn and trample upon. In our nature, however, there is a provision,
alike marvellous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the
intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang
that rankles after it. With almost a serene deportment, therefore, Hester
Prynne passed through this portion of her ordeal, and came to a sort of
scaffold, at the western extremity of the market-place. It stood nearly
beneath the eaves of Boston's earliest church, and appeared to be a fixture
there.
     In fact, this scaffold constituted a portion of a penal machine, which
now, for two or three generations past, has been merely historical and
traditionary among us, but was held, in the old time, to be as effectual an
agent in the promotion of good citizenship, as ever was the guillotine among
the terrorists of France. It was, in short, the platform of the pillory; and
above it rose the framework of that instrument of discipline, so fashioned as
to confine the human head in its tight grasp, and thus hold it up to the public
gaze. The very ideal of ignominy was embodied and made manifest in this
contrivance of wood and iron. There can be no outrage, methinks, against
our common nature,--whatever be the delinquencies of the individual,--no
outrage more flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his face for shame; as
it was the essence of this punishment to do. In Hester Prynne's instance,
however, as not infrequently in other cases, her sentence bore, that she
should stand a certain time upon the platform, but without undergoing that
gripe about the neck and confinement of the head, the proneness to which
was the most devilish characteristic of this ugly engine. Knowing well her
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part, she ascended a flight of wooden steps, and was thus displayed to the
surrounding multitude, at about the height of a man's shoulders above the
street.
     Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have
seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and with
the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of Divine
Maternity, which so many illustrious painters have vied with one another to
represent; something which should remind him, indeed, but only by
contrast, of that sacred image of sinless motherhood, whose infant was to
redeem the world. Here, there was the taint of deepest sin in the most sacred
quality of human life, working such effect, that the world was only the
darker for this woman's beauty, and the more lost for the infant that she had
borne.
     The scene was not without a mixture of awe, such as must always invest
the spectacle of guilt and shame in a fellow-creature, before society shall
have grown corrupt enough to smile, instead of shuddering, at it. The
witnesses of Hester Prynne's disgrace had not yet passed beyond their
simplicity. They were stern enough to look upon her death, had that been
the sentence, without a murmur at its severity, but had none of the
heartlessness of another social state, which would find only a theme for jest
in an exhibition like the present. Even had there been a disposition to turn
the matter into ridicule, it must have been repressed and overpowered by the
solemn presence of men no less dignified than the Governor, and several of
his counsellors, a judge, a general, and the ministers of the town; all of
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whom sat or stood in a balcony of the meeting-house, looking down upon
the platform. When such personages could constitute a part of the spectacle,
without risking the majesty or reverence of rank and office, it was safely to
be inferred that the infliction of a legal sentence would have an earnest and
effectual meaning. Accordingly, the crowd was sombre and grave. The
unhappy culprit sustained herself as best a woman might, under the heavy
weight of a thousand unrelenting eyes, all fastened upon her, and
concentred at her bosom. It was almost intolerable to be borne. Of an
impulsive and passionate nature, she had fortified herself to encounter the
stings and venomous stabs of public contumely, wreaking itself in every
variety of insult; but there was a quality so much more terrible in the solemn
mood of the popular mind, that she longed rather to behold all those rigid
countenances contorted with scornful merriment, and herself the object.
Had a roar of laughter burst from the multitude,--each man, each woman,
each little shrill-voiced child, contributing their individual parts,--Hester
Prynne might have repaid them all with a bitter and disdainful smile. But,
under the leaden infliction which it was her doom to endure, she felt, at
moments, as if she must needs shriek out with the full power of her lungs,
and cast herself from the scaffold down upon the ground, or else go mad at
once.
     Yet there were intervals when the whole scene, in which she was the
most conspicuous object, seemed to vanish from her eyes, or, at least,
glimmered indistinctly before them, like a mass of imperfectly shaped and
spectral images. Her mind, and especially her memory, was preternaturally
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active, and kept bringing up other scenes than this roughly hewn street of a
little town, on the edge of the Western wilderness; other faces than were
lowering upon her from beneath the brims of those steeple-crowned hats.
Reminiscences, the most trifling and immaterial, passages of infancy and
school-days, sports, childish quarrels, and the little domestic traits of her
maiden years, came swarming back upon her, intermingled with
recollections of whatever was gravest in her subsequent life; one picture
precisely as vivid as another; as if all were of similar importance, or all alike
a play. Possibly, it was an instinctive device of her spirit, to relieve itself,
by the exhibition of these phantasmagoric forms, from the cruel weight and
hardness of the reality.
     Be that as it might, the scaffold of the pillory was a point of view that
revealed to Hester Prynne the entire track along which she had been
treading, since her happy infancy. Standing on that miserable eminence, she
saw again her native village, in Old England, and her paternal home; a
decayed house of gray stone, with a poverty-stricken aspect, but retaining
a half-obliterated shield of arms over the portal, in token of antique gentility.
She saw her father's face, with its bald brow, and reverend white beard,
that flowed over the old-fashioned Elizabethan ruff; her mother's, too, with
the look of heedful and anxious love which it always wore in her
remembrance, and which, even since her death, had so often laid the
impediment of a gentle remonstrance in her daughter's pathway. She saw
her own face, glowing with girlish beauty, and illuminating all the interior
of the dusky mirror in which she had been wont to gaze at it. There she
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beheld another countenance, of a man well stricken in years, a pale, thin,
scholar-like visage, with eyes dim and bleared by the lamp-light that had
served them to pore over many ponderous books. Yet those same bleared
optics had a strange, penetrating power, when it was their owner's purpose
to read the human soul. This figure of the study and the cloister, as Hester
Prynne's womanly fancy failed not to recall, was slightly deformed, with
the left shoulder a trifle higher than the right. Next rose before her, in
memory's picture-gallery, the intricate and narrow thoroughfares, the tall,
gray houses, the huge cathedrals, and the public edifices, ancient in date and
quaint in architecture, of a Continental city; where a new life had awaited
her, still in connection with the misshapen scholar; a new life, but feeding
itself on time-worn materials, like a tuft of green moss on a crumbling wall.
Lastly, in lieu of these shifting scenes, came back the rude market-place of
the Puritan settlement, with all the townspeople assembled and levelling
their stern regards at Hester Prynne,--yes, at herself,--who stood on the
scaffold of the pillory, an infant on her arm, and the letter A, in scarlet,
fantastically embroidered with gold thread, upon her bosom!
     Could it be true? She clutched the child so fiercely to her breast, that it
sent forth a cry; she turned her eyes downward at the scarlet letter, and even
touched it with her finger, to assure herself that the infant and the shame
were real. Yes!--these were her realities,--all else had vanished!