This story of temptation and survival is told so expertly between the lines, that everything important is never actually written. Nevertheless, the reader has no problem understanding what's happening and picking sides. Hawthorne is able to express a thoroughly modern point of view without deviating from the language of Puritanism, but subverting it from within.
Quotes:
Be it accepted as a proof that all was not corrupt in this poor victim of her own frailty, and man’s hard law, that Hester Prynne yet struggled to believe that no fellow-mortal was guilty like herself.
Pearl was a born outcast of the infantile world. An imp of evil, emblem and product of sin, she had no right among christened infants.
Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared.
the freedom of a broken law
It must have been a work of vast ability in the somniferous school of literature.
Had a man seen old Roger Chillingworth, at that moment of his ecstasy, he would have had no need to ask how Satan comports himself, when a precious human soul is lost to heaven, and won into his kingdom. But what distinguished the physician’s ecstasy from Satan’s was the trait of wonder in it!
It kept him down, on a level with the lowest; him, the man of ethereal attributes, whose voice the angels might else have listened to and answered! But this very burden it was, that gave him sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind; so that his heart vibrated in unison with theirs, and received their pain into itself, and sent its own throb of pain through a thousand other hearts, in gushes of sad, persuasive eloquence.
Little accustomed, in her long seclusion from society, to measure her ideas of right and wrong by any standard external to herself, Hester saw or seemed to see that there lay a responsibility upon her, in reference to the clergyman, which she owed to no other, nor to the whole world besides.
It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates.
The letter was the symbol of her calling. Such helpfulness was found in her,so much power to do, and power to sympathize,that many people refused to interpret the scarlet A by its original signification. They said that it meant Able; so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman’s strength.
Indeed, the same dark question often rose into her mind, with reference to the whole race of womanhood. Was existence worth accepting, even to the happiest among them? [...] As a first step, the whole system of society is to be torn down, and built up anew. Then, the very nature of the opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit, which has become like nature, is to be essentially modified, before woman can be allowed to assume what seems a fair and suitable position. Finally, all other difficulties being obviated, woman cannot take advantage of these preliminary reforms, until she herself shall have undergone a still mightier change.
It lies not in the pleasure of the magistrates to take off this badge, calmly replied Hester. Were I worthy to be quit of it, it would fall away of its own nature, or be transformed into something that should speak a different purport.
Roger Chillingworth was a striking evidence of man’s faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil’s office.
You wrong yourself in this, said Hester, gently. You have deeply and sorely repented. Your sin is left behind you, in the days long past. Your present life is not less holy, in very truth, than it seems in people’s eyes.
We are not, Hester, the worst sinners in the world.
Heaven would show mercy, rejoined Hester, hadst thou but the strength to take advantage of it.
Their immediate posterity, the generation next to the early emigrants, wore the blackest shade of Puritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all the subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up. We have yet to learn again the forgotten art of gayety.
As was usually the case wherever Hester stood, a small vacant area a sort of magic circle had formed itself about her, into which, though the people were elbowing one another at a little distance, none ventured, or felt disposed to intrude.
as her tears fell upon her father’s cheek, they were the pledge that she would grow up amid human joy and sorrow, nor forever do battle with the world, but be a woman in it
Among many morals which press upon us from the poor minister’s miserable experience, we put only this into a sentence: Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!
It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom.
She assured them, too, of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven’s own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness.
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