Above the Mob: The Scarlet Letter

In the digital age, platforms that could serve to convey knowledge have become the public pillory for shaming those with whom they disagree. One of the most popular authors of recent times, J. K. Rowling, has suffered the smears. Attacks, and threats for upholding biological truth about women and the importance of guarding gender distinctions in public life. She defends women athletes who complain that they feel threatened when men claiming to be women are allowed into their locker rooms. She supports those who make the same protest regarding school restrooms. He opponents shame her for not agreeing with her. However, public shaming is nothing new.

The Scorned

Set in the 1640’s, The Scarlet Letter tells the story of Hester Prynne, a woman found guilty of adultery and forced to stand on a scaffold with her infant in her arms. She is condemned to wear a scarlet letter “A” sewn onto to her bodice. For all of Boston to judge, she stands on the platform outside the prison. Before she arrives, one woman tells other female spectators that if they were in charge of the sentencing instead of Boston’s magistrates, Hester would not have been so lightly judged. Indeed, one woman would have her branded with a hot iron applied to her forehead while another declares, “she ought to die.” Another young woman, Hester’s only advocate holds a baby of her own and responds, “let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be always in her heart.”

Hester dominates the scaffold. She stands tall and elegant with flowing dark hair. In all ways she appears a lady, dignified and graceful. She holds her baby on her arm, exposing the scarlet “A” she herself has made of fine cloth and embroidered in with gold thread. Artistically executed and striking, it actually seems an appropriate decoration for her gown though clearly not in line with the colonial sumptuary laws that limited expenditures on personal possessions. Yet, the narrator adds, “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.”

The Judges

When the magistrates ask Hester to identify her partner in adultery, she refuses. Those magistrates include the colonial governor Bellingham, the elderly Reverend Wilson, and the young Reverend Dimmesdale, Hester’s pastor. Though calling them good men, the narrator says it would have been difficult to find three men “less capable of sitting in judgment on an erring woman’s heart.” Only one of them, Dimmesdale, believes it is wrong to force a woman “to lay open her heart’s secrets in such broad daylight, and in the presence of so great a multitude.” Yet, when pressed publicly by both the governor and the elder clergyman, he does say to Hester, “thou seest the accountability under which I labor . . . I charge thee to speak out the name of thy fellow-sinner and fellow-sufferer!”

Dimmesdale’s has a reputation for eloquence and faith. His parishioners and colleagues perceive him as having both “a nervous sensibility and a vast power of self-restraint.” However, he also seems uneasy and prefers solitude. Still, when he speaks, they hear “the speech of an angel.” They cannot imagine anyone resisting his words, neither Hester nor her illicit lover.

Hester, however, remains silent. Then Reverend Wilson demands that she confess her partner’s name and suggests her repentance “may avail to take the scarlet letter off thy breast.” Hester responds, not to Wilson, but to her own pastor, “It is too deeply branded . . . would that I might endure his agony as well as mine.” In that response, Dimmesdale must hear the words of a soul more courageous than himself. He is the unnamed father.

The Persecutor

Hester remains silent, appearing indifferent. One spectator, however, has been far from indifferent. Even before her questioning, he declares Hester’s sentence to be wise, believing the scarlet letter should even be engraved on her tombstone. He declares of the unidentified partner, “he will be known!” Not truly indifferent, Hester recognizes the man. She even regards her situation on the scaffold as a temporary protection from speaking to him. He is her husband who failed to arrive in the colony after sending his wife ahead. Only his possible death at sea saved Hester from the death penalty.

A physician, he calls himself Roger Chillingworth in order to hide the fact that he is Hester’s husband. He sent her to Boston while he settled business in Britain. When he did return, Indians captured him and held him for ransom. The circumstances left Hester alone. Still, enraged by her infidelity, Chillingworth goes to her cell to attend to her agitation and asks her to identify the child’s father. When she refuses, he swears to uncover the truth.

Defying Cancel Culture

According to historian Will Durant, one of the four pillars of any culture is a unifying moral code which discourages socially damaging behavior. In Boston Christian beliefs defined that code. However, the novel critiques the excesses of shaming without disapproving of the Puritans’ Christian moral code. The “New Puritans” of wokism, as author Andrew Doyle calls them, would strike Hawthorne as excessive as well.

Though the voices of cancellation demand apologies, they do not forgive. Chillingworth, as Hester’s husband, has a right to be angry, but the extremes to which he takes his inquiries are strikingly like those taken by often anonymous shamers online. Like Rowling, Hester Prynne endures the attacks and the humiliation.

Rowling’s books have suffered no dip in sales. Her attackers have only managed to polarize those on the two sides of the transgender issue. Instead of succumbing to scolds, Hester becomes a successful contributor to Boston society and endures her shame. Hester’s skill as a seamstress becomes highly sought after. Following a very brief stay in prison, she lives alone with her daughter in a cottage on the outskirts of town, Boston’s attitude toward her changes over the years. Though Boston did not forget her adultery, Puritan cancel culture did not cancel Hester. The Scarlet Letter shows how to resist and overcome cancellation by refusing to submit to it. Hester Prynne endures the punishment of an adulteress because she acknowledges her sin, but she refuses to condemn another. She plies her trade as a seamstress.

If every student assigned The Scarlet Letter had read it, perhaps the hypocrisy and extremism of cancel culture might not have grown into the disease of souls it has become. Instead, we have a preponderance of that disease on so-called “social” and other media. The young mother watching Hester on the scaffold, had empathy for her. The people who rage for empathy today, show none, using electronic scaffolds to destroy reputations and lives just as Chillingworth strives to do in the novel. While Hester’s sin is one Western civilization has condemned since the times of Moses, Plato, and Aristotle, it is also the sin for which Christ famously forgave the woman caught in adultery, commanding her to sin no more.