Hawthorne’s humor; Hester’s house

First, it would be easy, amid Hawthorne’s high moral seriousness and such gothic trappings as the fearsome prison gates and the pillory scaffold, to miss the flashes of restrained, subversive wit in the authorial narration. When Hester is commanded by the reverend John Wilson, the narration disarms us by revealing that Wilson’s “kind and genial spirit” is for him a source of “shame,” before “the eldest clergyman of Boston” is compared to baby Pearl: “his gray eyes, accustomed to the shaded light of his study, were winking, like those of Hester’ infant, in the unadulterated sunshine.” This solemn, law-giving patriarch, the narration implies, should stick to the cozy confines of his parsonage.

I’m also struck by the externalization of theme in the physical details of Hester’s house, the “small thatched cottage” she retreats to after prison. The cottage “stood on the shore, looking across a basin of the sea at the forest-covered hills, towards the west.” At the outset of her new existence as pariah, the only home available to Hester is this meager shelter “on the shore,” on a brink, a threshold, a continually shifting boundary, an unstable edge between the solid land of the New World and the ancient sea. The cottage gives upon a “basin of the sea” at once particular and universal; this cove on the Massachusetts coastline is also the bowl of the sea itself, the immense saline womb, a womb which is also Hester’s. This basin separates the shorefront cottage from “forest-covered hills, towards the west,” spatial data pointing us towards conquest, expansion, the ever-receding “frontier.” At Hester’s back is the awful Puritan past, in sight before her are the western hills, with all the promise and menace of the still primeval forest. The cottage itself is fringed with a “clump of scrubby trees,” probably pitch pine or scrub oak, that “did not so much conceal the cottage from view, as seem to denote that here was some object which . . . ought to be, concealed.” Here we detect a certain animism that for Hawthorne brings the landscape alive, endowing the forest and its trees with sentience. The dwarf pines conspire with Hester’s persecutors and, like the letter embroidered on her breast, announce her sin to all witnesses. Even those unacquainted with her infamy will know the single mother banished to this “little, lonely” place “ought to be concealed”; the trees will tell them.