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Movie Review: The Scarlet Letter (the Book and the Adaptations) [1]

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Date: 2025-02-01

SPOILER ALERT!

Most movie versions of The Scarlet Letter jump right into the story of Hester Prynne in Boston during the middle of the seventeenth century, leaving out “The Custom-House,” the introductory chapter of the novel. I suppose the main purpose of this chapter is to give the impression that the story Nathaniel Hawthorne is about to tell is based on true events, in which a woman is forced to wear a scarlet “A” on her bosom for being guilty of adultery.

The 1979 television mini-series does go so far as to include that part of “The Custom-House” where the author discovers some documents, a manuscript, and a scarlet letter, which become the basis for the story.

That, however, comes only toward the end of that chapter. The purpose of the first part would seem to be that of explaining the author’s sentimental attachment to Salem, Massachusetts, where the custom-house is located, while at the same time distancing himself from the Puritans that founded it and of whom he is a descendant. He says that these Puritans would likely regard him as an idler, while he in turn casually remarks that these ancestors of his may well be spending eternity in Hell for their cruelty.

So, what was it that made these Puritans so evil? Hawthorne seems to be of the opinion that it was the fact that their women were ugly. Perhaps he thought that it was being unattractive that made these women mean and intolerant, but I get the impression that he believes that an ugly body will just naturally have an ugly soul. Either way, these women provided the cruelty that lies at the heart of Puritanism.

It is our good fortune, Hawthorne avers, that in each successive generation, the women became more attractive, and with that were blessed with a more pleasant disposition, until the time of his writing, where the women were as pretty and good-natured as any man might want. And so it was that as the women became better looking, the Puritan religion dissipated.

In “Chapter II, The Market-Place,” Hawthorne describes the women that are waiting in the crowd to see the humiliation of Hester Prynne and her baby:

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.

As noted above, Hawthorne would have us believe that the story he tells is true, based as it is on the documents and manuscript found in the custom-house. So, we have to wonder how he knows all this about the women. Was there a letter among the documents in the custom-house where someone comments, “Boy! These women in Boston sure are ugly.” And was there an additional document, dated many decades later, where someone comments, “It sure is strange the way Sally is so much better looking than her mother was, and who in turn has had a daughter even prettier than she.”

Now, we readily grant that in creating a story based on the documents and manuscript he discovered, Hawthorne must be allowed the freedom to imagine what thoughts are running through someone’s head or what that person might be doing when alone in a room. But his assertions regarding the increasing beauty of women in the two subsequent centuries go beyond what license we willingly permit the author for the sake of the story and take us into the realm of some kind of fantastic metaphysics in which spiritual progress has been a function of the way women were becoming prettier.

As for the men, one of the women in the crowd comments, “The magistrates are God-fearing gentlemen, but merciful overmuch,—that is a truth.” She goes on to say that instead of having to wear a scarlet “A” on the bodice of her gown, Hester should have had an “A” branded on her forehead with a hot iron. However, another woman, whom Hawthorne characterizes as “the ugliest as well as the most pitiless of these self-constituted judges,” says she should be put to death.

Though Hawthorne believes that the essence of Puritanism lay in its ugly women, yet he does not mean to imply that such women were revered. Rather, they often seem to be despised. One of the men in the crowd, upon hearing what these women have to say, reprimands them, calling them “gossips” and telling them to be quiet.

In fact, ugly women were in danger of being accused of witchcraft. The very scaffold upon which Hester is to be displayed with her baby and scarlet letter is the one where Hawthorne says a Mistress Hibbins, who had a “sour” face and an “ill-omened physiognomy,” would be hanged three years hence for being a witch.

Hester’s beauty, on the other hand, was sufficient to remind one of the Virgin Mary:

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….

Lest he be accused of blasphemy, however, Hawthorne is quick to add that this thought would occur to that imagined Papist “only by contrast [with] that sacred image of sinless motherhood, whose infant was to redeem the world.”

Still, Hawthorne’s prejudice regarding a woman’s physical features is merely being carried to the next level: if ugly women are vindictive, and attractive women forgiving, then a beautiful woman must partake of the divine, as indeed Hester does as the years go by, becoming a “Sister of Mercy,” being of aid and comfort to the very people that had condemned her, who came to say of her that she was “so kind to the poor, so helpful to the sick, so comfortable to the afflicted!”

In fact, it is Hester’s beauty that is a major reason why she is not being put to death, as a man in the crowd explains to a stranger, the very man who turns out to be her husband, Roger Prynne:

“Now, good Sir, our Massachusetts magistracy, bethinking themselves that this woman is youthful and fair, and doubtless was strongly tempted to her fall,—and that, moreover, as is most likely, her husband may be at the bottom of the sea,—they have not been bold to put in force the extremity of our righteous law against her. The penalty thereof is death. But in their great mercy and tenderness of heart, they have doomed Mistress Prynne to stand only a space of three hours on the platform of the pillory, and then and thereafter, for the remainder of her natural life, to wear a mark of shame upon her bosom.”

From this we may gather that had Hester been plain and frumpy, the magistrates would have been less merciful, reasoning that because no man would have gone out of his way to tempt her, she would have had less excuse for giving in to her sexual desires, probably luring to her bed some hapless fellow who succumbed in a moment of weakness. Justice is not blind.

The movies of 1926 and 1934 are faithful to the novel in this regard, where we see unattractive women expressing their hostility toward Hester, with only the occasional young woman with delicate features expressing some degree of sympathy for her. In the 1934 version, while the homely women watch with stern faces as the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale preaches about sin and iniquity, it is a young, pretty woman that falls asleep, whom the usher has to wake up. We know that she is of the future, where pretty women will discard the dark days of Puritanism.

In the 1979 version, however, this correlation between soul and body is not maintained. There is an attractive woman that is snide and catty to Hester, and Mistress Hibbins appears to be pleasant in appearance.

In any event, while Hawthorne may have delighted in portraying the Puritan religion in the worst possible light, the 1934 version of this story is more circumspect, for it begins with an exculpatory prologue: “Though to us, the customs seem grim and the punishments hard, they were a necessity of the times and helped shape the destiny of a nation.”

How they were a “necessity of the times” is not explained, as if it is a given that these people could not have survived had they been tolerant and forgiving. And while there is no doubt that these Puritans helped to shape the future of this nation, we may take exception to the word “destiny,” which has a positive connotation, for this nation might well have been better off had the Puritans stayed in England.

Of course, this movie was made when the Production Code forbade putting religion in a bad light, and the prologue undoubtedly served to assuage the misgivings of the censors who were not sure there should be a movie version of this novel at all.

In this 1934 version, a man points out that by the laws of Moses, a woman guilty of adultery should be put to death by stoning. He is, of course, referring to Leviticus 20:10-12 and Deuteronomy 22:21-24. This was what the woman in the novel was referring to when she said Hester deserved death. That Hester’s punishment is limited to wearing a scarlet letter is what the other woman meant by saying the men were too merciful.

Speaking of which, in the 1926 version, a man is punished by having to wear a sign saying, “Wanton Gospeller.” There is no reference to this man or his sign in the novel, but we may imagine that he was being punished for preaching from the Bible in a manner inconsistent with what was deemed proper by the Puritan community, presumably by citing those passages that are about love and forgiveness. He might even have had the temerity to relate the story of the adulteress from John 8:1-11. In that community, however, should he have said that the one who is without sin should cast the first stone, he would likely have been pelted many times over.

In the 1934 version, however, the Reverand Arthur Dimmesdale does mention that story from the New Testament to the governor, but since Dimmesdale is the one who got Hester pregnant, his argument is self-serving. It is easy to forgive the sins of which one has been guilty. In any event, the governor dismisses that story about Jesus as being too lenient.

After “The Custom-House,” the story in the novel begins in medias res. However, the 1926 version tells the story chronologically. This spoils the surprise of later discovering that it was Dimmesdale that had sex with Hester, although we so love it when a man of God is brought low after lecturing others about sin that we would likely have hoped for that outcome in any event.

In that 1926 movie, when Dimmesdale finds out that Hester is pregnant, he suggests that they get married. She tells him, however, that she is already married to a man who was supposed to follow her to Boston but never arrived. She suspects he is dead but has no certainty in this regard.

This is a mistake. If Dimmesdale does not know she is married, then presumably no one else in the community knows that either, in which case, she might be guilty only of fornication rather than adultery. However, the novel makes it clear that everyone knows the story of how she married a man in England before coming to Boston.

Still, her being married would not have stopped them from leaving Boston. They should have made plans to leave as soon as she found out she was pregnant. In fact, that is what they eventually plan to do seven years later, only Dimmesdale dies right after his public confession. Considering the fact Hester’s punishment might have been death, he should have gotten her out of town before she was even showing. It would have been the Christian thing to do.

Perhaps this is the biggest objection to the 1995 version, where Dimmesdale does not die after confessing. When he, Hester, and their daughter Pearl all proceed to leave Boston and live happily ever after in the Carolinas, it underscores the fact that they could have done that to begin with. The whole seven years of humiliation and suffering was as pointless as it was unnecessary.

If it is a mystery why Hester and Dimmesdale didn’t leave Boston immediately, it is an even greater mystery why she ever married Roger Prynne. He shows up the day Hester is brought from prison to stand upon the scaffold, holding her baby, and displaying her scarlet letter “A.” Outraged at what he sees, he plans to avenge himself on the man who had sex with her, but as he is ashamed of being a cuckold, he does not reveal himself to be Hester’s husband, but says his last name is Chillingworth.

When he gets a chance to talk to Hester alone, Roger admits that he wronged Hester by persuading her to marry him, for she had youth and beauty, while he was ugly, decaying from old age, misshapen from birth (specifically, a hunchback). She in turn admits that she wronged him, saying only that she told him from the beginning that she felt no love for him nor feigned any. Because they wronged each other, Roger says they are even. He seeks revenge only against the man that wronged them both.

In saying in her defense that she told Roger from the beginning that she neither loved him nor would pretend such love, Hester probably thought herself virtuous, in that she had been honest with Roger. But when a woman is no longer willing to lie to her husband, that marriage is over, and in this case, even before it began.

Given her declaration, we can only wonder why she should have married him. While standing on the scaffold, her memory takes her back to England, from the time she was born until she married Roger and moved with him to Amsterdam. From there, he sent her to America, promising to follow her shortly after tidying up his affairs. But in none of these recollections do we understand why she agreed to marry him. Given how beautiful she is, there should have been plenty of young men to court her, from whom she might have had her pick.

To what end, therefore, does the author make Roger physically repulsive? We can easily imagine an alternative story, one in which Roger was young and handsome when they married, and that they truly loved each other. But when a year went by and he did not show up, it would still be understandable that she would give in to her sexual desires for another man.

The explanation must lie in Hawthorne’s belief in a correlation between spiritual and physical features. The man in this novel that has even more hatred in his heart than the ugly women of Boston is also the one man in the novel who is himself ugly. Remarks are made by various people, including the author, to the effect that Roger is like the “Black Man” or Satan, and that his determination to torment Hester’s lover is akin to Satan’s gaining possession of a man’s soul.

Later in the novel, after Roger has discovered that it was Dimmesdale that impregnated Hester, she tries to talk Roger out of seeking revenge against him. In reply, he says, “It is not granted me to pardon. I have no such power as thou tellest me of. My old faith, long forgotten, comes back to me, and explains all that we do, and all we suffer….” In other words, he was not religious when he married Hester. But now that he is full of so much hatred, he needs religion to give it meaning. To match such wickedness, Hawthornian logic requires that he be deformed.

I noted above that the 1979 version did not maintain the correlation between the physical and spiritual ugliness of the women that was in the novel. It deviated from this even more so in the character of Roger. He was played by Kevin Conway, who was only thirty-seven years old at the time. Conway admitted that Hester’s marriage to Roger was inexplicable, so it was decided that when Roger first arrives in Boston, he would look not like Igor, but rather be depicted as a man of vitality, one whom we might believe Hester could have married and been happy with had things worked out differently. Only later in the movie did the makeup artist make him appear older and fiercer. Needless to say, this requires that we forget what was said earlier about how things were back in England, where Roger had a decaying, misshapen body, and how Hester declared that she did not love him and would not fake it.

The 1995 version tries its hand at explaining why Hester married Roger. Referring to her father, a man asks, “ls it true he was in debt to your husband, and you were the payment?” I suppose such a thought might reasonably occur to a Puritan, for the Bible tells you how to sell your daughter (Exodus 21:7-11). Hester does not answer him, but the audience is expected to accept this, nevertheless. I don’t suppose I need to mention that there is no hint of that in the novel. But then, a lot of stuff goes on in this version that is not in the novel.

After seven years, it finally occurs to Hester to leave Boston. Dimmesdale likes the idea. Somehow, Roger finds out about their plan and books passage on the same ship leaving for Europe, planning on following them wherever they go. However, before they leave, Dimmesdale stands upon the scaffold and confesses his sin, revealing an “A” on his own chest. The strain is so much that he dies.

A year later, Roger dies too, leaving Pearl an inheritance. Yeah, sure, why not?

Hester and Pearl sail to England. After a time, Hester returns, and when she dies, she is buried next to Dimmesdale, sharing a single tombstone, bearing the letter “A.”

As for Pearl herself, she seems to be the happiest person in the novel. As a child, while living with her mother on the outskirts of Boston, she became something of a free spirit, allowed to play and have fun. When she became of age in England, she married an aristocrat. And as she was described, even as a child, as having a “rich and luxuriant beauty,” we can be sure that she sluffed off what little of the Puritan religion she was exposed to.

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