106 pages • 3 hours read
Nathaniel HawthorneThe Scarlet Letter
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1850A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 5-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Hester at Her Needle”
Although daunted by the prospect of living the rest of her life as an outcast, Hester doesn’t consider leaving Salem. Instead, she takes up residence in an isolated cottage near the coast, where she makes her living as a seamstress. She has a talent for sewing intricate pieces suited to funerals, military displays, and government offices:
“Vanity, it may be, chose to mortify itself, by putting on, for ceremonials of pomp and state, the garments that had been wrought by her sinful hands […] But it is not recorded that, in a single instance, her skill was called in aid to embroider the white veil which was to cover the pure blushes of a bride” (75).
Hester dresses her daughter in similarly elaborate clothing but wears plain garments herself. She also spends much of her time sewing basic garments for the poor; given Hester’s general taste for beauty and ornamentation, the narrator speculates that this may be a form of penance. However, despite the social niche Hester manages to carve out for herself, she remains on the outskirts of Salem society and is highly conscious of the judgment of others even as she goes about town conducting business. She also begins to feel that the letter she wears gives her a unique and painful insight into the hidden sins of others.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Pearl”
The name Hester chooses for her child—Pearl—reflects her sense of the girl’s preciousness. Nevertheless, Hester fears that the circumstances of Pearl’s conception will taint her character. As Pearl grows older, these fears seem justified; although Pearl can be loving and affectionate, she’s also capricious and temperamental. Pearl’s behavior often strikes others as un-childlike, if not altogether inhuman: “She seemed rather an airy sprite, which, after playing its fantastic sports for a little while upon the cottage-floor, would flit away with a mocking smile” (82).
Hester’s ostracism extends to Pearl, who grows up isolated from and mocked by other children. She responds with anger and scorn, choosing instead to play with toys she crafts from her surroundings. Pearl also displays a strange fascination with the scarlet letter Hester wears, often smiling at it in a knowing way.
Pearl’s behavior unnerves Hester; one day, as Pearl is gathering flowers and scattering them over the scarlet letter, Hester wonders aloud who her daughter is. She grows increasingly alarmed when Pearl denies having been sent to Hester by God; instead Pearl demands that Hester tell her where she came from. The exchange reminds Hester that many people in Salem believe Pearl was fathered by a demon.
Chapter 7 Summary: “The Governor’s Hall”
One day Hester visits Governor Bellingham on the pretext of delivering a pair of gloves. In reality, she wishes to speak to him because there has been talk of giving Pearl—now a toddler—to another family to raise, so that mother and daughter won’t hinder one another’s moral development. Hester brings Pearl with her, dressing her daughter in a red-and-gold outfit reminiscent of the letter. When a group of children threaten to throw mud at the pair, Pearl dashes at them, “resembl[ing], in her fierce pursuit of them, an infant pestilence,—the scarlet fever, or some such half-fledged angel of judgment,—whose mission was to punish the sins of the rising generation” (91).
At the governor’s mansion, a servant says Bellingham is busy and tries to turn Hester away. Hester is insistent, however, so she and Pearl are escorted into the entry hall, where Pearl notices a suit of armor and takes great delight in the way its polished surface distorts what it reflects. She points it out to her mother, who’s alarmed by the way it magnifies both the letter on her bodice and Pearl’s “look of naughty merriment” (94). Hester draws Pearl away to a window overlooking the garden. When Governor Bellingham and several other figures walk into the garden, Pearl shrieks.
Chapter 8 Summary: “The Elf-Child and the Minister”
Governor Bellingham is accompanied by John Wilson, Arthur Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth. Bellingham and Wilson notice Pearl at the window and address her, commenting on her strange dress and odd demeanor. When they realize she’s Hester’s child, they step inside.
Bellingham asks Hester to defend her suitability as a mother, and she claims that her knowledge of sin is precisely what make her a good teacher. He then asks Wilson to lead Pearl through the Christian catechism to assess Hester’s instruction. When asked where she came from, however, Pearl playfully claims to have been plucked off a rose bush.
Bellingham announces his intention to remove Pearl from Hester’s custody. In response, Hester clutches Pearl and turns to Dimmesdale, who speaks on Hester’s behalf: “[I]t is good for this poor, sinful woman that she hath an infant immortality, a being capable of eternal joy or sorrow, confided to her care,—to be trained up by her to righteousness,—to remind her, at every moment, of her fall” (101). Hearing this, Bellingham consents to leave Pearl in Hester’s care.
Pearl approaches Dimmesdale and caresses his hand, but runs off laughing when he kisses her forehead. Meanwhile, Chillingworth wonders aloud whether Pearl’s appearance and temperament could reveal the identity of her father. Wilson, however, believes this question should be left to God.
As Hester and Pear leave, they possibly (according to local legend) encounter Mistress Hibbins, who asks Hester whether she’ll attend a witches’ coven in the forest; Hester declines, though she says she would have pledged herself to the “Black Man” if Bellingham had taken Pearl.
Chapters 5-8 Analysis
As the narrator himself acknowledges, Hester’s decision to remain in Salem may strike readers as strange. He argues, however, that her past experiences and actions continue to exert so much influence over her that leaving the place where they occurred is simply unthinkable:
“[T]here is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the post where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime” (72).
Broadly speaking, the novel suggests that the past’s destiny-like “fatality” is a destructive force—one that overrides individual free will and binds people to harmful or outdated practices. Figuratively, this is one reason why the narrator describes the relationship between Hester and Chillingworth as unnatural: it ties a woman with most of her life still ahead of her to a relic of a “decaying” past.
Another character with a complex relationship to the past is Hester’s daughter Pearl. On one hand, the narrator states that her temperament and interests are deeply intertwined with her mother’s history, as “the warfare of Hester’s spirit, at that epoch, was perpetuated in Pearl,” and Hester recognizes Pearl’s “wild, desperate, defiant mood, the flightiness of her temper, and even some of the very cloud-shapes of gloom and despondency that had brooded in her heart” (82). Relatedly, Pearl functions both in and outside the narrative as a symbol of Hester’s prior sins, showing an immediate interest in and affinity for an even more obvious emblem of Hester’s actions: the scarlet letter itself.
In another sense, however, Pearl appears uniquely unconstrained by history. According to the narrator, she lacks “the disease of sadness, which almost all children, in these latter days, inherit, with the scrofula, from the troubles of their ancestors” (160-61). In fact, far from inheriting the “sadness” of her ancestors, Pearl seems for much of the narrative to have no human ancestors at all. Hester and Pearl’s first appearance in the novel contains numerous echoes of the biblical story of Jesus’s conception; Hester, for instance, claims her daughter “shall never know an earthly [father]” (63) when refusing to name her lover. As time goes on, Pearl’s eccentricities lead to additional, darker speculation about her parentage: Hester “half playfully” questions whether Pearl is truly her child, Pearl claims to have “been plucked by her mother off the bush of wild roses” (99), and much of Salem believes that Pearl was fathered by a demon.
That Salem sees Pearl as dangerous or even evil isn’t surprising, given that she exists not only outside the bounds of history and tradition, but also of society itself. Her mother’s ostracism ensures that Pearl is a “born outcast of the infantile world. An imp of evil, emblem and product of sin, she had no right among christened infants” (84). As a result, Pearl grows up with no human connections beyond the one she shares with her mother. She is so shut out of society that even in play she seems unable to imagine a social relationship that isn’t adversarial: “She never created a friend, but seemed always to be sowing broadcast the dragon’s teeth whence sprung a harvest of armed enemies, against whom she rushed to battle” (85). Pearl is instead much more at home in the natural world; the novel often likens her to a bird and at several points describes her adorning herself with things like flowers or seaweed. This wildness only makes Pearl appear more threatening to those around her; for a society like Salem, which is intolerant of any deviation from laws and norms, a person who seems unable to comprehend the very existence of those norms is inherently dangerous. This is the case with Pearl, who “[can]not be made amenable to rules” (81) no matter how hard Hester tries to discipline her.
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