Written by Daivik Sharma
This is a thought that's been lingering in my mind for a while now, when I read this quote from The Scarlet Letter:
“To say the truth, there was much need of professional assistance, not merely for Hester herself, but more urgently for the child; who, drawing its sustenance from the maternal bosom, seemed to have drank in with it all the turmoil, the anguish and despair, which pervaded the mother’s system. It now withered in convulsions of pain, and was a forcible type, in its little frame, of the moral agony which Hester Prynne had borne throughout the day” (Hawthorne 79).
In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, after Hester Prynne endures her public humiliation and mental torture, she falls into a state of “nervous excitement”, while her child withers in physical “convulsions of pain” (Hawthorne 79). The diction of the words “turmoil”, “anguish”, “despair”, “withered”, “pain”, and “agony” describe the extreme suffering Hester Prynne undergoes and the excessive pain that passes onto her child physically (Hawthorne 79). The child’s physical spectacle of pain reveals to the reader how much Hester mentally suffers on the scaffold, as Hester never outwardly expresses her agony to the public nor to the reader. Hawthorne’s excessive use of negatively connotative words highlights the child’s helplessness and misery, victimizing the child in the reader’s mind; seeing the domino effect of Hester’s punishment exerted on her daughter, an innocent victim, provokes a sense of sympathy from the reader. The passage suggests that Hester’s daughter drinks in the moral anguish from her mother’s body through breastfeeding, as the negativity from Hester’s punishment resides in her system. The significance of this transfer of pain aids in the plot of the novel, as it foreshadows the extreme amount of suffering the child will endure for the rest of her life as consequence for her mother’s sin. In this Puritan society, Hester’s daughter will be subject to discrimination similar to her mother’s, simply for having been born through sin. During her public humiliation, Hester holds her daughter up on the scaffold with her under obligation, as if her daughter was being punished for the same sentence. Additionally, the fact that the symbol for Hester’s sin, despair, and alienation rests upon her chest while she breastfeeds her daughter in the jail cell signifies how Hester’s sin holds responsibility for the shared anguish of mother and daughter. Regardless of Hester’s husband’s treatment, the permanency of Hester’s punishment indicates that the suffering of her daughter and herself will haunt them for the rest of their lives.
Daivik Sharma is a young aspiring writer from Punjab, India. At 18 years old, he is determined to develop his craft and become a better writer. You can find him having conversations with himself (it’s perfectly normal, he promises!) and watching the clouds drift through the sky.
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