Tonight, we are reading Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter," a tale whose rich layers unfold into a lullaby of morality and compassion, perfect for easing you into a night of deep, restful sleep. As we stroll through the austere streets of a Puritan colony, we'll accompany Hester Prynne, a woman whose embroidered scarlet "A" becomes a powerful emblem of sin and societal judgment. But as the night deepens, so does our understanding of Hester's quiet dignity and the complexities of her community that both condemns and upholds her. So, snuggle up in your blankets and have sweet dreams.
The music in this episode is A Love That Once Was by Gavin Luke.
BetterHelp Visit our sponsor at BetterHelp.com/dreamful for 10% off your first month.
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
Tonight, we are reading Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter," a tale whose rich layers unfold into a lullaby of morality and compassion, perfect for easing you into a night of deep, restful sleep. As we stroll through the austere streets of a Puritan colony, we'll accompany Hester Prynne, a woman whose embroidered scarlet "A" becomes a powerful emblem of sin and societal judgment. But as the night deepens, so does our understanding of Hester's quiet dignity and the complexities of her community that both condemns and upholds her. So, snuggle up in your blankets and have sweet dreams.
The music in this episode is A Love That Once Was by Gavin Luke.
BetterHelp Visit our sponsor at BetterHelp.com/dreamful for 10% off your first month.
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
Welcome to Dreamful Podcast. I would like to start this episode by thanking our newest supporters, tanya Button, neve McColl and Catherine Lincoln Manwearing. Thank you all so much and I hope you have the sweetest of dreams. If you would like to support the show and gain access to the subscriber-only episodes while receiving a shout out, visit DreamfulStoriescom and, on the support page, find a link to become a Buzzsprout supporter or subscribe via Supercast. If you listen on Spotify, this show is sponsored by BetterHelp.
Speaker 1:
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Speaker 1:
The story I'll be reading to you was required literature when I was in high school, but the funny thing is I despised reading this book because of how Nathaniel Hawthorne's flowery language made me so tired. Well, I guess that makes it the perfect book for this podcast. I hope you enjoy this sleepy, sleepy novel, the Scarlet Letter. So snuggle up in your blankets and have sweet dreams. A throng of bearded men in sad-colored garments and grey steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods and others bare-headed, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak and studded with iron spikes.
Speaker 1:
The founders of a new colony, whatever utopian, of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery and another portion as a site of prison. In accordance with this rule, it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison house somewhere in the vicinity of Cornhill almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial ground on Isaac Johnson's lot and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel. Certain it is that some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather stains and other indications of age which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous ironwork of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the new world. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era For this ugly edifice. And between it and the wheel track of the street was a grass plot much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, apple, peru and such unsightly vegetation which evidently found something congenial in the soil and its so early born the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But on one side, the portal and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rosebush, covered in this month of June, with its delicate gems which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoners who went in and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom. In token that the deep heart of nature could pity and be kind to him, this rosebush, by strange chance, has been kept alive in history. But whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it or whether, as there is fair authority for believing it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sated Anne Hutchinson as she entered the prison door.
Speaker 1:
We shall not dig upon us to determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise. Then pluck one of its flowers and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom that it may be found along the track or relieve the darkening clothes of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.
Speaker 1:
The grass plot before the jail in prison lane on a certain summer morning not less than two centuries ago, was occupied by a pretty large number of the inhabitants of Boston, all with their eyes intently fastened on the iron-clamped Okondore. Amongst any other population or to a later period in the history of New England, the grim rigidity, the petrified, the bearded physiognomies of these good people would have augured some awful business in hand. It could have butoken nothing short of the anticipated execution of some noted culprit on whom the sentence of a legal tribunal had but confirmed the verdict of public sentiment. But in that early severity of the Puritan character, an inference of this kind could not so indubitably be drawn. It might be that sluggish bonservant or an undutiful child whom his parents had given over to the civil authority was to be corrected at the whipping post. It might be that an antinomian, a Quaker or some other heterodox religionist was to be scorched out of the town, or an idle and vagrant Indian whom the white man's firewater had made riotous about the streets was to be driven with stripes into the shadow of the forest. It might, too, that a witch like old Mistress Hibbins, the bitter-tempered widow of the magistrate, was to die upon the gallows.
Speaker 1:
In other case, it was very much the same solemnity of demeanor on the part of the spectators as befitted of people amongst whom religion and law were almost identical and in whose character both were so thoroughly interfused that the mildest and the severest acts of public discipline were like, made venerable and awful. Meager indeed and cold was the sympathy that a transgressor might look for from such bystanders at the scaffold. On the other hand, a penalty which, in our days, would infer a degree of mocking, infamy and ridicule, might then be invested with almost a stern dignity as the punishment of death itself. It was a circumstance to be noted, on the summer morning when our story begins its course, that the women, of whom there were several in the crowd, appeared to take a peculiar interest in whatever penal inflection might be expected to ensue. The age had not so much refinement that any sense of impropriety restrained the weirs of petticoat and far-thin-gail from stepping forth into the public ways and wedging their not unsustainable persons, if occasion were, into the throng nearest to the scaffold of the execution.
Speaker 1:
Morally as well as materially, there was a coarser fiber 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 slider of 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 not been the not altogether unsuitable representative of the sex. They were, her countrywomen in the beef and ale of their native land, with a moral diet not a wit more refined and turned largely into a composition. The bright morning sun therefore shone on broad shoulders and well-developed busts and long round and ruddy cheeks that had ripened in the far off island and had hardly yet grown paler or thinner.
Speaker 1:
In the atmosphere of New England, there was, moreover, a boldness and a redundancy of speech among these matrons, as most of them seemed to be, that would startle us at the present day, whether in respect to his report or its volume of tone. Good wives, said a hard-featured dame of fifty. I'll tell ye a piece of my mind. It would be greatly for the public behoof, if we women, being of mature age and church members in good repute, should have the handling of such malefactresses as this Hester Prynne. But think ye gossip's. If the Hussie stood up for judgment before his five that are now here in a knot together, would she come off with such a sentence as the worshipful magistrates have awarded Mary? I try not. People say, said another, that the reverend Master Dimmesdale, her garly pastor, takes it very grievously to heart that such a scandal should have come up upon his congregation. The magistrates are God-fearing gentlemen, but merciful over much. That is the truth.
Speaker 1:
Added a third at home. No, matron. At the very least they should have put the brand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne's forehead. The Master would have winced at that. I warned me.
Speaker 1:
But she, the naughty baggage, little will she care what they put upon the bodice of her gown. My, look you. She may cover it with a brooch or such heathenish adornment, and so walk the streets as brave as ever. Ah, but interposed more softly a young wife holding a child by the hand. Let her cover the mark as she will. The pang of it will always be in her heart. What do we talk of? Marks and brands, whether on the bodice of her gown or the flesh of her forehead, or the ugly? As the most pitiless of these self-constituted judges, this woman is brought shame upon us all and ought to die. Is there not law for it? Truly, there is both in the scripture and the statute book. And let the magistrates who have made it of no effect thank themselves as their own wives and daughters go astray. Mercy on us, good wife, exclaimed a man in the crowd. Is there no virtue in woman, save what springs from a wholesome fear of the gallows?
Speaker 1:
That is the hardest word, yet hush now gossips, for the lock is turning in the prison door, and here comes Mistress Prynne herself. The door of the jail being flung open from within, there appeared in the first place like a black shadow emerging into sunshine. The grim and grisly presence of the town beetle was assured by a side and his staff of office in his hand. This personage prefigured and represented in his aspect the hold dismal severity of the puretenant code of law which it was his business to administer, in its final and closest application to the offender. Starting forth the official staff in his left hand, he laid his right upon the shoulder of a young woman, whom he thus drew forward Until in the threshold of the prison door, she repelled him by an action marked with natural dignity and force of character, as, stepped into the open air, as if by her own free will, she borne her arms a child, a baby of some three months old, who winced and turned aside its little face from the two vivid light of day because its existence here to fore had brought it acquainted only with the great twilight of a dungeon or other darksome apartment of the prison. When the young woman, the mother of this child, stood fully revealed before the crowd, it seemed to be her first impulse to class the infant closely to her bosom, not so much by an impulse of motherly affection as that she might thereby conceal a certain token which was wrought or fastened into a dress In a moment, however wisely judging that one token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide another. She took the baby on her arm and, with a burning blush and yet a haughty smile and a glance that would not be abashed, looked around at her townspeople and neighbors. On the breast of her gown in fine-wred cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A. It was so artistically done and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance, a fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore and which was of a splendor in accordance with the taste of the age but greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony.
Speaker 1:
The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance on a large scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam, and a face which, besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. She was Lady Lek too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those days, characterized by certain state and dignity rather than by the delicate, a venescent and indescribable grace which is now recognized as its indication. It never had as to print a pureed-more Lady Lek, in the antique interpretation of the term, than as she issued from the prison. Those who had before known her and had expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by disastrous cloud were astonished and even startled to perceive how her beauty shone out and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped. It may be true that to a sensitive observer, there was something exquisitely painful in it. Her attire, which indeed she had wrought for the occasion in prison and had modeled after her own fancy, seemed to express the attitude of her spirit, the desperate recklessness of her mood, by its wild and picturesque peculiarity. But the point which drew her eyes and, as it were, transfigured the wearer, so that both men and women who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne were now impressed, as if they beheld her for the first time, was that scarlet letter so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom? It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.
Speaker 1:
She has good skill at her needle, that's certain, remarked one of her female spectators. But had ever a woman before this brazen hussy contrived such a way of showing it? Why gossips? What is it but to laugh in the faces of our godly magistrates and make a pride out of what they, worthy gentlemen, meant for a punishment? It were, well, muttered, the most ironed visage of the old dames. If we stripped Madame Hester's rich gown off her dainty shoulders and asked for the red letter, would she have stitched so curiously? I would store a rag of mine, own romantic flanneled, make a fitter one. Oh peace, neighbors, peace, whispered their youngest companion. Do not let her hear you. Not a stitch in that embroidered letter, but she has felt it in her heart.
Speaker 1:
The grim beetle now made a gesture with his staff. Make way, good people, make way in the king's name, cried he. Open a passage and I promise ye mistress' print shall be set where man, woman and child may have a fair side of her brave apparel from this time till an hour past meridian. A blessing on the righteous colony of the Massachusetts, where iniquity is dragged out into the sunshine. Come along, madame Hester, and show your scarlet letter.
Speaker 1:
In the marketplace, a lane was forthwith opened through the crowd of spectators, preceded by the beetle and attended by an irregular procession of stern-browed men and unkindly visaged women. Hester print set forth towards the place appointed for her punishment A crowd of eager and curious schoolboys understanding little of the matter in hand except that it gave them a half holiday. A friend before her progress, turning their heads continually to stare into her face and at the winking baby in her arms and at the ignominious letter on her breast. It was no great distance, in those days, from the prison door to the marketplace. Measured by the prisoner's experience, however, it might be reckoned a journey of some length, for, haughty as her demeanor was, she perchance underwent an agony from every footstep of those that's wronged to see her, as if her heart had been flung to the street for them all to spurn and trample on. In our nature, however, there is a provision, a like, marvelous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pain that wrinkles after it. With almost a serene deportment, therefore, hester print passed through this portion of her ordeal and came to a sort of scaffold at the western extremity of the marketplace. It stood nearly beneath the eaves of Boston's earliest church and appeared to be a fixture there.
Speaker 1:
In fact, this scaffold constituted a portion of a penal machine which now, for two or three generations past, has been merely historical and traditionary among us, but was held in the old time to be as a factual, an agent in the promotion of good citizenship, as ever was a guillotine among the terrorists of France. It was, in short, the platform of the pillory, and above it rose the framework of that instrument of discipline so fashioned as to confine the human head and its tight grasp and thus hold it up to the public gaze. The very ideal of ignominy was embodied and made manifest in this contrivance of wood and iron. There can be no outrage be thinks against their common nature, whatever be the delinquencies of the individual, no outrage more flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his face for shame, as it was the essence of this punishment. To do so In Hester Prenn's instance, however, is not infrequently in other cases. Her sentence bore, as she should, stand a certain time upon the platform, but without undergoing that gripe about the neck and confinement of the head, the proneness to which was the most devilish characteristic of this ugly engine.
Speaker 1:
Knowing well her part, she ascended a flight of wooden steps and was thus displayed to the surrounding multitude at about the height of a man's shoulders above the street. Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mind 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 something which should remind him indeed, but only by contrast of that sacred image of sinless motherhood whose infant was to redeem the world. Here there was the taint of deepest sin in the most sacred quality of human life, working such effect that the world was only the darker for this woman's beauty and the more lost for the infant that she borne. The scene was not without a mixture of all, such as must always invest the spectacle of guilt and shame in a fellow creature before society shall have grown cropped enough to smile instead of shuddering at it. The witnesses of his reprens'd disgrace had not yet passed beyond their simplicity. They were stern enough to look upon her death. Had that been the sentence, without a murmur at severity, but had none of the heartlessness of another social state, which would find only a theme for jest in an exhibition like the present. Even had there been a disposition to turn the matter into ridicule, it must have been repressed and overpowered by the solemn presence of men no less dignified than the governor and several of his councillors, a judge, a general and the ministers of the town, all of whom sat or stood in a balcony of the meeting house looking down upon the platform. When such personages could constitute a part of the spectacle without risking the majesty or reverence of rank and office, it was safely to be inferred that the infliction of a legal sentence would have an earnest and effectual meaning. Accordingly, the crowd was somber and grave.
Speaker 1:
The unhappy culprit sustained herself as best a woman might, under the heavy weight of a thousand unrelenting eyes all fastened upon her and concentrated at her bosom, and was almost intolerable. To be born Of an impulsive and passionate nature, she had fortified herself to encounter the stings and venomous stabs of public contumely, wreaking itself in every variety of insult. But there was equality so much more terrible in the solemn mood of the popular mind that she longed rather to behold all those rigid countenances contorted with scornful merriment, and herself the object At a roar of laughter, burst from the multitude, each man, each woman, each little shrill-voiced child contributing their individual parts. Hester Prynne might have ever paid them all with a bitter and disdainful smile. Yet under the leaden inflection which it was her doom to endure, she felt at moments as if she must knees shriek out with the full power of her lungs and cast herself in the scaffold down upon the ground, or else go mad at once.
Speaker 1:
Yet there were intervals when the whole scene in which she was the most conspicuous object seemed to vanish from her eyes, or at least glimmered indistinctly before them like a mass of imperfectly shaped and spectral images. Her mind, and especially her memory, was pretty naturally active and kept bringing up other scenes than this roughly hewn straight of a little town on the edge of the western wilderness. Other faces, then, were lowering upon her from beneath the brim. So those stable-crowned hats from, in this sense, of the trifling and immaterial passages of infancy and school days, sports, childish quarrels and the little domestic traits of her maiden years came swarming back upon her, intermingled with recollections of whatever was gravest in her subsequent life, one picture precisely as vivid as another, as if all were of similar importance, were all alike a play. Possibly it was an indistinctive device of her spirit to relieve itself by the exhibition of these phantasmagogoric forms from the cruel weight and hardness of the reality.
Speaker 1:
Be that as it might, the scaffold of the pillory was a point of view that revealed a Hester Prynne, the entire track along which she had been treading since her happy infancy. Staring on that miserable eminence, she saw again her native village in Old England and her paternal home, a decayed house of grey stone with a poverty-stricken aspect but retaining a half obliterated shield of arms over the portal, in token of antique gentility. She saw her father's face, with his bald brow and reverend white beard, a float over the old-fashioned Elizabethan rough. Her mother's too, with a look of heedful and anxious love which had always worn her remembrance and which face, glowing with girlish beauty and eliminating all the interior, even since her death, had so often laid the impediment of a gentle remonstrance.
Speaker 1:
In her daughter's pathway, she saw her own of the dusky mirror in which she had been wont to gaze. At there, she beheld another countenance of a man whilst broken in years a pale, thin, scholar-like visage, with eyes dim and bleared by the lamp-light that had served them to pour over many ponderous books. Yet those same-bleared optics had a strange penetrating power, and it was their owner's purpose to read the human soul. This figure of the study in the cloister, as Hester Prinz's womanly fancy failed knot to recall, was slightly deformed, with the left shoulder trifle higher than the right. Hester rose before her in memory's picture gallery the intricate and narrow thoroughfares, the tall grey houses, the huge cathedrals and the public edifices, ancient and date and quaint in architecture of a continental city where a new life had awaited her, still in connection with the misshapen scholar. A new life but feeding itself on time-worn materials, like a tough, dark-grain moss on a crumbling wall.
Speaker 1:
Lastly, in lieu of these shifting scenes came back the rude marketplace of the Puritan settlement, with all the townspeople assembled and levelling their stern regards at Hester Prinz. Yes, it herself who stood on the scaffold of the pillory, an infant on her arm and the letter A in scarlet, fantastically embroidered with gold thread, upon her bosom. Could it be true? She clutched the child so fiercely to her breast that it sent forth a cry. She turned her eyes downward at the scarlet letter and even touched it with her finger to assure herself that the infant and the shame were real. Yes, these were her realities. All else had vanished.
