The First Letter

What the scarlet A stands on

"on a field, sable, the letter A, gules." Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

Begin at the end, in the burying ground beside King’s Chapel, where the novel leaves its dead. Two graves, and Hawthorne measures the gap himself: dug with a space between, as if the dust of the two sleepers had no right to mingle. Yet one tombstone serves for both. A single slab at the head, two separated plots beneath it, and on the slab a device cut in the language of heraldry, a herald’s wording for an engraved shield: on a field, sable, the letter A, gules. A red letter on a black ground, set at the single point the two graves share.

That is the last image of the book, and it is a geometry. Two descents that end apart. One mark holding the top. The novel does not close on a character or a moral. It closes on a figure: a shape with a single apex and two nadirs, carved in stone over the people it describes. This essay is about that shape, because the shape was the book’s subject from the first page, worn on a breast for seven years before it was cut over a grave. The letter A is a cross that failed in a particular way, and the way it failed is the story.

The Buckled Cross

Take the cross again: one upright on the plumb line, one arm laid level across it. Now load it. Press down on the figure until it gives, and watch where it gives. The crossing point is the weak joint. Under enough weight the single upright shears along its length, and the two halves of the vertical splay apart at the base, each leaning away from true, each ending at its own point on the ground. The top still meets. The bottom no longer does. And the horizontal does not vanish in the failure; it slides. The arm drops from the crossing down the figure and comes to rest low, a short bar tying the two splayed legs to each other so they cannot finish the separation they have begun.

The result is the capital A. Apex held, vertical divided, two nadirs, crossbar fallen. It is not an arbitrary mark that happens to resemble a damaged cross. It is what the cross becomes under load: the union at the top surviving as a single point, the one line to the source split into two descents, the open level arm that once swept the whole plane reduced to a private tie between the two parties of the failure. A cross says one upright and a whole plane of neighbors level beneath it. An A says the upright broke, and what is left of the horizontal joins only these two.

Lay the letter on the lovers and it reads without strain. The apex is the act, the one point the two lines genuinely share, the union that was real whatever else it was. From it the two descents: hers down the public side, sentenced, displayed, worn in daylight; his down the hidden side, unconfessed, carved inward, worn under the shirt. Two falls from one point, neither line plumb, each held at its angle only by the existence of the other. A house divided against itself, drawn as a letter. Out of plumb, both of them, and out of plumb in opposite directions, which is the only way two lines from one apex can both be wrong.

Whose figure this is, mine or the town’s, has a documented answer, and it is coming.

The Shape That Stands

Here is the trap in the figure, and it is the best thing in it. The A is stronger than the cross.

Ask any builder. The triangle is the rigid shape, the one form that cannot rack or fold, the truss, the gable, the brace. Two splayed legs and a tie bar stand on their own and carry weight besides. The plumb line can do neither. A plumb line does not stand at all; it hangs, sustained from a single point above it, useless the instant the suspension is cut. The true figure is dependent by nature. The fallen figure supports itself.

That is not a flaw in the reading. That is the reading. The divided house does not topple, because the two halves of the division brace each other; sin is structurally sound. Hester’s strength, which the town comes to admire, and Dimmesdale’s standing, which the town never doubts, are the two legs of a figure that asks nothing of heaven because it has learned to bear its own load. The letter stands on the plane on its own two feet. The plumb line hangs from above or not at all. Boston watched the one and called it shame; it watched the other and called it sanctity; and the geometry says the shameful figure was the stable one, stable the way a buttressed ruin is stable, each failure holding the other up. The letter is a small prophecy: the shape that needs no suspension is the shape this soil will come to prefer.

The Crossbar

The two legs of the letter touch at the top and nowhere else. What keeps the figure legible is the bar between them, and the bar has a name.

Pearl is the crossbar. She is the one element the two descents share below the apex, the living tie that runs from the public leg to the hidden one and holds them in relation against their will. Remove her and the letter loses its bar: two strokes meeting at a point, a figure with no rung, no letter at all, only a divergence. With her, the divergence is held, spelled, made readable. The town reads Hester by the child. Hester reads her own sin by the child, dresses her in the letter’s own scarlet and gold until the girl is the A walking. And the two sinners read each other through her and through nothing else; for seven years the child is the only line of communication the broken vertical permits.

Hawthorne gives the bar its office in a scene. On the scaffold at midnight, the minister at last takes the child’s hand, and Pearl asks him the only question she ever really asks: wilt thou stand here with mother and me, tomorrow noontide? Stand, in public, in daylight, the three of us. The crossbar pulls toward connection, because that is what a tie bar does; it is the remnant of the horizontal, and the horizontal’s whole nature is to join. He refuses, and the refusal keeps the letter in its fallen form. When he finally accepts, on the last scaffold, the bar has done its work and the figure changes. Pearl kisses him, the spell is broken, and Hawthorne says of her in that moment that she would grow up amid human joy and sorrow, not forever do battle with the world. The crossbar, released, becomes a woman on the open plane. The letter only ever held her in place. It could not hold her down.

In Adam’s Fall

Now the documented fact at the center of this essay, the one piece that is not my geometry but the culture’s own assignment.

The children of Puritan New England learned their letters from one book. The New England Primer was the schoolroom of the colonies, and it taught the alphabet as a catechism, each letter with its rhyme and its picture. The first letter, the first rhyme, the first thing a child of that world ever read:

In Adam’s Fall We sinned all.

A is for Adam, and Adam is the fall. Before any magistrate in the novel touches her, the letter Hester is sentenced to wear already has a meaning in the literacy of the men who sentence her, and the meaning is original sin. The court selects the initial of her crime, a crime Hawthorne never once names in the book, and in choosing that initial they choose, by their own hornbook, the letter of the first transgression. They brand her with Adam. The first letter of the alphabet, the first man, the first sin, the first thing taught to children: the town’s own schooling closed this circle long before the novel opened it.

This answers the objection the essay would otherwise owe a debt to. A hostile reading says the A is an initial and nothing more, that any crime beginning with any letter would have produced any other mark, and that the geometry is weight I set on it. So divide the weight, exactly, once. The meaning is the culture’s: that A spells the fall is documented in its first schoolbook, taught to every reader the novel contains, and Hawthorne, who knew the Primer the way he knew his own ancestors, suppressed the word adultery from the entire book and staked the whole signifying load on the bare letterform. An author who withholds the referent has chosen to let the sign mean what it already means. The shape is mine: that the A is a cross buckled into two descents under one held apex is an observation the novel nowhere states. What the novel does instead is behave, scene after scene, as if the shape were true. The evidence for the geometry is not a sentence in Hawthorne. It is the architecture of everything he built around the letter, and the rest of this essay is that architecture.

The Embroidered Cover

Hester is ordered to wear the mark of her shame, and she comes out of the prison wearing it in gold. The letter is embroidered, Hawthorne says, with elaborate flourishes of gold thread, so artfully done that it looks like a thing of splendor rather than a sentence. The town is scandalized by the workmanship before it is scandalized by the sin. She has gilded the fall, laid ornament over the iconography of judgment until the surface reads as beauty, and the same hand that must wear the letter is the hand that made it gorgeous. The gold period knew this method; one painter in Vienna built a career and a dining room on it. Splendor as the cover, and the fall underneath, wearing it.

And the cover works, which is the unsettling part. Over the years the town begins to reread the letter through its own beauty and Hester’s conduct beneath it. They say it stands for Able. Some take it for an angel’s mark after the night the meteor burns. The sign drifts; the community revises its referent generation by generation, meaning laid on and scraped off like paint. What never changes is the form. Able, angel, adulteress: every rereading keeps the same two splayed descents under the same held apex, because interpretation amends the label and cannot touch the geometry. The town spends decades renaming a shape it never once straightens. That is what a fallen structure under a beautiful cover does. It accepts every compliment and remains out of plumb.

The Scaffold

The novel has one piece of architecture of its own, and it is a deliberate vertical. The scaffold stands in the market square as the town’s machine for plumb: the platform of public uprightness, the place where the crooked are made to stand straight in daylight and be measured. Hawthorne builds the entire book on it. Three scaffold scenes, beginning, middle, end, and the plot between them is nothing but the minister’s relation to the vertical.

In the first, Hester stands on it alone, the public leg of the letter erect in the sun, while the hidden leg watches from the crowd and is invited, by the governor, to urge the partner of her guilt to confess. He urges; she keeps the secret; the divided figure is established with one leg in the light and one in the dark.

In the second, the minister mounts the scaffold at midnight, when standing counts for nothing, the vertical attempted in the dark where no one can see it bear. It is the geometry of his whole condition: he will take the position but not the exposure, the form of plumb without the daylight that makes plumb public. And while he stands there holding Hester’s hand and the child’s, the sky answers with the essay’s figure written in fire. A meteor burns across the night, and the town, in the days after, says it traced an immense letter A. Even the zenith wears the divided form. The one night the minister climbs the vertical in secret, the heavens display the letter over his head, the fallen shape installed at the top of the sky, as if to say the apex itself remembers what broke beneath it.

In the third, at noon, in procession, at the height of his public honor, he turns aside, climbs the scaffold in full daylight, calls Hester and Pearl to him, confesses, tears away the ministerial band to show whatever is or is not carved on his flesh, and dies in the act. The hidden leg comes to plumb at last, and the return to plumb kills him. That is not irony. That is the cost the cross has always charged; the way back through the guard is a wounding, and the man who finally stands straight stands straight for minutes. Uprightness at the price of the upright. The town, true to form, immediately begins reinterpreting what it saw.

After that the letter has nothing left to hold. Pearl, the crossbar, is released into life. Hester leaves, returns years later of her own will, takes up the letter again unbidden, and wears it until it ceases to be a stigma and becomes, Hawthorne says, a type of something to be sorrowed over and looked upon with awe. The sign she was sentenced to becomes the sign she keeps. The figure is not straightened in her lifetime. It is inhabited honestly, which is as much as the plane allows.

The Space Between

So return to the burying ground, because the book does, and read the stone with everything now in hand.

Two graves with a space between, the dust of the two sleepers given no right to mingle. The two nadirs are kept apart even in death; the legs of the letter end where they ended, and the earth itself is made to hold the division. But one stone serves for both, set at the head, at the single point the two descents still share, and on it the letter, red on black, the apex carved in the only permanent material the novel contains. The community that spent a lifetime rereading the sign finally cuts it in stone exactly as it was given, and places it precisely where the geometry says the union held: at the top.

The letter never becomes a cross again. Hawthorne is exact about that; nothing in the book unbuckles the figure, no ending restores the single upright, and the last page is an escutcheon, not a resurrection. What the book testifies to is smaller and harder: the apex held. Through seven years, through the midnight scaffold and the forest and the dying confession, through two separated graves, the one point the two lines shared did not let go, and the stone at the head says so in heraldry. Whether a held apex is enough, whether the divided vertical is ever rejoined below the ground where the book cannot follow, is the question the figure cannot answer from inside its own geometry, the same question every turning wheel left to time. The novel ends before it tells. It leaves a letter standing on a grave, two feet on the earth, one point toward the sky, gules on sable, the fall spelled in the first letter the children learn, holding at the top.