Th e second paragraph suggests that Hester Prynne stays in New England
because
Ashe has been exiled from her home
Bshe is ambivalent
Cit is better than her birth-place
Dshe longs for eventual absolution
Eit has been the most important place in her life
Passage 3. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Th e Scarlet Letter
It may seem marvellous that, with the world before her—kept by no restrictive
clause of her condemnation within the limits of the Puritan settlement, so remote
and so obscure—free to return to her birth-place, or to any other European land,
and there hide her character and identity under a new exterior, as completely as
if emerging into another state of being—and having also the passes of the dark,
inscrutable forest open to her, where the wildness of her nature might assimilate
itself with a people whose customs and life were alien from the law that had condemned
her—it may seem marvellous that this woman should still call that place
her home, where, and where only, she must needs be the type of shame. But there
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, ghostlike,
the spot where some great and marked event has given the colour to their
lifetime; and, still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it. Her
sin, her ignominy, were the roots which she had struck into the soil. It was as if a
new birth, with stronger assimilations than the fi rst, had converted the forest-land,
still so uncongenial to every other pilgrim and wanderer, into Hester Prynne’s
wild and dreary, but life-long home. All other scenes of earth—even that village
of rural England, where happy infancy and stainless maidenhood seemed yet to be
in her mother’s keeping, like garments put off long ago—were foreign to her, in
comparison. Th e chain that bound her here was of iron links, and galling to her
inmost soul, but could never be broken.
It might be, too—doubtless it was so, although she hid the secret from herself,
and grew pale whenever it struggled out of her heart, like a serpent from its hole—
it might be that another feeling kept her within the scene and pathway that had
been so fatal. Th ere dwelt, there trode, the feet of one with whom she deemed herself
connected in a union that, unrecognised on earth, would bring them together
before the bar of fi nal judgment, and make that their marriage-altar, for a joint
futurity of endless retribution. Over and over again, the tempter of souls had thrust
this idea upon Hester’s contemplation, and laughed at the passionate and desperate
joy with which she seized, and then strove to cast it from her. She barely looked
the idea in the face, and hastened to bar it in its dungeon. What she compelled
herself to believe—what, fi nally, she reasoned upon as her motive for continuing
a resident of New England—was half a truth, and half a self-delusion. Here, she
said to herself had been the scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her
earthly punishment; and so, perchance, the torture of her daily shame would at
length purge her soul, and work out another purity than that which she had lost:
more saint-like, because the result of martyrdom.
because
It may seem marvellous that, with the world before her—kept by no restrictive
clause of her condemnation within the limits of the Puritan settlement, so remote
and so obscure—free to return to her birth-place, or to any other European land,
and there hide her character and identity under a new exterior, as completely as
if emerging into another state of being—and having also the passes of the dark,
inscrutable forest open to her, where the wildness of her nature might assimilate
itself with a people whose customs and life were alien from the law that had condemned
her—it may seem marvellous that this woman should still call that place
her home, where, and where only, she must needs be the type of shame. But there
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, ghostlike,
the spot where some great and marked event has given the colour to their
lifetime; and, still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it. Her
sin, her ignominy, were the roots which she had struck into the soil. It was as if a
new birth, with stronger assimilations than the fi rst, had converted the forest-land,
still so uncongenial to every other pilgrim and wanderer, into Hester Prynne’s
wild and dreary, but life-long home. All other scenes of earth—even that village
of rural England, where happy infancy and stainless maidenhood seemed yet to be
in her mother’s keeping, like garments put off long ago—were foreign to her, in
comparison. Th e chain that bound her here was of iron links, and galling to her
inmost soul, but could never be broken.
It might be, too—doubtless it was so, although she hid the secret from herself,
and grew pale whenever it struggled out of her heart, like a serpent from its hole—
it might be that another feeling kept her within the scene and pathway that had
been so fatal. Th ere dwelt, there trode, the feet of one with whom she deemed herself
connected in a union that, unrecognised on earth, would bring them together
before the bar of fi nal judgment, and make that their marriage-altar, for a joint
futurity of endless retribution. Over and over again, the tempter of souls had thrust
this idea upon Hester’s contemplation, and laughed at the passionate and desperate
joy with which she seized, and then strove to cast it from her. She barely looked
the idea in the face, and hastened to bar it in its dungeon. What she compelled
herself to believe—what, fi nally, she reasoned upon as her motive for continuing
a resident of New England—was half a truth, and half a self-delusion. Here, she
said to herself had been the scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her
earthly punishment; and so, perchance, the torture of her daily shame would at
length purge her soul, and work out another purity than that which she had lost:
more saint-like, because the result of martyrdom.