The Scarlet Letter Notes 7a

Chapter 19: The Child at the Brook-side

• “And Pearl was the oneness of their being” 141
• Why won’t Pearl cross the stream and go to her mother?
• Why does Dimmes touch his heart again as Pearl looks at them?
• Why does Pearl kiss the scarlet letter?
• “Doth he love us? . . Will he go back with us, hand in hand, we three together, into the town?” 145

Chapter 20: The Minister in a Maze

• What is the maze?
• What’s their plan? Is it a good one
• Why does the Election speech matter?
• What has come over Dimmes? How is he acting and why? What social commentary is Hawthorne giving through this passage? What has Puritanism done to Dimmesdale?
• “The wretched minister! He had made a bargain very like it! Tempted by a dream of happiness, he had yielded himself with deliberate choice, as he had never done before, to what he knew was deadly sin.” Reflect 152
• Old Dimmes gone, replaced with a wiser one
• Chillingworth conversation passes without direct acknowledgement, although both know
• When he writes his sermon: “he wrote with such an impulsive flow of thought and emotion, that he fancied himself inspired; and only wondered that Heaven should see fit to transmit the grand and slemn music of its oracles through so foul an organ-pipe as he” 154

Chapter 21: The New England Holiday

• Election Day: elected, but almost like royalty. Happier, but still pretty somber
• 159: “the generation next to the early emigrants, wore the blackest shade of Puritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all the subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up. We have yet to learn again the forgotten art of gayety.”
• 159: “the incomplete morality of the age”—so rigorous that it had to be inconsistent
• 160: buffer circle around her, still not completely accepted even though “so changed was Hester Prynne’s repute before the public, that the matron in town most eminent for rigid morality could not have held such intercourse with less result of scandal than herself.” 161