- die (or dye?).... sl16.html#g01
- Ce0162p274 has "dye"
instead of the first edition's "die"--the meaning is
surely that of a color dye. Spelling was not so regular as it is
today, and we have made no attempt to regularize spelling nor
modernize it here. But be aware that if you spelled words this
way today your teacher would mark it wrong.
- the Apostle
Eliot ...sl16.html#g02
- The Rev. John Eliot
was preaching to Native Americans in Dorchester, where he
lived just outside Boston, and in Nonantum, in today's
Newton, where in The
Blithedale Romance he is referred to several
times by Hawthorne. Hawthorne also wrote a children's
story about Eliot in Grandfather's Chair. Hawthorne
approved highly of his kind treatment of the Indians, and Eliot
did write
a Bible in their language even though none lived to
read it later. Most of the "praying Indians" he
converted were rounded up in 1676 during King Philip's War
and died in camps on Deer Island, Boston.
- imaged not amiss the
moral wilderness ...sl16.html#g03
- In other words, there was a similarity between the pagan
wilderness, which was wild and without moral rules, and the
life of isolation that Hester had been living, where she
had to make up rules of her own, perhaps the same Christian ones
as the old ones, but in any case her own, not those of someone else.
Not only was Hester without a husband, but her child was without
a father, and both seem to have escaped the close governance of
church and school that Governor Bellingham and Reverend Wilson
wished for them. Despite this similarity, Hester and Pearl and
most Puritans would be superstitiously afraid of the forest.
- scrofula ...sl16.html#g11
- Scrofula is a tuberculosis of the lymph glands in the
neck, causing a swelling there. Tuberculosis is a contagious
disease caused by a micro-organism, but this was not known
in 1850 and might have been generally thought to be
hereditary both then and in 1649.
- She wanted...a grief that
should deeply touch her ...sl16.html#g11
- "Wanted" meaning lacked. It seems that Hester is
thinking this, not the narrator. It is saying that Pearl was too
inhuman, and needed human sorrow to make her more real, and
capable of understanding more of the meaning of life. In that
sense, it is similar to the lack of love that Chillingworth
exhibits, and that Dimmesdale is prone to. And it must make us
think that Hester is thinking she needed love herself as well as
that the scarlet letter's grief had made her more human
and understanding of life's meaning, but that this was
hard to communicate to Pearl as a parent, and, sadly, she might have
to learn it for herself.
- the Black
Man ...sl16.html#g15
- All this is described as a "story," or
entertainment, rather than a true history. But Pearl seems to
know it by heart, and thus it must have meant a great deal to
her. The mark on the bosom that the Black Man is supposed to
place there is only after the sinner has signed the book. In
return for this Faustian bargain, the sinner gets some special
powers and protection from the Devil. The mark on the bosom would
also sound like a good solution to Pearl's mystery of why
her mother wears the scarlet letter there, why she cannot, and
why the pastor clutches his bosom so much (after all, Pearl
noticed that he lived with and walked around with that black man
Chillingworth). In the witchcraft trials in Danvers later in the
century, one of the only pieces of evidence was the presence of
such a mark (though the absence of it did not thereby acquit
anyone, sad to say). The Black Man is supposed to conduct a
Witch's Sabbath in the woods. See "Young Goodman Brown" for the famous
example of that.
- violets and
wood-anemones and some scarlet columbines
...sl16.html#g34
- These are not herbs but pretty flowers that Hawthorne liked
to look for near rocks. Violets are purple, wood-anemones are
pink-tinged, and columbines are red. The moss all around
indicates age. This type of forest would very definitely seem old
to Hawthorne, as by his day much of the woods of New England had
been cut for firewood, railroad fuel, or sheep pastures. But at
the time of the Puritans the woods were quite different. It was
only in wet dells such as this that one would find as much
underbrush. The trees were tall but more widely separated, since
the Native Americans burned off the woods regularly, to help in
hunting deer, and for growing corn and pumpkins in place of
plowing. Ironically, it was only after the Puritans introduced
disease and warfare to kill off the Indians that the woods grew
back, more thickly. Today it is not possible to find such woods
near Boston, though in general New England is more wooded today
than ever. The brook might have existed too, but not by
Hawthorne's day. Whatever it was saying has never been
recorded.
Summary. From here until the end of the book
we expect you to write your own summaries, following the models
of preceding chapters. E-mail to EricEldred@usa.net
your summary (after reading the chapter carefully). You will
get in return e-mail similar summaries made by others, which you
may then compare with your own to see if you have understood
the chapter. Use "Ch. 16 SL Summary" as the Subject:
line.
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Eldred, Eric. <cite>Notes to Ch. 16, The Scarlet
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1999. 23 Sep. 1999. <br />
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(<a
href="http://eldred.ne.mediaone.net/nh/sl16-n.html">Eldred</a>)
Eldred, Eric. Notes to Ch. 16, The Scarlet
Letter. 1999. 23 Sep. 1999.
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