We all know Hester Prynne committed adultery and wore a big red "A" on her chest. But until now, her marriage, how she got to America and why she committed this awful sin have been a puzzle. Christopher Bigsby attempts to fill in what Hawthorne left unsaid in his tender, insightful -- if somewhat didactic -- book "Hester."
"Hester's" strongest point is the heroine's voyage across the Atlantic on a tiny ship called the Hope. In her flight, Hester manages to escape from her loveless marriage to Roger Chillingworth and for the first time experience freedom from social fear.
On board ship, Hester is separated from everything familiar and plunged into the unknown dangers of the sea, where she must forge a new identity for herself. In such dire circumstances, Mr. Bigsby explains, morality is suspended, inhibitions shed. "Here, hands may touch which on shore may never intertwine. Here, words may be spoken which if spoken on land would terrify the soul."
Mr. Bigsby constantly reminds us of the pull of society's moral standards on Hester. He frames each chapter with a verse from an unknown poem about the lord of dance, signifying an ever-present force in Hester's life. The irony is that it's a happy poem. Mr. Bigsby forces us to think about the sharp contrast between the jolly, dancing Christ-figure of the poem and the unforgiving, tyrannical Puritan society that condemns Hester Prynne.
At sea, Hester falls in love with Arthur Dimmesdale and commits the first act of adultery that, later repeated, earns her the red "A."
But the courtship between these two characters is practically devoid of sexuality. Mr. Bigsby's depiction of Dimmesdale's wimpy character matches Hawthorne's portrait of the minister but leaves much to be desired by the contemporary reader. Instead of presenting physical details of the consummation, Mr. Bigsby turns to us with a rhetorical examination of the characters' behavior.
"And why was Hester, raised on the self's denial, one day to make love to one not her husband, as I am compelled to tell you she assuredly will, and why did he, a man of faith, so forget his vows? You might as well ask why we are as we are. . . ." Here, as in other places in the novel, Bigsby runs the risk of lecturing us.
The beginning of the book, though slow at times, elicits vivid images of Hester Prynne's repressed childhood. The atmosphere is stifling in the witch-hunting society of England. Mr. Bigsby talks about the lists of people suspected of disloyalty to the government in a country on the brink of civil war. "A blood-caked fingernail would move downwards and press its edge, a half-moon sign, in the paper's weave," signifying that person's doom. Mr. Bigsby draws a horrifying link to devices used in the Holocaust.
Mr. Bigsby psychoanalyzes Hester's ill-fated marriage to Roger Chillingworth, a scientist as indifferent to his wife as he would be to a constant fixture in his house. Knowing what Chillingworth does later to ruin Hester and the minister's chance at happiness, we tend to hate him. But Mr. Bigsby portrays him in a somewhat sympathetic light. Mr. Bigsby asks the reader, "What is cruelty?" And then he points out that each of us is capable of what Chillingworth felt.
This way, Mr. Bigsby craftily brings the reader down to eye-level with the characters and places us in their society so we can draw comparisons to our own world. The problem is that sometimes we feel as if we're being hit over the head.
On one occasion, Mr. Bigsby attempts to connect the horrors of seal-clubbing with the sinister quality of people living in the wilderness of early America.
A passage from Hester's diary reads, "as I watched them stumble and slide in the slush of blood and snow, here slitting a throat, there bending to peel the skin of an animal while it shivered and shook with death, I wondered . . . was I, perhaps, travelling back in time to man's beginnings, a world before civility, compassion and belief?" Mr. Bigsby follows up with a comment condemning present-day fur hunters for coldhearted greed. Here, the author's personal beliefs wander beyond the practical scope of the novel, and his correlation between fictive past and literal present breaks down.
The trap Mr. Bigsby sometimes falls into is common in prequels. The trouble is, we already know the ending, and Mr. Bigsby is trying too hard to get us to look at it as a literary or a social scholar would. Still, "Hester" is visually alluring and compelling enough to make us want to return to its sequel.
Ms. Wesley is a writer who lives in Baltimore.
Title: "Hester"
Author: Christopher Bigsby
Publisher: Viking
Length, price: 187 pages, $21.95