106 pages • 3 hours read
The Scarlet Letter
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Chapters 9-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary: “The Leech”
Shortly after moving to Salem, Chillingworth befriended Reverend Dimmesdale, whose health had recently begun to fail. Dimmesdale’s parishioners see this frailty as a sign of holiness and conclude that God must have sent Chillingworth to Salem to cure Dimmesdale. Although initially reluctant to seek medical advice, Dimmesdale enjoys the intellectual conversation Chillingworth provides; the two spend more time together and eventually take lodgings in the same house.
Chillingworth, meanwhile, has studied Dimmesdale intently and concluded that his sickness stems from a mental or spiritual ailment. Consequently, Chillingworth resolves to strive “deep into his patient’s bosom, delving among his principles, prying into his recollections, and probing every thing with a cautious touch, like a treasure-seeker in a dark cavern” (109).
As time goes on, Chillingworth’s behavior strikes some townsfolk as strange or even suspicious; rumors spread that he practiced witchcraft while living with the Native Americans, and some even believe that Chillingworth is a demon or devil sent to tempt and torment Dimmesdale.
Chapter 10 Summary: “The Leech and His Patient”
Chillingworth’s motives have changed since befriending Dimmesdale; where he initially hoped only to learn the truth, he now feels compelled to pry deeper and deeper into Dimmesdale’s psyche in the hopes of discovering something sordid. Dimmesdale, meanwhile, is half-aware of the change in Chillingworth but ignores his intuitive mistrust.
One day Dimmesdale asks about some sinister-looking plants Chillingworth has gathered, and the latter explains that he found them covering a man’s grave: “They grew out of his heart, and typify, it may be, some hideous secret that was buried with him, and which he had done better to confess during his lifetime” (115). The men debate whether and how such secrets should be revealed: Dimmesdale argues that some people wish to confess their sins but find themselves unable to, while Chillingworth denies that anyone harboring a guilty secret can hope to accomplish any good in the world. As they speak, Hester and Pearl pass by the window. Pearl tosses a burr at Dimmesdale before tugging her mother away, saying that the Black Man will “catch” Hester as he has Dimmesdale if they stay.
Dimmesdale considers Hester fortunate that her sins are public knowledge, and Chillingworth urges him to reveal anything that is privately troubling him. Dimmesdale retorts that only God can heal a person’s soul and storms off, only to apologize a few hours later.
On a different day Chillingworth happens to catch Dimmesdale asleep. Chillingworth carefully pushes aside the minister’s shirt and sees something that both delights and horrifies him.
Chapter 11 Summary: “The Interior of a Heart”
Following his discovery of Dimmesdale’s secret (later revealed to be a branded letter A), Chillingworth uses his closeness to the minister to goad him with stray remarks: “He became […] a chief actor, in the poor minister’s interior world. He could play upon him as he chose” (122-23).
Meanwhile, Dimmesdale’s reputation as a minister grows; his physical and mental suffering add pathos and a sense of shared humanity to his sermons. This success only exacerbates Dimmesdale’s inner distress, and he tries repeatedly to confess his failings in front of his parishioners. In the end, however, he always resorts to vague admissions of sinfulness that fail to assuage his sense of guilt. Fasting, nightlong vigils, and self-flagellation with a scourge all fail to bring any relief. His sleeplessness causes him to experience strange visions of demons, angels, and the condemnation of friends and family, including “Hester Prynne, leading along little Pearl, in her scarlet garb, and pointing her forefinger, first at the scarlet letter on her bosom, and then at the clergyman’s own breast” (127).
Chapter 12 Summary: “The Minister’s Vigil”
One night Dimmesdale walks to the scaffold where Hester was punished seven years earlier. He stands on the platform but quickly realizes that with no crowd to witness him, his penance is meaningless. At one point he is so overwhelmed by a sense of God’s judgment that he screams aloud and waits to be discovered. A little later Reverend Wilson passes the scaffold on his way home from Governor Winthrop’s deathbed, and Dimmesdale imagines calling out to him. However, Dimmesdale’s presence goes unnoticed until he lets out a hysterical laugh and hears a voice he recognizes as Pearl’s laughing in response.
Dimmesdale calls out to Hester, who has been tending to Governor Winthrop, and invites her up onto the scaffold. Pearl asks whether Dimmesdale will stand on the platform with her and her mother the following day, and he regretfully says he won’t.
At that moment a comet streaks across the sky, briefly lighting up the square. Dimmesdale looks up at the sky, where he sees “the appearance of an immense letter,—the letter A,—marked out in lines of dull red light” (136). He also notices that Pearl is pointing at a figure in the street: It’s Chillingworth, and his expression seems especially malevolent in the light of the comet. Terrified, Dimmesdale asks Hester who Chillingworth is. Pearl claims to know, but when Dimmesdale asks her to tell him, she babbles incomprehensibly then scolds Dimmesdale for his cowardice and hypocrisy. Chillingworth approaches the scaffold, explaining that he too has been at Governor Winthrop’s. He urges Dimmesdale to return home, and Dimmesdale leaves with him.
The next day Dimmesdale gives a particularly touching and impassioned sermon. Afterward, the sexton hands Dimmesdale a glove he dropped on the scaffold; the sexton believes the Devil placed it there to disgrace the minister. He also comments on the letter that appeared in the sky the night before, which many in town took to stand for “Angel” in honor of Winthrop’s passing.
Chapters 9-12 Analysis
Although the narrator does not explicitly confirm the nature of Dimmesdale and Hester’s relationship until their meeting in the woods, he foreshadows it heavily throughout this section. Dimmesdale’s responses to Chillingworth strongly suggest that he is harboring some guilty secret, while his ongoing heart problems suggest a parallel to Hester’s scarlet letter, which she wears on her chest. Likewise, Dimmesdale’s vision of Hester pointing at his own chest implies that he should also be wearing the mark of an adulterer.
Of course, as Chillingworth discovers in Chapter 10, Dimmesdale does in fact wear his own letter A. Unlike Hester, Dimmesdale can keep his sin a secret, and this distinction is key to understanding the characters’ very different personalities and experiences. Although Hester suffers because of her ostracism, she retains a strong and not entirely negative understanding of who she is beyond her appointed role as a societal scapegoat; her impassioned pleading with Bellingham, for instance, reveals how seriously she takes her identity as a mother. What’s more, Hester finds ways to turn her socially dictated status as an outcast to good purpose, using it as a license to minister to others who exist on the margins of society (like the poor and the sick).
Dimmesdale, by contrast, is a weaker character who relies on his public role as a minister to provide him with his sense of self: “[I]t would always be essential to his peace to feel the pressure of a faith about him, supporting, while it confined him within its iron framework” (108). However, because the society he values would condemn him if the full truth about him were known, Dimmesdale finds himself in a double bind: He can only maintain his public identity by concealing his private one, but because the Puritans consider concealment itself immoral, his secrecy only exacerbates his sense of guilt. His various attempts to confess without confessing simply strike him as further proof of his hypocrisy. One example is the nighttime scene atop the scaffold. Dimmesdale goes there with the intention of copying Hester’s atonement, and the two scenes do mirror one another in many ways; like Hester, Dimmesdale sees and recognizes Chillingworth from his position atop the scaffold. However, these parallels serve to underscore the important differences between the scenes. Dimmesdale ascends the scaffold when (he believes) there is no one to see him, and when the darkness makes him all but invisible regardless. He also repeatedly refuses Pearl’s requests to acknowledge his relationship to her and her mother, further underscoring that he never truly intended his actions to be public—or, as he puts it, anything but a “mockery of penitence” (129).
The appearance of a red letter A in the sky indicates that the truth has a way of making itself known regardless of human efforts to conceal it. In fact, the light of the comet threatens to reveal both Dimmesdale’s secrets and Chillingworth’s, since it is in this same moment that Dimmesdale realizes Chillingworth’s true “malevolence” (136). Similarly, the subtle changes in Chillingworth’s physical appearance appear (ironically) to bear out his own warning that “all the powers of nature call so earnestly for the confession of sin” (115). As Chillingworth becomes increasingly obsessed with vengeance, the townsfolk of Salem notice “something ugly and evil in his face” (112). Elsewhere, however, the novel casts significant doubt upon these same people’s ability to read inner character correctly. In Chapter 12 alone, Salem society misinterprets two signs of Dimmesdale’s guilt: the comet and the dropped glove. This foreshadows the difficulty some have in reading even Dimmesdale’s public confession as an indication of his guilt; it also underscores the inherent ambiguity of even apparently straightforward symbols.
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