In another 1850 review of The Scarlet Letter that appeared in the
Massachusetts Quarterly Review (reprinted in The Recognition of
Nathaniel Hawthorne), George Bailey Loring also praises Hester's strength
and her superiority to those around her.
On this beautiful and luxuriant woman, we see the effect of open
conviction of sin, and the continued galling punishment. The heroic traits awakened
in her character by her position were the great self-sustaining properties of
woman, which, in tribulation and perplexity, elevate her so far above man. The
sullen defiance in her was imparted to her by society. Without, she met only
ignominy, scorn, banishment, a shameful brand. Within, the deep and sacred love
for which she was suffering martyrdom,-for her crime was thus sanctified in
her own apprehension,-was turned into a store of perplexity, distrust, and madness,
which darkened all her heavens. Little Pearl was a token more scarlet than the
scarlet letter of her guilt; for the child, with a birth presided over by the
most intense conflict of love and fear in the mother's heart, nourished at a
breast swelling with anguish, and surrounded with burning marks of its mother's
shame in its daily life, developed day by day into a void little demon perched
upon the most sacred horn of the mother's altar. Even this child, whose young,
plastic nature caught the impress which surrounding circumstances most naturally
gave, bewildered and maddened her. The pledge of love which God had given her,
seemed perverted into an emblem of hate. And yet how patiently and courageously
she labored on, bearing her burthen the more firmly, because, in its infliction,
she recognized no higher hand than that of civil authority! In her earnest appeal
to be allowed to retain her child, she swept away all external influences, and
seems to have inspired the young clergyman, even now fainting away with his
own sense of meaner guilt, to speak words of truth, which in those days must
have seemed born of heaven. . . .
Her social ignominy forced her back upon the true basis of life. She alone, of all the world, knew the length and breadth of her own secret. Her lawful husband no more pretended to hold a claim which may always have been a pretence; the father of her child, her own relation to both, and the tragic life which was going on beneath that surface which all men saw, were known to her alone. How poor and miserable must have seemed the punishment which society had inflicted! The scarlet letter was a poor type of the awful truth which she carried within her heart. Without deceit before the world, she stands forth the most heroic person in all that drama. When from the platform of shame, she bade farewell to that world, she retired to a holier, and sought for such peace as a soul cast out by men may always find. This was her right. No lie hung over her head. Society had heard her story, and had done its worst. And while Arthur Dimmesdale, cherished in the arms of that society which he had outraged, glossing his life with a false coloring which made it beautiful to all beholders, was dying of an inward anguish, Hester stood upon her true ground, denied by this world, and learning that true wisdom which comes through honesty and self-justification. In casting her out, the world had torn from her all the support of its dogmatic teachings, with which it sustains its disciples in their inevitable sufferings, and had compelled her to rely upon that great religious truth which flows instinctively around a life of agony, with its daring freedom. How far behind her in moral and religious excellence was the accredited religious teacher, who was her companion in guilt! . . . (46-47).
