What Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter Reveals About Harvard’s History

Today, the scarlet “A” is easily recognized as the iconic literary symbol linked to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel “The Scarlet Letter.” For a younger generation, it might be the 2010 film “Easy A,” starring Emma Stone.

In colonial Massachusetts, though, it carried a far more sinister meaning. In 1694, under the Massachusetts law titled “An Act against Adultery and Poligamy,” convicted adulterers could be forced to stand at the gallows for an hour with a rope around their necks, endure as many as forty lashes, and “forever after wear a capital A of two inches long” sewn onto their clothing. The fabric letter had to remain “in open view” on the arm or back, and attempts to conceal it only invited further whipping.

This law belonged to the Puritan religious tradition from which Harvard emerged. At its founding in 1636, Harvard was intended, in part, to educate the colonial leaders who considered enforcing religious morality a public responsibility. Under the colony’s 1641 “Body of Liberties,” adultery with a married woman was punished by death. Though execution was substituted with public humiliation by 1694, the colony’s power was still preserved by regulating the sexual conduct of its citizens through criminal sanctions.

Harvard itself did not administer criminal punishments, but it similarly disciplined the sexual conduct of its students, instructing them to lead a “Godly Life” in its 1655 laws. By 1767, the administration placed “Fornication” alongside “Blasphemy, Robbery, Forgery” as offenses warranting temporary removal or expulsion.

In his 1850 novel “The Scarlet Letter,” Nathaniel Hawthorne took readers back to this world. Set in Puritan Boston during the 1640s, Hawthorne’s novel follows Hester Prynne, a married woman who gives birth to a daughter, Pearl, as a result of an affair with the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale. Refusing to identify her lover, Hester is forced to stand upon a public scaffold and wear a scarlet “A” on her chest.

But to complicate the stigma surrounding the “A” on Hester’s chest, Hawthorne describes how Hester fashions her letter with “fantastic flourishes of gold thread,” and one town spectator even accuses her of trying to “make pride out of what they, worthy gentlemen, meant for a punishment.” In doing so, Hawthorne allows the stigmatized “A” to serve as a means of reclamation for Hester. Although townspeople eventually come to read her “A” as “Able” because of the selfless nature of her charitable work, her redemption still depends on the approval of those who once condemned her for her sexuality. Though she can influence the letter’s meaning, she has no power in how she is ultimately perceived.

In the 18th century, the University remained deeply aligned with its founding Puritan ideals around sex and religious morality. Harvard faculty meeting minutes from an 18th-century meeting document strict disciplinary actions against students for encounters with women the records describe as prostitutes. Described in records as “lewd women” and “women of bad fame,” they were characterized not merely by their sexual conduct, but by their perceived capacity to corrupt the moral character of “Harvard men.” In a 1955 “Harvard Crimson” article, student Stephen R. Barnett ’57, digging in the university’s archives, found a particularly revealing incident from 1770: “‘two women of ill fame’ had ‘spen[t] the night in a certain college chamber.’”

This incident is not isolated, as historian Conrad Edick Wright tells the story of how Harvard’s faculty—“the president, professors, and tutors of the College”—voted in 1770 to rusticate (suspending a student and sending them away to the countryside) senior Winthrop Sargent ’1770, just two months before his graduation, for entertaining two prostitutes in his room overnight.

Historian Sheldon S. Cohen wrote about how another student was rusticated in 1773 for visiting a “house of ill-fame” in Charlestown and more “were rusticated in May 1770 for keeping women of questionable morality ‘in their chambers at night.’”

“The Harvard Corporation complained to the Charlestown selectmen concerning the corrupting influences of the town’s notorious Ship Tavern [an infamous brothel during the era], and several students formed an Association for the Suppression of Vice (1767),” Cohen continued. “But these and other attempts to uphold righteousness and virtue proved unsuccessful.”

The public nature of Harvard’s disciplinary procedures in the 18th century is strikingly reminiscent of Hawthorne’s scarlet letter. In a 1958 “Harvard Crimson” retrospective, alumnus John R. Adler ’61 noted that 18th-century Harvard classified fornication, defined as sexual intercourse outside the institution of marriage, as an offense punishable by expulsion.

Such punishment was a spectacle: “The Entire college was assembled in hall, the President announced the crime and the Corporation’s sentence.” The student’s name was then removed from the College register, and expelled students—“culprits” as Adler described them—could be readmitted only if they publicly confessed their sins and proved how they had repented since then.

Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” thus offers us a window into the moral world from which Harvard emerged, showing not only how sex on campus was surveilled and punished but also whose reputations, exactly, were made to bear the consequences, and who was allowed a second chance. Though the male students survive in the historical record with names, disciplinary proceedings, and a path back, like temporary rustication in the countryside, the women they encountered, who stood outside the “right,” male Harvard bubble, appear only through vague and simplistic descriptions such as “ill fame” and “questionable morality.”

Much as Hester’s scarlet letter identifies her much more than it does her concealed lover, shielding him from equal repercussions and “accountability,” Harvard’s own archives still preserve the moral judgments attached to these female sex workers without telling us much about their lived experiences. Hawthorne, at least, gives Hester the agency to embroider her own scarlet letter, and even Emma Stone’s character in the 2010 film “Easy A” reclaims the letter—Harvard’s archives, however, leave these women only with the societal shame others stitched into their stories.

Mujtaba Raja ’30 (mujtabaraja@college.harvard.edu) is comping the “Harvard Independent.”