“Hester at Her Needle”: Textile Production and the “Work” of The Scarlet Letter

ABSTRACT The central symbol in The Scarlet Letter, situated as it is in a late seventeenth-century narrative, has typically been read as a vehicle for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s (re)writing of New England’s past. However, the letter also tells the story of Hawthorne’s present, with Hester the embroiderer and seamstress literally embodying changes occurring in mid-nineteenth-century America and the role of women in those changes. Wearing her fancy, hand-embroidered letter against the backdrop of her homespun dress, Hester embodies a radical shift in the import and meaning of textiles that occurred in the mid-nineteenth century. More than just a signifier of a type and style of textile, however, the embroidered letter becomes a point of convergence for anxieties about female production, about changes in the domestic sphere, about shifting class structures, and about an increasingly industrialized economy and its concomitant cultural shifts. The letter also serves as a marker indicating a moment in time when women began to be figured more overtly both as consumer goods and consumers of goods, a trend that simply intensified through the rest of the century.