Analyzing the Representation of Native Americans in “The Scarlet Letter”
Author: Martin Munyao Muinde
Email: Ephantusmartin@gmail.com
Introduction
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter,” published in 1850, is primarily recognized for its exploration of sin, guilt, and redemption in Puritan society, yet the novel’s representation of Native Americans, though limited, offers significant insights into nineteenth-century American attitudes toward indigenous peoples and the construction of cultural boundaries in colonial New England. While Native American characters appear only briefly in the narrative, their presence serves crucial symbolic and thematic functions that reveal the anxieties, prejudices, and contradictions inherent in both Puritan and antebellum American society. Hawthorne’s portrayal of Native Americans reflects the complex racial ideologies of his own era while attempting to depict the historical realities of seventeenth-century Boston, where indigenous peoples remained a visible presence despite colonial encroachment. The novel positions Native Americans at the margins of Puritan society, simultaneously depicting them as exotic Others and as threatening figures who challenge the colonial project’s legitimacy. Understanding how Hawthorne represents Native Americans in “The Scarlet Letter” requires examining the historical context of both the novel’s setting and its composition, as well as analyzing the specific scenes where indigenous characters appear and the symbolic meanings they carry within the narrative structure.
The representation of Native Americans in “The Scarlet Letter” operates on multiple levels, functioning as historical detail, symbolic commentary, and ideological reinforcement of colonial narratives. Hawthorne writes during a period when Native American removal policies had dramatically reshaped the American landscape, and his depiction of indigenous peoples reflects the dominant cultural assumptions of Manifest Destiny and racial hierarchy that characterized mid-nineteenth-century America (Pearce, 1988). At the same time, the novel’s romanticist sensibilities sometimes position Native Americans as symbols of natural freedom in contrast to Puritan repression, creating a complex and often contradictory representation. By analyzing how Native Americans appear in the novel, where they are positioned within the social geography of Puritan Boston, how they interact with white characters, and what symbolic meanings they carry, we can better understand both Hawthorne’s literary strategies and the broader cultural assumptions about race, civilization, and colonialism that shaped American literature in the nineteenth century. This analysis examines the representation of Native Americans in “The Scarlet Letter” through multiple critical lenses, considering historical accuracy, symbolic function, and ideological implications.
Historical Context: Native Americans in Seventeenth-Century Boston
To properly analyze the representation of Native Americans in “The Scarlet Letter,” it is essential to understand the historical reality of indigenous presence in seventeenth-century New England, the period in which Hawthorne sets his novel. When English Puritans established the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, they encountered numerous Algonquian-speaking tribes, including the Massachusetts, Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and Pequot peoples, who had inhabited the region for thousands of years (Salisbury, 1982). The relationship between Puritan settlers and Native Americans was complex and evolved over time, beginning with tentative cooperation and trade but increasingly characterized by conflict, land dispossession, and cultural misunderstanding. By the 1640s, when “The Scarlet Letter” takes place, Puritan-Native relations had become tense, and the Pequot War of 1636-1638 had demonstrated the colonists’ willingness to use extreme violence to eliminate indigenous resistance. Despite these conflicts, Native Americans continued to visit and trade in colonial settlements, creating the kind of contact zones that Hawthorne depicts in his novel. The historical record shows that indigenous peoples served as traders, guides, and laborers in colonial towns, though they remained subject to discriminatory laws and social prejudices that positioned them as inferior Others in the Puritan worldview (Lepore, 1998).
Hawthorne’s representation of Native Americans in “The Scarlet Letter” captures some elements of this historical reality while also reflecting the romanticized and stereotypical views of indigenous peoples common in nineteenth-century American literature. The novel accurately depicts Native Americans as present in the colonial marketplace, participating in trade and interacting with colonists, which reflects the historical fact that economic exchange continued even amid broader patterns of conflict and dispossession. However, Hawthorne’s descriptions also rely on conventional imagery of indigenous peoples as primitive, savage, and fundamentally different from Europeans, reflecting what scholars have termed the “vanishing Indian” mythology that portrayed Native Americans as doomed to disappear before advancing civilization (Dippie, 1982). The novel was written during the era of Indian Removal, when the United States government forcibly relocated thousands of Native Americans from their ancestral lands, and this contemporary context inevitably shaped Hawthorne’s representation of indigenous peoples as marginal figures in a narrative focused on white characters and Puritan society. Understanding this dual context—both the historical reality of seventeenth-century New England and the ideological assumptions of nineteenth-century America—is crucial for critically analyzing how Native Americans function within “The Scarlet Letter” and what their representation reveals about American literature’s complicity in colonial narratives.
Native Americans in the Marketplace Scene
The most significant appearance of Native Americans in “The Scarlet Letter” occurs in Chapter 21, “The New England Holiday,” when Hester Prynne and Pearl observe the Election Day festivities in the Boston marketplace. Hawthorne describes the diverse crowd gathered for this important colonial occasion, including “the Indians, in their native garb” who “stood apart, with countenances of inflexible gravity, beyond what even the Puritan aspect could attain” (Hawthorne, 1850, p. 231). This description establishes Native Americans as distinct from the Puritan community, spatially separated and visually marked as different through their clothing and demeanor. The phrase “stood apart” is particularly significant, suggesting both physical distance and social exclusion, positioning Native Americans as observers rather than participants in the Puritan celebration. Hawthorne’s attention to their “inflexible gravity” and comparison to Puritan seriousness creates an interesting parallel, suggesting that Native Americans possess a natural dignity that matches or exceeds Puritan formality, though this observation still operates within primitivist assumptions about indigenous peoples having essential racial characteristics. The marketplace scene depicts Native Americans as exotic spectacle for white observers, contributing to the festive atmosphere precisely through their difference and otherness rather than through genuine participation in the community’s social life.
Pearl’s fascination with the Native Americans in the marketplace scene reveals how Hawthorne uses indigenous characters to develop themes about civilization, wildness, and social boundaries. The narrator notes that Pearl “ran and looked the wild Indian in the face; and he grew conscious of a nature wilder than his own” (Hawthorne, 1850, p. 234). This description encapsulates several problematic assumptions common in nineteenth-century representations of Native Americans, including the characterization of indigenous peoples as fundamentally “wild” and the suggestion that Pearl, who has been repeatedly associated with untamed nature throughout the novel, represents an even more extreme form of wildness. The scene positions Native Americans as measuring sticks for Pearl’s own marginalization from Puritan society, suggesting a racial hierarchy in which Pearl’s status as the illegitimate daughter of an adulteress places her symbolically closer to Native Americans than to respectable Puritan children. Hawthorne’s depiction participates in what scholars have identified as a common literary strategy of using Native American characters primarily as symbols for white characters’ psychological or social conditions rather than as fully developed individuals with their own subjectivity and complexity (Scheckel, 1998). The marketplace scene thus reveals both the spatial arrangement of colonial society, with Native Americans relegated to the margins, and the symbolic economy through which white authors used indigenous peoples to explore themes of civilization and savagery that ultimately reinforced colonial hierarchies.
Symbolic Function: Native Americans as Representatives of Natural Freedom
Throughout “The Scarlet Letter,” Hawthorne employs Native Americans symbolically to represent natural freedom, wilderness, and an alternative to Puritan repression, though this representation remains deeply problematic in its reliance on romanticized stereotypes. The novel’s famous forest scenes, where Hester and Dimmesdale meet away from the surveillance of Puritan society, are explicitly associated with Native American space and presence. The forest represents a realm beyond Puritan law and social control, described as “the wild, heathen Nature of the forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by higher truth” (Hawthorne, 1850, p. 203). By associating this space with “heathen Nature,” Hawthorne connects the forest symbolically with Native Americans, who are implicitly understood as the forest’s natural inhabitants. This symbolic association participates in the long literary tradition of positioning Native Americans as part of nature rather than culture, as primitive rather than civilized, and as existing outside history and social development (Berkhofer, 1978). While Hawthorne uses this symbolic framework to critique Puritan repression—suggesting that the forest offers a space of moral freedom and authentic emotion unavailable in the settlement—the critique depends upon and reinforces problematic assumptions about Native Americans as fundamentally different from Europeans and as representing an earlier stage of human development.
The symbolic use of Native Americans to represent freedom from social constraint also appears in the novel’s treatment of Pearl, whose wildness is repeatedly compared to indigenous characteristics. Pearl is described as speaking “in a tongue unknown to the erudite clergyman” and as having “the wild energy of her nature” that connects her more to the forest than to the settlement (Hawthorne, 1850, p. 113). These descriptions implicitly link Pearl with Native Americans, suggesting a kinship based on their shared marginalization from Puritan society and their association with natural spontaneity rather than civilized restraint. However, this symbolic framework ultimately reveals more about white anxieties and fantasies than about actual Native American peoples or cultures. The figure of the “noble savage” who lives in harmonious freedom from civilized corruption, which underlies Hawthorne’s symbolic use of Native Americans, functions as a projection of white desires for escape from social constraints rather than as a genuine engagement with indigenous societies and histories (Pearce, 1988). By analyzing the symbolic function of Native Americans in “The Scarlet Letter,” we can see how even seemingly sympathetic representations that position indigenous peoples as embodiments of freedom and natural authenticity participate in forms of othering that deny Native Americans full humanity and historical agency, reducing them to symbols in white narratives rather than recognizing them as complex peoples with their own cultures, histories, and perspectives.
Native Americans and the Boundaries of Puritan Civilization
The representation of Native Americans in “The Scarlet Letter” plays a crucial role in establishing and maintaining the boundaries of Puritan civilization, serving as markers of what the colonial community defines itself against. Throughout the novel, references to Native Americans function to delineate the spatial and cultural borders between the Puritan settlement and the wilderness, between Christian civilization and heathen savagery, between order and chaos. The Puritans’ fear of indigenous peoples reflects deeper anxieties about the colonial project’s stability and legitimacy, as the presence of Native Americans serves as a constant reminder that the land claimed by the colonists rightfully belongs to others. Hawthorne captures this anxiety in descriptions of the forest as a place where “the Black Man” holds his revels, a reference that conflates Native American religious practices with European witchcraft and devil worship (Castiglia, 1996). This conflation reveals how Puritan ideology constructed Native Americans as not merely different but as spiritually dangerous, as forces of evil that threatened the colony’s Christian mission. The novel’s treatment of these themes reflects historical Puritan attitudes while also participating in nineteenth-century anxieties about racial difference and cultural contact, showing how representations of Native Americans served to define white identity through contrast and opposition.
The novel’s depiction of the relationship between Puritan authority and Native American presence reveals the underlying violence and dispossession upon which colonial society was built, though Hawthorne addresses these issues only indirectly. When Native Americans appear in the marketplace, they do so under the watchful eyes of Puritan authorities who permit their presence for purposes of trade while maintaining strict social boundaries and hierarchies. This controlled contact reflects the historical reality of Puritan-Native relations, which combined economic interdependence with cultural hostility and political domination (Salisbury, 1982). The novel’s spatial arrangement, with Native Americans “standing apart” from the Puritan community and associated primarily with the forest rather than the settlement, literalizes the process of dispossession by which indigenous peoples were gradually pushed to the margins and then removed entirely from their ancestral lands. While Hawthorne does not explicitly critique colonialism in “The Scarlet Letter,” his representation of Native Americans as dignified figures whose presence challenges Puritan self-righteousness suggests at least an implicit recognition of the moral problems inherent in the colonial project. However, this limited critique does not extend to questioning the fundamental legitimacy of colonization itself, and the novel ultimately accepts the displacement of Native Americans as a historical inevitability rather than examining it as an ongoing injustice.
Racial Ideology and the “Savage” Other
Hawthorne’s representation of Native Americans in “The Scarlet Letter” reflects and reinforces the racial ideologies of nineteenth-century America, particularly the construction of indigenous peoples as “savage” Others fundamentally different from and inferior to white Europeans. The language Hawthorne uses to describe Native Americans consistently emphasizes their supposed primitiveness, describing them as “wild” and associating them with physical appearance markers that nineteenth-century racial science used to categorize and hierarchize human populations. When describing the Native Americans in the marketplace, Hawthorne focuses on their physical features and clothing, presenting them as exotic specimens to be observed rather than as individuals with interiority and subjectivity. This objectifying gaze reflects what scholars have identified as the “ethnographic present” common in nineteenth-century literature, where indigenous peoples are depicted as if frozen in time, representing an earlier stage of human development rather than as contemporary peoples with their own histories and futures (Fabian, 1983). The novel’s representation thus participates in the broader cultural work of constructing racial difference as natural and unchangeable, providing ideological justification for Native American dispossession and marginalization by depicting indigenous peoples as essentially unsuited for civilization and modernity.
The racial ideology underlying Hawthorne’s representation of Native Americans becomes particularly evident in the novel’s treatment of cultural contact and mixing. Throughout “The Scarlet Letter,” contact with Native Americans and association with wilderness carries the threat of degeneracy, suggesting fears about racial contamination and the possibility of white colonists “going native” (Sayre, 1965). Hester Prynne’s marginalization positions her in closer proximity to Native Americans than other Puritan women, and this proximity is presented as both a consequence of her sin and a further marker of her degraded status. When Hester contemplates fleeing to the wilderness or to Europe with Dimmesdale and Pearl, the association of this plan with indigenous space suggests the dangerous allure of abandoning civilization for savagery. These representations reveal anxieties about cultural boundaries and racial mixing that were particularly intense in nineteenth-century America, when debates about slavery, expansion, and Native American removal forced confrontations with questions about racial difference and equality. While Hawthorne’s novel does not directly address these contemporary controversies, his representation of Native Americans as fundamentally other, as existing outside the moral and social world of the main characters, implicitly reinforces the racial hierarchies that justified both African enslavement and Native American dispossession. By analyzing these ideological dimensions of Native American representation in “The Scarlet Letter,” readers can better understand how literature participated in constructing and naturalizing racial categories that had profound political and social consequences.
Limitations and Absences in Hawthorne’s Representation
Perhaps most revealing about Hawthorne’s representation of Native Americans in “The Scarlet Letter” is what remains absent from the novel—the lack of Native American characters with speaking roles, developed personalities, or narrative agency. Indigenous peoples appear only briefly as background figures, exotic elements in crowd scenes, or symbolic associations rather than as fully realized human beings with their own perspectives, motivations, and stories. This absence reflects a broader pattern in American literature of the nineteenth century, where Native Americans functioned primarily as symbols or obstacles in narratives focused on white characters rather than as subjects of their own stories (Berkhofer, 1978). The novel provides no insight into how Native Americans understood the Puritan invasion of their lands, how they experienced the dramatic social changes brought by colonization, or what their lives, cultures, and beliefs actually entailed. Instead, Hawthorne relies on generalized stereotypes and external observations, presenting Native Americans entirely through the perspective of white observers who interpret indigenous presence according to their own cultural assumptions and anxieties. This representational strategy of making Native Americans visible only as objects of white perception while rendering their own subjectivity invisible constitutes a form of erasure that, however unintentional, participates in the broader colonial project of denying indigenous peoples full humanity and historical significance.
The limitations of Hawthorne’s representation become particularly apparent when compared to the detailed psychological portraits he provides of his white characters, especially Hester, Dimmesdale, Chillingworth, and even minor figures like Governor Bellingham. These characters are granted interiority, complexity, moral ambiguity, and developmental arcs, while Native Americans remain flat, undifferentiated, and static. This disparity in representation reveals the racial boundaries of Hawthorne’s empathy and imagination, suggesting that he could not or would not extend the same humanizing attention to indigenous characters that he devoted to white characters (Castiglia, 1996). Modern readers and critics must grapple with these limitations while still appreciating the novel’s other achievements, recognizing that even great works of literature often reflect and perpetuate the prejudices of their historical moment. Analyzing the representation of Native Americans in “The Scarlet Letter” thus becomes an exercise not only in understanding what the novel says about indigenous peoples but also in recognizing what it fails to say, what it cannot imagine, and how its silences and absences themselves constitute meaningful forms of representation that tell us much about nineteenth-century American culture and its relationship to colonialism, race, and national identity.
Contemporary Critical Perspectives on Native American Representation
Contemporary literary criticism has increasingly examined how classic American texts like “The Scarlet Letter” represent Native Americans, using postcolonial theory, critical race studies, and indigenous studies methodologies to analyze the ideological work these representations perform. Scholars have argued that Hawthorne’s novel participates in what Susan Scheckel terms “the insistence of the Indian” in American literature, where Native American figures repeatedly appear at crucial moments to mark boundaries, embody contradictions, and serve symbolic functions in narratives primarily concerned with white identity formation (Scheckel, 1998). This critical approach examines not only how Native Americans are depicted but also why they appear when and where they do, what narrative work their presence performs, and how their marginalization within the text reflects and reinforces broader patterns of indigenous dispossession and erasure. From this perspective, even the limited presence of Native Americans in “The Scarlet Letter” reveals significant anxieties about colonialism, legitimacy, and the violent foundations of American society that the novel cannot fully acknowledge or address. The marketplace scenes, the forest symbolism, and the associations between Pearl and wildness all become sites where colonial guilt and anxiety emerge in displaced and symbolic forms, suggesting that Native American dispossession haunts the novel even when indigenous characters barely appear.
More recent scholarship influenced by indigenous studies has pushed beyond analyzing representations to question the very frameworks through which non-Native authors and critics approach Native American presence in literature. These scholars argue that focusing solely on how white authors represent Native Americans risks perpetuating the centering of white perspectives and experiences that characterizes colonial discourse (Warrior, 1995). Instead, they advocate for reading practices that recognize indigenous presence and agency even in texts that attempt to marginalize or erase them, and for privileging Native American voices, stories, and interpretive frameworks over those of colonizing cultures. From this perspective, analyzing the representation of Native Americans in “The Scarlet Letter” should include acknowledging the Algonquian peoples whose land the novel depicts without authorization, recognizing the Massachusett, Wampanoag, and other indigenous nations as the original inhabitants and rightful sovereigns of the Boston area, and reading the novel’s silences and absences as themselves meaningful. This critical approach demands that readers question whose stories get told, whose perspectives are privileged, and how literary classics like “The Scarlet Letter” have contributed to normalizing colonization and indigenous dispossession by treating them as natural backdrops for white dramas rather than as central historical events requiring moral reckoning. By engaging with these contemporary critical perspectives, readers can develop more nuanced and ethically informed understandings of how Native American representation functions in American literature and how we might read these texts more responsibly today.
Conclusion
The representation of Native Americans in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” reflects the complex intersection of historical reality, literary symbolism, and racial ideology that characterized both seventeenth-century Puritan society and nineteenth-century American culture. While indigenous characters appear only briefly in the novel, their presence serves important narrative and symbolic functions, marking the boundaries of Puritan civilization, representing natural freedom in contrast to social repression, and providing exotic background for the white characters’ psychological and moral dramas. However, Hawthorne’s representation relies heavily on stereotypes common in his era, depicting Native Americans as primitive, savage, and fundamentally other while denying them the interiority, complexity, and narrative agency granted to white characters. The novel’s treatment of Native Americans reveals the limitations of even sympathetic romanticist approaches to indigenous peoples, as the symbolic use of Native American figures to critique Puritan repression ultimately depends upon and reinforces problematic assumptions about racial difference and civilizational hierarchy.
Analyzing the representation of Native Americans in “The Scarlet Letter” requires attention to multiple contexts and critical frameworks, including the historical realities of Puritan-Native relations in seventeenth-century New England, the ideological assumptions about race and colonialism that shaped nineteenth-century American literature, and the contemporary critical perspectives that challenge colonial narratives and center indigenous voices and experiences. The novel’s spatial arrangement, with Native Americans relegated to the margins of Puritan society and associated primarily with the wilderness, literalizes the processes of dispossession and erasure that characterized European colonization of North America. The absence of developed Native American characters with speaking roles and subjective depth constitutes a form of representational violence that, while typical of its historical moment, demands critical recognition and interrogation by modern readers. By examining how Native Americans appear in “The Scarlet Letter,” what symbolic work their presence performs, and what remains unspoken or unimaginable within the novel’s representational framework, we gain valuable insights into how American literature has participated in constructing racial categories, naturalizing colonial violence, and shaping national narratives that marginalize indigenous peoples. This critical analysis invites readers to approach classic texts with both appreciation for their literary achievements and awareness of their ideological limitations, fostering more ethically informed and historically conscious reading practices.
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