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Elizabeth Pain is buried at King's Chapel
Burying Ground. She died in 1704, and her grave is marked with a
beautiful carved stone. It is believed that
Nathaniel Hawthorne
(1804-1864) was inspired by Elizabeth Pain's gravestone, and referred to it
in his famous book The Scarlet Letter.
Wikipedia summarizes The Scarlet
Letter concisely: "Hester Prynne, the story's protagonist, is
a young married woman whose husband was presumed to have been lost at sea on
the journey to the New World. She begins a secret adulterous
relationship with Arthur Dimmesdale, the highly regarded town minister, and
becomes pregnant with a daughter, whom she names Pearl. She is then
publicly vilified and forced to wear the scarlet letter 'A' on her clothing
to identify her as an adulteress, but loyally refuses to reveal the identity
of her lover. She accepts the punishment with grace and refuses to be
defeated by the shame inflicted upon her by her society."
The controversy associated with Elizabeth Pain's marker is that some modern
references state that Nathaniel Hawthorne was inspired by Mrs. Pain's life,
which is most likely completely false. Hawthorne appears to have been
inspired by her gravestone. Excerpts from the final
paragraph in The Scarlet Letter states the following: "And,
after many, many years, a new grave was delved, near an old and sunken one,
in that burial ground beside which King's Chapel has since been built. It was near that old
and sunken grave, yet with a space between, as if the dust of the two
sleepers had no right to mingle. Yet one tombstone served for both. All
around, there were monuments carved with armorial bearings; and on this
simple slab of slate?as the curious investigator may still discern, and
perplex himself with the purport?there appeared the semblance of an engraved
escutcheon [a shield]."
The shield on Elizabeth Pain's marker likely inspired Nathaniel
Hawthorne. Hawthorne wrote about the conflicts of Puritanism, albeit with artistic license. Records indicate that in 1674, a Boston town official admitted to committing "incontinence,"
and was levied a fine of 5 Pounds as punishment. Wearing a scarlet "A"
was unlikely the punishment for adultery (although public drunkards at times
were required to wear a "D" as penalty). Hawthorne also
appears to have borrowed Hester Prynne's name from William Prynne, an opponent of the
Anglican Church in England in the 1600s, whose ears were cut off as
punishment.
Mrs. Pain's Escutcheon or Shield
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