Nathaniel Hawthorne: Scarlet Letter

（思政融入点：认识清教思想）

"Only this is such a strange and incomprehensible world!” a character called Holgrave declares in The House of the Seven Gables (1851), the second full-length fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864). “The more I look at it, the more it puzzles me; and I begin to suspect that a man’s bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom!” Hawthorne was notoriously mistrustful of all speculative schools of thought, or of anyone or any movement that claimed to have solved the mystery and resolved the contradictions of life. That included the two major historical movements associated with his native New England of which he had intimate experience: Puritanism and Transcendentalism. He was someone who managed to make great art, not so much out of bewilderment, as out of of ambiguity, irresolution – a refusal to close off debate or the search for truth. Hawthorne was undoubtedly a moralist, concerned in particular with the moral errors of egotism and pride, separation from what he called “the magnetic chain of humanity.” But he was a moralist who was acutely aware of just how complex the human character and human relations are, just how subtle and nicely adjusted to the particulars of the case moral judgments consequently have to be – and how moral Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 93 judgment does not preclude imaginative understanding, even sympathy. He was also someone who had inherited from his Puritan ancestors what he termed his “inveterate love of allegory.” But his alertness to the dualities of experience meant that, in his hands, allegory passed into symbolism: an object or event assumed multiple possible significances, rather than correspondence with one, divinely ordained idea. Finally, Hawthorne was, he confessed in the “Preface” to The House of the Seven Gables, an author of romances rather than novels. But, for Hawthorne, greater imaginative freedom was a means, not an end. His aim, and achievement, was to maneuver the romance form so as to unravel the secrets of personality and history: “the truth of the human heart,” as Hawthorne himself put it, and the puzzling question of whether the present is an echo or repetition of the past, a separate world “disjoined by time,” or a mixture somehow of both. In 1828 Hawthorne published his first novel, Fanshawe: A Tale, anonymously and at his own expense. An autobiographical work, it went unnoticed. But it did attract the attention of its publisher, Samuel Goodrich, who then published many of Hawthorne’s short stories in his periodical, The Token. Eventually, these were reprinted in a volume, Twice-Told Tales, in 1837, then in a larger version in 1842. In a characteristically modest and self-critical preface, Hawthorne referred to his tales as having “the pale tint of flowers blossomed in too retired a shade.” They do, however, include some of his best pieces, such as “The Maypole of Merrymount,” “Endicott and the Red Cross,” and “The Grey Champion.” And, collectively, they explore the issues that obsessed him: guilt and secrecy, intellectual and moral pride, the convoluted impact of the Puritan past on the New England present. For the next five years, Hawthorne worked as an editor for Goodrich, then became involved briefly in the experiment in communal living at Brook Farm. Used to solitude, however, he found communal living uncongenial: its only positive result for him was the novel he published in 1852 based on his Brook Farm experience, The Blithedale Romance. Married now, to Sophia Peabody, he and his wife moved to Concord, where they lived in the Old Manse, the former home of Ralph Waldo Emerson. There was time for neighborly visits to Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller, for the family – three children were born to Sophia and Nathaniel between 1844 and 1851 – and for writing: in 1846, Mosses from an Old Manse appeared, containing such famous stories as “Young Goodman Brown,” “Rappacini’s Daughter,” and “Roger Malvin’s Burial.” There was also time, after Hawthorne left a post he had held for three years as customs surveyor, to concentrate on a longer fiction, what would turn out to be his most important work. The germ of this work, what was to becomeThe Scarlet Letter (1850), can be found as far back as 1837. In the story “Endicott and the Red Cross,” the narrator describes a young woman, “with no mean share of beauty,” wearing the letter A on her breast, in token of her adultery. Already, the character of Hester Prynne, the heroine of The Scarlet Letter, was there in embryo. And gradually, over the years between 1837 and 1849, other hints and anticipations appear in the journals Hawthorne kept. “A man who does penance,” he wrote in one journal entry, in an idea for a story, “in what might appear to lookers-on the most glorious and triumphal circumstances of his life.” That was to become the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, Hester’s secret lover and the father of her illegitimate child, preaching the Election Day Sermon. “A story of the effects of revenge, in diabolising him who indulges it,” he wrote in another entry. That was to be 94 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 Roger Chillingworth, Hester’s husband and Dimmesdale’s persecutor. Ideas for the portrait of Pearl, the daughter of Hester and Dimmesdale, often sprang from Hawthorne’s observation of his own daughter, Una. As he wrote the novel, over the course of 1849 and 1850, Hawthorne was simultaneously exhilarated and wary. “The Scarlet Letter is positively a hell-fired story,” he wrote to his publisher, when he had completed it; “it will weary very many people and disgust some.” The major tensions that Hawthorne searches out in The Scarlet Letter are related to his own ambivalent relationship to Puritanism, and his own Puritan ancestors in particular. As he intimates in the introductory essay to his story, he felt haunted by his ancestors yet different from them. He could experience what he calls there “a sort of home-feeling with the past,” but he also suspected that his Puritan founding father might find it “quite a sufficient retribution for his sins” that one of his descendants had become a writer, “an idler” and a dabbler in fancy. The Scarlet Letter rehearses the central debate in nineteenth-century American literature: between the demands of society and the needs of the individual, communal obligation and self-reliance. The Puritan settlement in which the story is set is a powerful instance of community. Hester Prynne, in turn, is a supreme individualist: “What we did had a consecration of its own,” she tells her lover. The conflict between the two is also a conflict between the symbolic territories that occur in so many American texts: the clearing and the wilderness, life conducted inside the social domain and life pursued outside it. And the main characteristic of Hawthorne’s portrait of this conflict is its doubleness: quite simply, he is tentative, equivocal, drawing out the arguments for and against both law and freedom. As a result, the symbolic territories of The Scarlet Letter become complex centers of gravity: clustering around them are all kinds of often conflicting moral implications. The forest, for example, may be a site of freedom, the only place where Hester and Dimmesdale feel at liberty to acknowledge each other. But it is also a moral wilderness, where characters go to indulge in their darkest fantasies – or, as they see it, to commune with the Devil. The settlement may be a place of security, but it is also one of constriction, even repression, its moral boundaries marked out by the prison and the scaffold. Simple allegory becomes rich and puzzling symbol, not only in the mapping of the opposing territories of forest and settlement, clearing and wilderness, but in such crucial, figurative presences as the scarlet letter “A” that gives the book its title. To the Puritans who force Hester to wear the scarlet letter, it may be an allegorical emblem. In the course of the story, however, it accumulates many meanings other than “adultress.” It might mean that, of course, and so act as a severe judgment on Hester’s individualism; then again, as the narrator indicates, it might signify “able,” “admirable,” or even “angel.” The major characters of The Scarlet Letter, too, become centers of conflict, the debate become flesh, turned into complex imaginative action. Hester, for example, may be a rebel, modeled on the historical figure of Anne Hutchinson as well as the mythical figure of Eve. But she cannot live outside of society altogether. She is a conflicted figure, unable to find complete satisfaction in either the clearing or the wilderness; and her eventual home, a house on the edge of the forest, in a kind of border territory between the two, is a powerful illustration of this. Dimmesdale is conflicted too, but in a more spiritually corrosive way. Torn between the image he offers to others and the one he presents to himself, his public role as a revered minister and his private one as Hester’s Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 95 lover and Pearl’s father, Dimmesdale is fatally weakened for much of the action. In his case, the central conflict of the story finds its issue in severe emotional disjunction. And Chillingworth is there to feed on that weakness, becoming Dimmesdale’s “leech” in more ways than one – apparently his doctor but actually drawing sustenance from Dimmesdale’s guilt and his own secret satisfying of the need for revenge. Roger Chillingworth, in turn, is more than just a figure of retribution and a possible projection of Hawthorne’s own uneasy feeling that, as a writer, he was just a parasite, an observer of life. “It is a curious observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same at bottom,” the narrator comments, after describing how Chillingworth declined once Dimmesdale died. The link is passion. “The passionate lover” and “the no less passionate hater” each sups voraciously on “the food of his affection”; and the hater, rather more than the lover, reminds us that laws may well be required to curb the individual appetite. Hawthorne was enough of a son of his Puritan forefathers to believe that, as he put it in his journals, “there is evil lurking in every human heart.” Knowledge of evil, after all, and of her origins, is the means by which Pearl eventually ceases to be a child – a creature of the wilderness, associated with its streams, plants, and animals – and starts to become an adult, a woman in the world. And knowledge of evil renders each of the major characters even more vacillating and conflicted: ensuring that the debate between self and society that The Scarlet Letter rehearses remains open, for the narrator and for us, his readers. This, perhaps, is the secret of the mysterious power of Hawthorne’s major novel: it is an open text. The story explores many issues. They include, along with the central problem of law and freedom, what the narrator calls the “dark question” of womanhood. Among many other things, The Scarlet Letter considers the condition of woman in and through the story of its heroine, speculating that “the whole system of society” may have “to be torn down and built up anew” and woman herself reconstructed, freed from a “long hereditary habit” – behavior instilled by social separation and subjection – before women like Hester can assume “a fair and suitable position.” On none of these issues, however, and least of all on the central one, does the narrator claim to be authoritative or the narrative move towards closure. The subtle maneuvering of character, the equivocal commentary and symbolism, ensure that meaning is not imposed on the reader. On the contrary, the reader has to collaborate with the narrator, in the construction of possible meanings, every time the book is read. To this extent, for all Hawthorne’s profound debt to Puritanism, The Scarlet Letter is an extraordinarily modern book: expressing a relativist sense of experience in a form that is more fluid process than finished product. What it offers is not, in the manner of a traditional classic text, an answer issuing out of a belief in some absolute, unalterable truth, but something more like a modern classic – a shifting, disconcerting, and almost endless series of questions. The Scarlet Letter ushered in the most productive period of Hawthorne’s life. In the next three years, he was to publish, not only the two further novels, The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance, but another collection of stories, The Snow Image and Other Tales (1851), and two volumes of stories for children, A Wonder Book (1852) and Tanglewood Tales (1853). He lived in England for a while, as United States Consul, and then in Rome, returning to America in 1860. The years in Europe supplied him with the material for a novel set in Rome and dealing with the international theme 96 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 that Henry James was to make his own, The Marble Faun (1860). They also resulted in a series of shrewd essays drawn from his observations in England, called Our Old Home (1863). But, back in the United States, he found it increasingly difficult to write. The writer who had once been inspired by the multiplicity of possible meanings that lay beneath the surface of things was stuck, frustrated by an apparent absence of meaning, his evident inability to strike through the surface. The “cat-like faculty of seeing in the dark” that Henry James was later to attribute to him had, Hawthorne felt, now deserted him. It was a sad ending for a great writer. But, of course, it in no way diminishes his achievement. Even the later, unfinished work is far more intriguing than Hawthorne, in his dejection, supposed. And his earlier work, above all the major stories and The Scarlet Letter, form an indispensable contribution to American literature.

Preview questions:

1. Write a summary of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.

2. What are the symbolic meanings of the scarlet letter on Hester's breast in different stages of her life?

3. List the four main characters' names in the work and interpret the connotation of their names.