The Scarlet Letter (Criticism)

Criticism

Pearl James

In the following essay, James, a doctoral candidate at Yale University, explores the historical concerns that shaped The Scarlet Letter and how Hester Prynne's emblem serves as several types of imagery.

Nathaniel Hawthome envisioned The Scarlet Letter as a short story to be published in a collection, but it outgrew that purpose. Most critics accept Hawthome's definition of it as a "romance," rather than as a novel. It usually appears with an introductory autobiographical essay, "The Custom House," in which Hawthome describes working in his ancestral village, Salem, Massachusetts, as a customs officer. Hawthome describes coming across certain documents in the customs house that provide him with the basis for The Scarlet Letter. But this essay fictionalizes the origins of the story in that it offers "proofs of the authenticity of a narrative therein contained." Following other literary examples in early American literature, like Washington Irving's History of New York, Hawthome masks his literary invention by making it seem "historical." He calls his motivation for writing the essay "a desire to put [himself] in [his] true position as editor, or very little more." This editorial positioning indicates his interest in creating a aura of "authenticity" and historical importance for his narrative.

Not surprisingly, therefore, much criticism of The Scarlet Letter focuses on its relation to history. Many critics have investigated the Puritan laws governing adultery and searched for an historical Hester Prynne. Other critics have used clues within the tale to specify its context. For example, when Dimmesdale climbs on the scaffold at midnight, Hester and Pearl have been watching at the governor's deathbed. Charles Ryskamp associates this with the death of Governor Winthrop on March 26, 1649, and notices that celestial disturbances were actually recorded after his death. Similarly, Election Day, on which Dimmesdale's sermon commemorates the inauguration of a new Governor, can be located historically on May 2, 1649. To notice these dates, however, is to notice that Hawthome takes liberties with them. ("The Minister's Vigil" chapter takes place in "early May," not March, and so on.) His role in composing The Scarlet Letter far exceeds that of a mere "editor." The tale is an invention, and Hawthome's use of disparate historical details should be understood not only as significant, but also as symbolic.

Hawthome's interest in the history of the colonies and his Puritan ancestors was deep and genuine, but complicated. He was interested in not just documenting, but creating an "authentic" past. In "The Custom House" and elsewhere in his writing, Hawthome imagines an ancestral guilt that he inherits; he takes "shame upon [himself] for their sakes." (One of his ancestors, John Hathome, ruled for executions during the Salem witch trials.) At still another level, Hawthorne invites the reader to relate The Scarlet Letter to contemporary politics of the 1840s. "The past is not dead" — it lives on in the custom house, and other contemporary political institutions. He writes The Scarlet Letter after having lost his administrative position, as a self-proclaimed "politically dead man." Hawthorne insists that the nation both enables and impedes the lives of its constituents and the telling of its histories.

In the novel's opening pages, we wait with the crowd for Hester to emerge from the prison. We overhear snatches of conversation among the women of the crowd, who express little sympathy for Hester and even wish for a harsher sentence. The narrator interrupts these bitter sentiments, which match the prison's "gloomy front," and contrasts them with a wild rosebush that blooms by the prison door. He hopes this rosebush may serve "to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found" by the reader of this "tale of human frailty and sorrow." Explicitly, then, Hawthome identifies The Scarlet Letter as a moral parable, which offers its readers a "sweet" and "moral" lesson. This lesson emerges from the faults made by the Puritans' early experiment in society, which the narrator consistently uses irony to deflate. He comments, for example, that "whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness" the founding Pilgrims had envisioned, a cemetery and a prison both became necessary institutions. He aims his irony not at the fact that the need for a prison arose, but at the naive fantasy that it could have been otherwise. As he does in The Blithedale Romance (1852), Hawthorne deflates the tradition of American dreams of Utopia and new social orders. In The Scarlet Letter, the fault shared by the Puritan settlers, the women outside the prison, and Arthur Dimmesdale most of all, is pious hypocrisy: they naively imagine that sin, or "human frailty and sorrow," can be avoided through denial and pretense. Chillingworth, using an assumed name and hiding his intent of revenge, becomes an increasingly diabolical villain by his own duplicity. At the other end of the spectrum, Hester Prynne, because she wears a sign of shame on the surface of her clothing, cannot feign innocence; consequently she has a greater potential for salvation and peace.

For Hawthorne, his Puritan ancestors and the society they built seemed to forget the wisdom of the great Puritan poet John Milton, author of Paradise Lost. Hawthorne repeatedly invokes Paradise Lost in order to reassert its vision of mankind as fallen, and its poetic dramatization of Adam and Eve's fall and expulsion from Eden. Fallen, with the world "all before them," they gain the potential for ultimate redemption. So Hester, let out of prison, "with the world before her," seems to have a better chance of redemption than her hypocritical neighbors.

Hawthorne's allusions to Paradise Lost also provide him a way of introducing the question of sexuality and woman as the site of temptation and sin. Hester Prynne repeatedly feels herself to be responsible for the sins of both Dimmesdale and Chillingworth. Dimmesdale and Chillingworth each reinforce this interpretation. The narrator dramatizes the self-serving structure of their accusations, and calls it into question. The irony of Dimmesdale's initial entreaty to Hester illustrates this:

Be not silent from any mistaken pity and tenderness for [thy fellow-sinner]; for, believe me, Hester, though he were to step down from a high place, and stand there beside thee, on thy pedestal of shame, yet better were it so, than to hide a guilty heart through life. What can thy silence do for him, except it tempt him — yea, compel him, as it were — to add hypocrisy to sin?

Dinunesdale, as he stands at a literally high place, transfers his own responsibility to acknowledge his part in the crime to Hester. Hester serves both Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, and indeed the whole community, as a scapegoat. The "rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic" in her nature, which implies sexuality, is something that the community simultaneously desires and disavows. They ostracize her, but continue to consume her needle-work, surreptitiously borrowing from the exotic principle she seems to symbolize.

In this way, Hawthorne directs his irony at Puritan hypocrisy. However, he softens the didacticism (intent to teach) of his tale with the other means he uses: imagery and symbolism. Again, the rosebush should "symbolize some sweet moral blossom" — the key word is "symbolize." The novel's most important symbol, the eponymous (name-giving) scarlet letter "A," takes on several different meanings. To the townspeople, the letter has "the effect of a spell, taking [Hester] out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and inclosing her in a sphere by herself." The spell of this scarlet letter is akin to that of The Scarlet Letter — the book itself. Like the community of Boston, we are invited to enter a separate sphere, where both imagination and moral growth can occur. As Hawthorne describes it in "The Custom House," modern life (of the 1840s) has a dulling effect on the mind and the spirit. In his fiction, he wants to create a richer and more challenging world. Just as the meaning of Hester's "A" gradually expands for the towns-people, meaning not just "Adultery" but also "Able," and perhaps "Angel," The Scarlet Letter has an ambiguity that opens possibilities of meaning for its readers. Readers continue to speculate on what the "A" additionally suggests: Arthur (Dimmesdale), Ambiguity, America, and so on.

The ambiguity of Hester's scarlet letter "A" has been used as a textbook case to illustrate the difference between two kinds of imagery in writing: allegory and symbolism. Allegory, in which the name of a character or a thing directly indicates its meaning, can be seen in Hawthorne's early story "Young Goodman Brown," about a young, good man. Symbolism, on the other hand, requires more interpretation; the "A," for instance, suggests many possibilities which are in themselves contradictory ("adultery" versus "angel"). Most critics understand symbolism as a more sophisticated technique, and see it as more rewarding for the reader, who must enter into the text in order to tease out its possible meanings. In The Scarlet Letter, this act of interpretation outside the text mirrors what happens in the story itself.

The narrator of The Scarlet Letter continually provides more than one interpretation of events. When the strange light shines in the sky during "The Minister's Vigil," it makes "all visible, but with a singularity of aspect that [seems] to give another moral interpretation to the things of this world than they had ever borne before." The narrator only reports a "light." He suggests that Dimmesdale reads it as a giant "A" — his own secret sin writ large in the heavens — because of his "highly disordered mental state." But this account is in turn undermined when the sexton and the townsfolk also read a large "A" in the sky, which they "interpret to stand for angel."

These moments suggest that part of the appeal of The Scarlet Letter is the act of reading itself. Hawthorne dramatizes the effect of reading most clearly through Pearl. Up until a certain point, she is more a symbol than a character. The narrator comments, as Pearl dances by, "It was the scarlet letter in another form; the scarlet letter endowed with life." But at a particular moment, Pearl ceases to be a symbol, an "it," and becomes human. That moment occurs on the scaffold, when she kisses her father; his grief transforms her, by calling upon "all her sympathies." This moment emblematizes the moral effect that aesthetic philosophers of the nineteenth century believed literature and art could have on their audiences. Hawthorne, by inscribing such a moment, puts forth high aesthetic claims for his work. The fact that Pearl — here the figure for an ideal reader — is feminine may suggest that Hawthorne has a feminine audience in mind. Occasionally, Hawthorne seems to voice a certain anxiety about the fact that aesthetic appreciation is "seldom seen in the masculine character after childhood or early youth," and whether or not writing might have a disturbingly feminizing effect on writers and readers. On the other hand, work as a customs officer poses a threat to "self reliance" and "manly character" — a threat Hawthorne escapes by returning to writing. In any case, the scene of Pearl's transformation, as the text's central moment of redemption and resolution, emphasizes the importance of the emotions in a richly lived and moral life. In this way, Hawthorne seems to bring two opposites together. Pearl, as a younger, virginal version of her mother, neutralizes the threat Hester initially posed. Hawthome brings the possibility of sensual and feeling feminine character back into the realm of moral life.

Source: Pearl James, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale 1997.

What Do I Read Next?

• The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Hawthorne's third novel, which he personally thought was a better piece of work than The Scarlet Letter, about the cursed house of the Pyncheon family where the sins of fathers are passed on to their descendants.
• The Bird Artist, Howard Norman's recent (1994) novel about an artist in a small Newfoundland coastal village, is a story of crime and adultery in a place without the religious authority of Hawthorne's Boston.
• The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (1987) by Carol F. Karlsen shows that the violent Salem witch trials were not only directed primarily at women, but particularly women who stood to inherit property and, thus, power.
• William Cronon's Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, (1983) is a seminal work of environmental history that describes the impact the early settlers had on New England native peoples and the environment.
• Life in the Iron Mills (1861) by Rebecca Harding Davis is the powerful story of the physical and emotional oppression and struggle of a mid-nineteenth-century mill-worker. Published about a decade after Hawthorne's novel, it is even more of an anomaly in the context of literary transcendentalism.
• Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" (1849) was originally titled "Resistance to Civil Government." He argues here for the right of the individual to refuse to pay taxes or otherwise support civil authority against his or her conscience. Thoreau spent some time in jail when he did not pay taxes in 1843 in protest of the Mexican War.
• Harriet A. Jacobs' s 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is a kind of "romance" slave narrative that ties sexuality to race in pre-Civil War America.