I spoke in my first lecture of the
myth of America. The Scarlet Letter
is its classic representation in the novel.
Moby-Dick is the nation’s prose epic; Leaves of Grass is
its epic poem. The Scarlet Letter
is the romance of the American Way. Of
course, there are aspects of Hawthorne’s novel that have little or nothing to
do with national matters. But the basic reason for its canonization – the
reason why it rapidly became the touchstone to a national literary
tradition, and why it still retains that status, amidst all current critical
revision -- is that it’s a foundational American text. Hawthorne created in The Scarlet Letter,
as the scarlet letter, a democratic aesthetic, a new symbolic mode that
expresses the core beliefs, values, and aspirations of the culture.
I want to
describe that achievement today by unfolding what I consider to be the novel’s
three levels of meaning: (1) psychological and moral; (2) cultural and
historical; and (3) aesthetic. We might think of this structure as a modern
counterpart to the medieval fourfold method that Dante immortalized. The aesthetic level in Hawthorne stands in
place of what Dante called the anagogic or mystical, and it’s an appropriate
shift from that time to our own. Not the
heavenly Jerusalem, capping the ascent from literal to theological, but the
creative imagination, encompassing, in a widening circle, psychology, morality,
history, and culture.
First, then, the
psychological and moral level: The Scarlet Letter is a story about
concealment. Concealment, not adultery. No act of adultery is committed in this
novel. There’s not even any sex (except in movie versions, which therefore
generally end where the novel itself begins).
The nineteenth century gave us great books about adultery – Madame
Bovary, Anna Karenina – but in The Scarlet Letter the word is
not so much as mentioned, not once. The
painful plot goes forward because Hester remains silent about both her lover’s
and her husband’s identity (in what Hawthorne calls a devil’s pact). It gathers
substance because Dimmesdale and Chillingsworth hide the truth; and in their
way so do the Puritans; surely Hester is right in some sense to see a secret A
on every bosom. And little Pearl is the concealment in plain view, the secret
made flesh. In plain view, and so a constant reminder of the problem: the facts
have “been disappeared,” hidden away, and people are trying to smoke them out.
“Name the culprit, woman!” “Why does the minister keep his hand over his
breast?” Towards the end of the novel, the sense of wholeness we feel,
and of closure, is that what’s been hidden has been brought to light.
What’s wrong with
concealment? For although virtually
everyone is complicit, they each have the best of reasons. Consider Hester. She admits her error – her fatal “lie,” as she comes to see it –-- but she’s quick to defend herself. Her
motive was love. Wasn’t it really an act
of generosity on her part? Dimmesdale
too has his noble reason. He worries
that if he speaks out the community may lose its faith – not just in him but in
the moral absolutes he represents. This
new venture in the Good Life, in which he firmly believes, to which he has
dedicated his life, may be shattered through their disillusionment. This is no
mere rationalization. Dimmedsale really
suffers. He sickens, weakens, and dies,
so deeply does he hold to his ideals. Could we not see in him, as Henry James
did, a hero of duty? As for
Chiillingsworth, he’s no hero, perhaps, but he also has a claim to principle –
and to our sympathy. Think of his
situation. After sea-storms, shipwreck, and long years in captivity – a rough
journey for an old man – he finally arrives at his destination, bruised and
battered, and finds his wife standing on the scaffold, with a new-born child in
her arms. You can’t blame him for being
shaken up. Chillingsworth wants to find
out who the father is, and how else can he do it except through disguise and
deceit? He pries too obsessively
perhaps, and with too much inward gloating, but on behalf of justice.
Sin? Guilt?
It may help to rephrase the problem in more general terms. The narrative
framework, the donne of this novel, is an adulterated reality. Something has already gone wrong. The characters are caught a situation they
didn’t want, and try as best they can to set it right -- through love, duty,
justice – and, in trying, they keep doing wrong, and worst of all, wrong to themselves. There’s the source of sin. What’s chilling about Chillingsworth is not
what he does to Dimmesdale; he may even be said to help the minister by goading
him to the open confessional. It’s what he does to his own soul in the course
of pursuing justice. He changes from
what Hester tells us he was – a kindly, gentle scholar -- into a grotesque. And
much the same may be said about Dimmesdale. What’s appalling is not really what
he does to Hester, and certainly not what he does to the community, which seems
mainly to the good. It’s what happens to
him through his commitment to duty.
From being an idealistic young intellectual he turns into a
self-loathing masochist. As for Hester,
she does little but good to others, but she makes her life a
living hell. In her uncompromising commitment to love, she transforms herself,
inwardly, in all her generosity and warmth, into a figure of alienation.
That’s why
Hawthorne remarks at the outset that anyone trying to found a utopia had better
set up a scaffold, a jail, and a cemetery.
We must remind ourselves that we live in a fallen world. That’s the
Puritan myth, and Hawthorne means us to take it seriously. The myth of the Fall: the story of Adam’s
disobedience, which brought death into the world, and all our woe; and which
brought, too, at the same moment, the promise of our redemption through Christ,
the Second Adam.
That paradox --
curse and hope entwined –is built into the structure of The Scarlet Letter. One need only think of the carefully
recurrent image of the scaffold. The
narrative is linked by three scaffold scenes, at the beginning, middle, and
end, each of which brings together the entire cast of characters. After the
Introductory chapter, the scene centers on the adulteress on the scaffold,
child of sin at her bosom, with the community looking on. A world of woe. The central chapters, 13 and 14, show the
scaffold at midnight, Hester and Pearl upon it, joined by Dimmesdale, watched
by Chillingsworth, with the community again present, though indirectly, through
a flash of lighting (resembling an A).
Trials and tribulations towards redemption. The penultimate scene, just before the
conclusion (chapter 23), returns to the scaffold, with Dimmesdale now the
voluntary center, baring his breast to the community. This last scene turns
something of a Pieta: the minister dies in Hester’s arms, and Pearl, child of
the Fall, comes at last into her full integral humanity. Salvation?
Hawthorne allows for that prospect.
The scaffold, he specifies, is made of wood, cut from the surrounding
forest, fastened with nail irons; and he makes it clear in the course of the
story that the forest is the wild region, analogous to our untamed nature, the
fallen tendencies we must cut down in order for morality to triumph. So
understood, the scaffold is the cross: it stands both for our fallen condition
and for our salvation through grace. The imagery leads almost allegorically, as
in an American Pilgrim’s Progress, from a sight of sin to a vision of
redemption.
Almost allegorically
–for of course Hawthorne is not an allegorist.
He’s a modern symbolic writer drawing on what he feels are certain
abiding truths embedded in the ancient myth. Hawthorne’s secular version of the
Christian paradox is ambiguity. And he represents it in terms of psychology,
rather than theology. But the shift builds on continuities. The secular for
Hawthorne was not merely the sphere of the rational. The psychological dimension of his narrative
is fundamentally moral. Moral
psychology, resonant with the insights of an old faith. I refer here to the
Puritan theory of the faculties. The Fall, according tot hat theory, sundered
the faculties of the mind. Adam in
Paradise could see reality whole, love and justice at one glance. With disobedience, reality seemed to split
apart, the perspective of love collided with the perspective of justice, one
seemed to contradict the other. We know
that both perspectives together constitute what we are – beings capable (and
deserving) of mercy and justice alike.
We need both attributes, we are both capacities. And yet we fail repeatedly to get them to
work together. Head and heart are
constantly in conflict. Our faculties are innately disjointed. For the
Puritans, it’s the wages of Original Sin; for Hawthorne, it’s the problem of
our ambiguous human condition.
The Scarlet
Letter
is a psychological study of that problem.
Hawthorne begins by translating the twin poles of reality, justice and
mercy, into variant perspectives: love, duty, justice. This is not to say that he translates the
Christian dualism into a tripartite theory of the mind. Love, justice, and duty do not together
account for the entire range of human understanding, any more than Hester,
Dimmesdale, and Chillingsworth together constitute a complete image of
humanity. They are three representative
individuals within a far larger human community, comprising a far wider variety
of ways of understanding. Ambiguity for
Hawthorne means an open-ended pluralism of perspectives. The psychological dilemma this entails is
that, because we tend to take a certain perspective, things seem ambiguous in a
negative or confusing sense. But the
confusion lies in us, not in reality.
Reality is ambiguous in the positive sense, as the nature of things in
all their full complexity. Our
difficulty in appreciating that complexity lies in our failure to apprehend its
fullness. It’s a failure which stems
from an innate psychic disjunction, and which issues in a dangerous impulse. In
our efforts to resolve the ambiguities around us, we tend to conceal part of realty. More dangerously still, in our inability to
face up to who we ambiguously are, we commit ourselves to one aspect or another
of the truth.
Dimmesdale is one
example. Unable to reconcile reconcile the fact that he is both upright and
transgressor, he divides reality in two. He lives in his mind within two
entirely different worlds. In his
closet, he’s pure evil, and punishes himself relentlessly. In the pulpit, he’s
goodness incarnate, and speaks like an angel.
Jeckyl and Hyde: the Victorian hypocrite. But Hawthorne’s point is different from that
of Robert Louis Stevenson. Hyde does evil to others. Dimmesdale makes us think of the social advantages
of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy may show
that you have moral standards, and really believe in them. You repress your
contrary instincts. At least before
others you can act as if you were what you ought to be. Not a bad thing
necessarily – except for yourself. For
hypocrisy means that you haven’t accepted yourself – who you complexly are –
good and evil, and in Dimmesdale’s case, sensual and spiritual, passionate and
duty-bound. As a result, you’ve split into a warring inner self -- publicly
self-vaunting (concealing the evil); inwardly self-hating (concealing the
good)– an ambiguity divided against itself, self-afflicted.
That’s one
instance of what Hawthorne means by sin; another is represented in
Chillingworth. Unable to reconcile mercy and justice, he simply chooses
justice, and closes out mercy. In Hawthorne’s Puritan-psychological language,
he becomes a demon of the intellect —all head, no heart -- and he pays dearly
for it. For to repeat: it’s not
Dimmesdale, the object of analysis, who’s the victim: the minister is an expert
at self-victimization. It’s the analyst
himself. To close out mercy – willfully
to deny the dimension of love – is to close out half the world around you, and
half of what you are, the vital part. Charity, as the Puritans would
say, connects to faith and hope.
Hawthorne’s image of that connection is Chillingworth’s psychosomatic deterioration. Physically and spiritually, he dries up and
withers away: analysis leads to cynicism, cynicism to fatalism, and fatalism to
despair in everything, everyone, including himself.
That
transformation does not make Chiilingworth a villain. To condemn him outright,
as readers often do, is to replicate the sin we’re witnessing. It’s to conceal
an integral part of this ambiguous story from ourselves. As though to emphasize this point, Hawthorne
tells us that whatever happy ending we can assign to his dark tale is owing to
Chillingworth’s mercy. The reason
that Hester could live happily in Europe
if she so chose, and that Pearl may have become an heiress – if so, the
first in a grand literary line of American heiresses abroad -- is that Chillingworth leaves them his
money. It’s entirely an act of
generosity, from the heart we must suppose, not the intellect. And to make doubly sure we get the point,
Hawthorne explicitly urges another view of the relation between lover and
husband. “Philosophically considered,”
he remarks towards the end of the novel, “hatred and love … are essentially the
same, except that one happens to be seen in a celestial radiance, and the other
in a dusky and lurid glow. In the spiritual world, the old physician and the minister…
may unawares have found their earthly stock of hatred and antipathy transmuted
into golden love.”
The A for
Ambiguity: there’s the key to Dimmesdale’s struggles and Chillingworth’s
decline; the key, too, to the problem of Pearl.
People keep asking: are you a child of God or a child of the Devil? Hester herself wonders: is she a blessing or an evil sprite, token of
retribution or red rose of love? And
the story-line obviously calls for an integration of all such possibilities, so
that Pearl can finally and fully join the human family. That’s the flow of the plot, most clearly
outlined in the relation between Hester and the Puritan community. At the start, the split of faculties: Hester the figure of love; the community, of
judgment. Then, as the narrative
progresses, the perspectives switch. The
community warms appreciatively to her strength and goodness and eventually
Hester pronounces judgment on herself. This last movement is worked out with
deliberate care. At the start, you recall, Hester crosses the prison threshold,
pushing aside the church-beadle, and emerges “of her own free will,” with her
resplendent A, to face the antagonism of the crowd. Women taunt, children
sneer. At the end, Hawthorne writes, some children at play observe her approaching
the threshold of her old cottage. There
she pauses “long enough to display a scarlet letter at her breast”: Hester has
resumed it, we’re told, “of her own free will, for not the sternest magistrate
of that iron period would have imposed it,” and in time she is sought after,
reverently, as a counselor: “Women,
--especially in the continually-recurring trials of wounded, wasted, wronged,
misplace or sinful passion … came to Hester’s cottage, demanding why they were
so wretched, and what the remedy?” It’s a dramatic reversal: the Puritans are
now enacting Hester’s role, and Hester takes the role of judge. She has come to
recognize, Hawthorne writes, “the impossibility that any mission of… truth
should be confided to a woman stained with sin, bowed down with shame.”
A
carefully-thought-through design, as I said: the community moves toward the
heart, Hester towards the head – not in absolute terms now, not as a fatal
split of the faculties, but through a confluence of perspectives. So ambiguity works! Or does it?
Maybe it works too well, too schematically. Isn’t there something too
facile, almost forced, about this design?
The question
takes us directly to the critical crux of the novel. Hester Prynne is an extraordinarily
compelling figure. No doubt she’s has made mistakes for which she may have to
pay, but has she not paid enough, more than enough, through those seven long
years? Now she has some chance for
peace and contentment. Does Hawthorne really have to bring her back? We
understand the moral-psychological dynamics of ambiguity which may dictate such
resolutions. But doesn’t hat conceptual design violate the integrity of
the narrative itself?
The question is
important because (among other reasons) the author insists on it as a
question. What’s notable about the
reversal I’ve outlined is that it remains unexplained. Hawthorne is scrupulous about explicating the
subtlest, slightest turn of the mind, the very texture of deliberation. And yet
precisely here, where Hester makes the momentous choice of imposing the A upon
herself -- in direct opposition to her earlier choices all along, and in spite
of the happy alternative that Hawthorne pointedly opens to her – at this
crucial turn, the author remains silent.
In order to understand what has happened we have to interpret, and
Hawthorne leaves the interpretation to us.
This leads us to
what I called the novel’s second, cultural level of meaning. Hester comes down
to us as a representative figure, a heroine to identify with, or to identify as
heroically American. To that end, when teaching the novel, I sometimes
highlight those two powerful and powerfully conflicting images I just notedand
ask: which Hester is your heroine? Is it
the free spirit we first meet and the counselor of patience at the end? Invariably, the students opt for the free
spirit. And with good reason. Hester
rebels from the start and grows in rebellion: that’s the source and sustained
nourishment of her force of character.
She leaves the prison holding her head high; she stands proudly on the
scaffold; she develops as an independent, self-supporting single mother (an
artist at her trade); and she does charitable work in her spare time, so well
that the town’s heart goes out to her. And what’s more, she becomes an
intellectual, a free thinker. She
“looked from [her] estranged point of view,” writes Hawthorne, “at human institutions, and whatever priests
or legislators had established; criticizing all. … The scarlet letter was her
passport into regions where other women dared not tread.” She actually becomes a proto-feminist.
All this wins the students’ admiration,
justifiably, as it has won the applause of Hawthorne critics and scholars. The Hester of our time is the hero as
feminist and subversive. But what
students find most compelling, again justifiably, is quintessentially American:
Hester’s resolute, fundamentally idealistic, irrepressibly buoyant
individualism. The highpoint is her
confrontation with Dimmesdale, when they meet in the forest, and Hester pleads
with her lover to leave. “Leave this wreck…Begin all anew. … The future is yet full of trial and
success.” Starting anew! The open future! I spoke before of a shift from theology to
psychology, one that seeks however to derive from the earlier mode a certain
moral gravity. The shift in this case is
from dogma to ideology, a secular move through which Hawthorne seeks
nonetheless to convey some sense of the sacred.
For there’s a myth behind the ideology of the open road, and Hawthorne
draws on it as shrewdly as he does on the Puritan myth. I refer to the Romantic myth of innate human
goodness. We were born free but society put us in chains. This version of the
Fall speaks of the tragic socialization of the innocent. And as applied by American Romantics, it points
specifically to the promise of regeneration through nature. This was nature’s nation, after all: here as
nowhere else, the individual was free to return to his or her inmost self, the
divine pre-socialized spirit within.
That was a dominant myth of Hawthorne’s
America. 1850 marks the height of the era that historians have labeled as
American boundlessness – boundless expansion, boundless individualism – the era
of the self-sufficient frontiersman in the West (to which Hester summons
Dimmesdale), and, in the urban North (for which Hawthorne was writing), the
apogee of the self-made man. The cultural keyword was self-reliance; the major
spokesman was Ralph Waldo Emerson: “To believe your own thought, to believe
that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all …-- that is
genius. Speak your latent conviction and
it shall be universal sense. … Our first thought is rendered back to us by the
trumpets of the last Judgment…. Nothing is sacred at last but the integrity of
your own mind. Absolve yourself to yourself and you shall have the suffrage of
the world. … the only right is what is after my constitution, the only
wrong is what is against it.”
These are the
high Romantic, American principles behind Hester’s intellectual
development. They are vividly displayed in the forest scene I quoted, and I
return for emphasis to the dramatic moment when she throws off the A: “The
stigma gone, Hester heaved a long, deep sigh, in which the burden of shame and
anguish departed from her spirit. Oh, exquisite
relief! She had not known the weight,
until she felt the freedom! By another
impulse, she took off the formal cap that confined her hair, and down it fell
upon her shoulders, dark and rich, with at once a shadow and a light in its
abundance, and imparting the charm of softness to her features. There played
around her mouth, and beamed out of her eyes, a radiant and tender smile, that
seemed gushing from the very heart of womanhood.” Note the antithesis between
social stigma and freedom, the liberating movement from shame to impulse, the
link (as in a prison-link) between “formal” and “confined,” and the humanity
that shines forth “from the very heart” when stigma, shame, and forms are
removed. “And,” the passage continues,
“as if the gloom of the earth and sky had been but the effluence of
these two mortal hearts, it vanished with their sorrow. All at once, as with a sudden smile of
heaven, forth burst the sunshine, pouring a very flood into the obscure forest,
gladdening each green leaf, transmuting the yellow fallen ones to gold.”
This is paradise
regained. Social forms have been swept
away, the fallen leaves have turned green and gold, and graced by heaven’s
smile, in nature’s clear light, a new prospect opens -- a new myth for a New
World. But we know the outcome. The A
falls short of the stream, Pearl retrieves it, angrily, and demands its
resumption, and finally Hawthorne brings Hester herself back -- drags her by
her luxuriant long black hair back across the Atlantic Ocean, and sets her down
among the Puritans yet once again, this time once and for all, in what had been
for her a penal colony, and what will certainly remain so, now that she has
judged herself guilty. “Here had been
her penance,” he writes, “and here was yet to be her penitence.”
Strong words, a
stern sentence. And indeed Hawthorne’s
portrait of Hester Prynne is a stern one – far harsher than has been
recognized. The cultural context of the
novel involves a scathing critique of the Romantic-Emersonian myth. The
question that Hawthorne raises of Hester’s heroism requires us to follow that
critique though, and, since it has been neglected, I take the liberty of
tracing it step by step, beginning with that final sentence: “here had been her
penance and here was yet to be her penitence.”
Penance: the outward form, acting as if you’d done wrong. Penitence:
the real thing, feeling guilty.
Throughout her seven lonely years, Hester plays the part of the sinner,
humbly serving others, in silence and in sorrow. But it’s a masquerade. Her penance masks a great pride, a rising
fury. That deception constitutes a major
dramatic theme of The Scarlet Letter – in Hawthorne’s fashion, a drama
of the mind.
For this
occasion, I limit the drama to three scenes, each of them a study in the
dangers inherent in the growth of the independent spirit. Scene one: Hester responds to the
crowd surrounding her on the pillory. They watch her somberly, a heavy moral
silence in the air; and their silence, surprisingly, seems to her unbearable:
“There
was a quality,” Hawthorne writes, “so much more terrible in the solemn mood of
the popular mind, that she longed rather to behold all those rigid countenances
contorted with scornful merriment, and herself the object. Had a roar of laughter burst from the
multitude--each man, each woman, each little shrill-voiced child, contributing
their individual parts--Hester Prynne might have repaid them all with a bitter
and disdainful smile. But, under the
leaden infliction which was her doom to endure, she felt, momentarily, as if
she must needs shriek out… or else go mad at once.” Commentary: Hester needs to feel the
hostility of her audience around her; she wants their scorn so that she can
return it with contempt. She wants them to be mean, outrageous, so that she can
feel superior -- and their moral gravity doesn’t allow for it. The solemnity of the occasion almost unhinges
her mind.
Then (we are
still in scene one) there’s an unexpected change. Hester sees Chillingworth in the distance --
her husband returned as it were from the dead – and she thanks heaven for the
crowd between them. She stares at him,
writes Hawthrorne, with “so fixed a gaze that, at moments of intense
absorption, all other objects in the visible world seemed to vanish, leaving
only him and her. Such an interview
[just him and her] would have been more terrible than even to meet him as she
now did, with the hot, mid-day sun burning down upon her face…. Dreadful as it
was, she was conscious of a shelter in the presence of these thousands of
witnesses. It was better to stand thus,
with so many betwixt him and her, than to greet him, face to face--they two
alone. She fled for refuge… to the
public exposure.” What’s the difference
between Chillingsworth and the Puritans?
To Hester, all the difference in the world. Chillingsworth is a man she has
betrayed. He’s someone she has
harmed, rather than having being harmed by him.
She is to blame: that’s what she has to acknowledge, reluctantly,
unhappily, when she does meet Chillingsworth later, face to face; and when,
seven years after that, amidst the fallen forest leaves, she begs Dimmesdale’s
forgiveness for having concealed her husband’s identity.
But in general
her development is toward victimization.
They are harming her -- with that growing sense of resentment Hester
pretends to conform. She manages to make
others think she’s a victim, and, as she does, she thinks so more and more
herself -- begins in fact to consider herself a martyr. A consequence of
self-reliance: you vindicate yourself by your beliefs (“What is right is what
is after your own constitution”), and so it’s hard to face up to the damage to
others that your beliefs have wrought.
Easier to think of how evil they are. Their cruelty, their
hypocrisy, their contemptibility become the pillars of your freedom of thought.
Scene two: Hester at her
needlework: she’s an expert at it, and a success: it earns her way and wins her
the town’s respect. More than that, it
could provide her with a source of consolation for her losses. Instead, she
sees it as a mode of sacrifice. Hawthorne tells us that her art “might have
been a mode of expressing, and therefore soothing, the passion of her life. …
[Her sense of sacrifice, however,] betokened… something doubtful, something …
deeply wrong beneath.” Simply put:
Hester could have taken pleasure from her work, but she prefers to pity
herself. What’s deeply wrong here is
amplified in the way she performs her acts of charity. “Such helpfulness was found in her,”
Hawthorne writes, “So much power to do,
and power to sympathize, that many people refused to interpret the scarlet ‘A’
by its original signification. They said
it meant able,” some went so far as to say “angelic.” But Hester will not budge from her sense of
martyrdom. After having helped the ill and aging through the night, Hawthorne
tells us, “she forbore to pray for them lest her blessing should turn into a
curse. … Meeting them in the street, she never raised her head to receive their
greeting. If they were ready to accost her, she laid her finger on the scarlet
letter, and passed on.” As the recent
phrase has it, in your face! Being
wronged, getting even: vengeance is sweet.
Her apparent humility, Hawthorne continues, “produced all the softening
influence of the latter quality on the public mind … and society was inclined
to show its former victim a more benign countenance… than she deserved.” Society’s former victim, a victim no
longer but an arch-hypocrite, with a sick link (her disdain, her burning
resentment, her skill at manipulation) – a sick link to the world around her.
Scene three: an anatomy of
that sickness. Recall the grand phrases of Emerson: “Absolve yourself to
yourself and you shall have the sufferance of the world. … Speak your latent
conviction and it shall be universal sense … rendered back … by the Trumpets of
the Last Judgment.” Recall Hester’s high
moment in this nonconformist mode: “Our love had a consecration of its own! We
felt it so!” And now attend Hawthorne,
describing what self-consecration entails: “Standing alone in the world—alone,
as to any dependence on society … she cast away the fragments of a broken
chain. The world's law was no law for her mind…. Hester Prynne, whose heart had
lost its regular and healthy throb, wandered without a clue in the dark
labyrinth of mind; now turned aside by an insurmountable precipice; now
starting back from a deep chasm. There was a wild and ghastly scenery all
around her, and a home and comfort nowhere. At times a fearful doubt strove to
possess her soul, whether it were not better to send Pearl at once to Heaven
and go herself to such futurity as Eternal Justice should provide.” Infanticide and suicide: the danger of
the voice within, rendered as the doomsday Trumpets of the Last Judgment.
Hester is saved from her worst tendencies by
two people, Pearl and Dimmesdale -- the only ones she does not feel superior
to. But, against everyone else her
rebellion grows. She comes to see herself,
Hawthorne writes, as “the people’s … life-long bond-slave”; and although she
sustains their gaze (now their
sympathetic gaze) “as a necessity, a penance, and something which it was a
stern religion to endure,” she is “actually dead in respect to any claim of
sympathy … [and] had departed out of the world with which she still seemed to
mingle.” Thus “Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage and activity …
wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness, as vast, as
intricate, and shadowy as the untamed forest… Her intellect and heart had their
home, as it were, in desert places. …
Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers—stern and wild
ones—and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.” Emerson’s sacred ground, “the integrity of
your own mind,” extends into a moral wasteland; the journey to self-fulfillment
ends in the wilds of self-estrangement.
Let’s return now
to that interpretative space that Hawthorne opens, where we are invited to
negotiate on our own, of our own free will. Where does Hester’s heroism
lie? Hawthorne poses the question, and
I think it’s clear by now that he also guides our interpretation. We negotiate,
but not on neutral ground: the author has a scheme in mind. Hester comes back because she needs to
recognize the shortcomings of self-reliance. But then, the opposite is true
too: we are not on neutral ground, but we still have to negotiate on our
own. For none of what I’ve just said
denies Hester’s enormous positive energy – the fantastic power of individuality
with which critics have come to identify her.
Hawthorne is
offering a critique of individualism, not a polemic against it. His concern is a central ideological dilemma
of liberal America –starkly so at 1850, the era of the open frontier and
hey-day of Transcendentalism, and still now.
America was and remains the contest of me or them, conform or
do-your-own-thing, self-interest or the social welfare. It’s the dilemma of individualism –meaning
the primacy of the inner spirit, and meaning, too, a certain socio-economic system
of interwoven relations (individualism). Hester stands in her penance
for both extremes -- the conformist par excellence, the nonconformist,
“questioning all”– both extremes expressed in the course of the novel from the
perspective of sin, through the conflict between ideals that ought to be
mutually sustaining. The A for Adam’s Fall, the A for Absolute Selfhood:
Hawthorne wants Hester back so that he can suggest a heroism of reciprocity,
one that that incorporates self-doubt and self-affirmation. Not either/or, but
both/and. Another term might be
compromise – in the positive sense of compromise: com-promise, two promises,
two myths, two sets of symbols and values, apparently opposed, yet in reality
-- that adulterated reality we share --
fundamentally one.
Hawthorne’s image
of compromise is Hester restored to her cottage at the margin of the
settlement, a liminal figure again, with liminality now a state of bonding
rather than bondage. Hester as counselor
and comforter represents a process linking individuality and community: “She
assured them…of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world
should have grown ripe for it … a new truth would be revealed, in order to
establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual
happiness…. The angel of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed … but
wise not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy … showing how
sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a successful life to
such an end! So said Hester Prynne, and
glanced her sad eyes downward at the scarlet letter.”
Sad eyes, but
they’re fixed on utopia: Hester retains her old faith. Her vision projects the
love she could not consummate with Dimmesdale, even perhaps some of her
feminism: there is a flash of her former pride in that redemptive woman to
come. But she has acquired a sense of
limits. Her vision of future good things
presupposes the imperfections of this world, an awareness of the case for restraint. We still need those dusky institutions
(prison, scaffold) because people still tend to harm others and themselves.
Hester remains an outsider up to a point, the point where she also feels part
of a troubled community; and she becomes an insider, but one whose
participation retains an independence of mind.
“Here was yet to be her penitence”: Hester is seeking somehow to join
personal and social perfectionism.
For Hawthorne, that’s the heroic
choice. And implicitly he sets it in
contradistinction to another tradition of heroism. Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliette, Anthony
and Cleopatra: the choice of love against the world – love, the higher law, by
contrast with which the laws of society seem arbitrary, inhuman. Hawthorne appreciates that ideal – it cannot
be overstated that Hester is a splendid figure in her absolutism -- but he
suggests that finally it’s based on false premises. It may be more glorious to die for your love;
certainly it’s more tragic. But heroism
for Hawthorne demands a modesty in the face of reality. It means the difficult choice of seeing things
as they are. It’s less heroic to be an
absolutist for your truth, than it would be to believe in your truth and
also to acknowledge the need for society; less dramatic but more heroic
to assert yourself and to recognize your limits.
Perhaps I should put this in historical
terms. Not more or less heroic, but
different kinds of heroism, suited to different cultures. Those earlier
all-or-nothing choices may have been appropriate to other times. Our modern
democratic moment, Hawthorne implies, demands a new standard, the heroics of
both/and. And he finds it in a
nonconformist who comes to terms with her guilt, a fallen woman committed to
her dream of love -- the American as individualist and as representative
individual.
So the A for Ambiguity flows into the A
for America. We are guided into that
configuration, as I said – compelled to interpret for ourselves, but pointed in
a certain direction. Hawthorne’s moral psychology is one guide; another is his
view of history. I refer to his view of
the Puritan community, which is of course intrinsic to the novel’s cultural
meaning. The Scarlet Letter is
the story of how America got from the Puritans to the Jacksonians. Hawthorne finds the A in the Customs House,
the entry to the country. That’s where
the immigrant passes from the Old World into the New, and for Hawthorne (as for
his contemporaries) the Puritan Great Migration was the entry into national
history. In the dominant national
narrative of 1850, the American Way led from the Mayflower Compact to the
Declaration of Independence. Hawthorne’s version of the narrative is implicit
in his title. His Puritans are first and
foremost an interpretive community. The
scarlet letter they impose is an interpretation of Scripture Law – a benevolent
one, let me add, for Scripture required the Puritans to put the adulteress to
death, and the letter is their way of compromise (in the positive sense): they
hope it will lead Hester to atone, for her own good. The first moments, before Hester enters,
involve a dispute between various factions of the community: some are
dissatisfied with the magistrates’ interpretation (it should have been
harsher); others agree with it; still another – a timid young woman who
nonetheless speaks her piece -- feels it was far too harsh. Theocracy itself, as Hawthorne presents it, is
the constant negotiation in outlook and opinion between clergy and magistrates.
Virtually every social action is attended by a clash of views; virtually every
clash shows good will as well as bad; and it’s fair to say that the good tends
to win in the long run. The rulers,
after considering what they believe will be in Pearl’s best interests, decide
to let Hester keep her. The letter of infamy is redefined, by mixed but popular
consent, as an emblem of the generous heart.
That capacity for
interpretation and reinterpretation is the historical ground of the heroism of
compromise. Hester’s faith in the future rests on the concept of process as
progress, and the concept is embodied in the community to which she returns. I
spoke of the scaffold scenes earlier in terms of moral psychology. Now I would add that there’s a national
meaning behind the A that figures at the center of each scene. If in chapter 2 the letter signifies, grimly,
the need for law in utopia, its appearance in the middle chapters, the scaffold
at midnight, offers a brighter vista. In
Hawthorne’s words: “a light gleamed far and wide over the muffled sky. So powerful was its radiance, that it
thoroughly illuminated the dense medium of cloud betwixt the sky and
earth. The great vault brightened, like
the dome of an immense lamp. It showed
the familiar scene of the street with the distinctness of mid-day… The wooden houses with their jutting storeys
and quaint gable-peaks; the door-steps and thresholds with the early grass
springing up above them; the garden plots, black with freshly-turned
earth.” Suddenly, in a new light, a new
interpretation of things: the familiar bespeaks fertility and possibility. “The wheel-track, little worn, and even in
the market-place margined with green on either side--all were visible, but with
a singularity of aspect that seemed to give another moral interpretation to the
themes of this world than they had ever borne before. And there stood the minister… and Hester
Prynne… in the noon of that strange and solemn splendor, as if it were the
light that is to reveal all secrets, and the daybreak that shall unite all who
belong to one another.”
Again, the
promise of utopia – and then, in the final scaffold scene, Dimmesdale’s
election-day sermon locates utopia in a concrete New World enterprise. In what must be taken as one meaning of the
chapter’s title, “The Revelation of the Scarlet Letter,” he unfolds the promise
as the Puritan errand into the future:
“His subject, it appeared, had been the relation between the Deity and
the communities of mankind, with a special reference to the New England which
they were here planting in the wilderness. And, as he drew to a close, a spirit
as of prophecy had come upon him, constraining him to its purpose as mightily
as the old prophets of Israel were constrained, only with this difference,
that, whereas the Jewish seers had denounced judgments and ruin on their
country, it was his mission to foretell a high and glorious destiny for the
newly gathered people of the Lord.”
Politicians at
1850 named this high and glorious destiny “manifest destiny”; Emerson named
it the country of tomorrow, where a
“nation of individuals will for the first time exist.” Hawthorne himself was neither a manifest
destinarian nor an Emersonian, but he imbibed deeply from both those cultural
sources, and he believed deeply, if complexly, in American democracy. That’s
another reason he wants Hester back. She is his figure of historical process. It’s not just that she has yet to do her
penitence; it’s that she has come to see that she needs history in order to
realize her dream of love. And the other
way around: it’s not just her need for history that brings her back, it’s
history’s need for her, as critic and visionary, in order for this community to
progress. Hence the memorable image of
reciprocity that frames the novel: at the start, the author looks back towards
his heroine; at the end his heroine looks forward towards her author, towards
his time and beyond. That connection is
a fraught with ambiguity, but through ambiguity it expresses Hawthorne’s belief
in the liberal state.
The Scarlet Letter is his classic
tribute to that belief. It builds on the ideals of pluralism, based on a theory
of moral psychology; on the ideals of individualism, based on a theory of civic
heroism; and on the ideals of progress, based on a theory of community in
process. And at the core of those ideals is the principle of the primacy of
interpretation. In this sense, Hawthorne wants Hester back because he needs her
work of art, her scarlet letter, in order to complete his own. The A for
ambiguity as the A for America is made manifest, finally, in a distinctive
symbolic method, an aesthetic devised for the new forms and values of a new
nation.
New forms, a
distinctive method, the A for Art: this calls for a brief overview of what came
before. Hawthorne’s symbolic outlook
derives from Judeo-Christian hermeneutics. Take the rose, the first symbol in
the novel. That’s literally what
Hawthorne invites us to do in his Introductory Chapter. He contrasts the black
prison from which Hester exits with a red rose-bush growing nearby, then plucks
one of its roses and presents it to the reader.
In effect, he is presenting us with a thousand-year-old flower. “Like a
rose among the thorns,/ So is my beloved among the maidens,” sings the lover in
the Song of Songs; and the rabbis commented: “the rose … symbolizes the
Community of Israel. As the rose among
thorns is tinged with red and white, so the Community of Israel is visited now
with justice and now with mercy.” The
Church Fathers added another, christological level of meaning: the rose is
Christ. Like the rabbis, they cautioned
against mere allegory – which is to say, against simply displacing the literal
sense (the fact of the rose) with its higher spiritual implications. The symbol in medieval hermeneutics is
inextricably literal-spiritual, like the Incarnation. And like the Incarnation the higher spiritual
implications of the symbol are grounded in church dogma. You can’t interpret the rose, for example, as
meaning lust. Interpretation is a guide
to spiritual truth, and the guide is anchored in established ecclesiastical
norms.
This principle
persisted into the modern period, but it was revolutionized with the
Reformation. Protestantism demanded the
direct relation between reader and text. It was not ecclesiastical tradition
that mattered (as in Dante’s fourfold method).
Interpretation required the direct correspondence between the individual
believer and the spirit of Scripture.
The Reformers did not intend by this to open a Pandora’s box of
spiritual meanings – they assumed that every believer would arrive at
essentially the same sacred configuration – but that’s what happened. Luther himself interpreted the Pope, and the
fifteen-hundred-year-old tradition behind the papacy, as Antichrist. The Puritans interpreted the Church of
England, heir to the Reformation, as a version of the Satanic Church of
Rome. The hermeneutic aim remained
constant: meaning is at once literal and spiritual, with the spiritual as guide
to redemption. But the system was now opened to subjectivity.
The direct result
was the Romantic religion of art; the Primary Imagination (Coleridge called it)
as the vehicle to universal law; the poet (in Shelley’s phrase) as the
unacknowledged legislator of the world.
And the full result was the chaos of modern symbolic interpretation.
Through all these variations, the old premise held: in some sense the literal
pointed to a higher reality, but what that reality was, was up to your
interpretation. The Rose is Christ – or is it?
Maybe it does mean Lust – Lust with a capital L, a universal,
innate in all spiritual interpreters, as a spiritual defect. Or maybe
its spiritual meaning is the literal – “a rose is a rose is a
rose.”
In the midst of
this hermeneutic free-for-all, central to it and yet brilliantly distinctive,
is the rose that introduces us to the symbolic system of The Scarlet Letter:
“on one side of the [prison] portal, and rooted almost at the threshold,
was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems,
which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to
the prisoner as he went in, or to the condemned criminal as he came
forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be
kind to him. This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in
history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness … or
whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up
under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson, as she entered the
prison-door, -- we shall not take upon to determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of
our narrative … we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers and
present it to the reader. It may serve,
let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be
found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human
frailty and sorrow.”
What’s being
served up here? First, a variety of possible meanings (plural); second, levels of meaning (moral,
historical, literal, fanciful); third: a guide to meaning, a symbolic flower
plucked from a real rose-bush, somehow preserved from the old forest after the
Puritans had cut the trees to make way for civilization – an actual rose-bush
rooted at the narrative threshold, Hawthorne’s narrative, and also that of
someone else (still another “fair authority”), for he is following the old
manuscript he found in the Custom’s House. We might call this a guide to
threshold meaning. Its premise is
both/and. The symbol is made up (an amalgam of or, may-be, and almost)
-- and yet it’s vividly there, a fact of history and culture. By its very structure it’s resistant, even
antithetical to, any total truth -- and yet it pleads for integration. The pleading takes the form of partialities
(hints, clues, suggestions) -- and yet it posits an overall design. Given the fragmented information, we are free
to see what we like in that design -- and yet we must assume it has a certain
meaning. In fact, we’re instructed to do
so: the author who gives us that literal-spiritual flower tells us to
ponder its significance.
Symbolism here is
neither subjective, in a certain familiar modernist mode, nor is it objective,
as Protestant hermeneutics might posit an objective scriptural higher
reality. It’s the both/and mode, linking
subjective and objective by way of process.
There’s meaning in this rose, and we gather it piece by piece,
accumulating meanings as we do so, possibilities that enlarge and enrich our
sense of the rose without ever quite defining it once and for all. That absence of finality serves at once to
qualify any interpretation we might arrive at and to spur on
interpretation. It makes us responsible
for interpreting and it prevents us from claiming the interpretation.
This is the meaning of the narrative as a whole, as Hawthorne directs us
towards it in his Conclusion. When Hester died, he tells us, “a new grave was
delved, near an old sunken one . . . with a space between. . . . Yet one
tombstone served for both. . . 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. It bore a device, a herald's
wording which might serve as a motto and brief description of our now
concluded tale; so somber is it, and relieved only by one ever-glowing point of
light gloomier than the shadow. – ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES.”
Again, the
threshold symbol: the space that separates, the slate that unites; the device
that might sum it all up, surrounded by touchstones of partiality (may
discern, appeared, semblance); and that wandering interpreter –
the implied reader – perplexed.
Yet the symbol out there is undeniably real. The aesthetic of that “engraved escutcheon”
has what anthropologists call “thick desription”: historical, epistemological,
cultural. The graves, we know, are for
Hester and her lover; the A is in some sense a representation of hers (and of
the novel’s title). But where is that
point of light? And why is it gloomier
than the shadow? What
shadow? And then we think of all the
other questions that the novel raises in order to leave us perplexed. Has
Pearl married into Italian aristocracy? was there a sign – still another
letter A – on Dimmesdale’s breast? Even
the statement that critics most like to quote as Hawthornesque, as writer
addressing reader – “’Be true! Be
true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst,
yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!’” – even that apparent
commonplace is encased in doubt. There’s
that dangerously-charged word “freely”; and also the tell-tale “if,” which sets
off a series of partialities: “inferred,” “some trait,” “may be.” And as if that were not enough, we are
explicitly informed that the statement is not Hawthorne’s. It’s one “among many morals,” he tells us, ”
which he found in that “manuscript of old date,” now described as “the
authority which we have chiefly followed . . . drawn up from the verbal
testimony of individuals, some of whom had known Hester Prynne, while others
heard the tale from contemporary witnesses.”
What does it mean to “be true” in such a case?
Ambiguity has come to cover a wide
field of critical approaches in our modern lexicon. Let me say what Hawthorne’s method is not. It
is not Kafkaesque. Certainly it makes
for interesting variations to interpret Hawthorne from that vantage-point (there
is no vantage-point more powerful for our time, so that we understand Borges
when he writes that the greatest influence on Hawthorne was Kafka), but Kafka
is radically un-American. (I assume I
don’t need to elaborate on that to this audience). Nor is Hawthorne’s method paradoxical, in
either the religious sense of the term, or in its modernist version, the New
Criticism. His symbols are not verbal
icons, transcending time, pointing to some overarching apodictic reality,
whether of the Spirit or of Beauty. They
are artifacts of history, ideology, popular legend, and public opinion raised
to the intensity of art; their import is insistently secular, partial, and
multifarious, an economy of multiple interests. As a work of beauty, the A – in all its ornate intricacy –is inseparable
from the ordinary, a triumph of the negotiations between the common culture and
the resistant-yet-representative artist.
Nor again, is Hawthorne’s method either
dialectical or dialogical. Dialectics
presupposes precisely the sort of fixed design (Hegelian or Marxist) that his
symbols work to undo; but in doing so they work through reconciliation, rather
than – as in Bakhtin’s approach—through sustained conflict. Nor once
again is Hawthorne a deconstructionist:
he believes in the moral validity of what’s out there. According to this
belief, I interpret to give meaning to reality, a decidable meaning to which I
am beholden, for my own good, even though reality is by definition larger, more
comprehensive, and more meaningful.
The difference
between this moral position and that of allegory is worth elaborating. Hawthorne’s method sets itself against
allegory not only because it denies one-to-one correlations (particular to
abstract), but because it eschews hierarchy. I’ve spoken of levels of meaning,
but the levels in this work are reversible, interchangeable. They shift in value from one configuration to
the next. No level of meaning is in
itself more significant than another. When Hester discards the A, she is saying
that it’s just a “ragged piece of cloth,” a social artifact, but as such
it has profound meaning, for her and for the narrative as a whole -- a meaning
no less deep than that (say) of the A for Hester’s art or the A for her
atonement-to-come.
Hawthorne’s
symbolic method is built on negotiability and volatility. Meaning is cumulative, a gradual ingathering
of different perspectives, none of them either merely surface-meaning or wholly
deep-meaning, but all of them together deeper and truer than any
single perspective can encompass. The writer closest to Hawthorne in this
respect is Melville, whose work by contrast therefore most clearly illuminates
Hawthorne’s strategies. Moby-Dick
is a great celebration of the sort of symbolic method I’ve been describing, but
at times it veers towards nihilism.
Ishmael realizes that the instability of levels of meaning, and the very
multiplicity of meanings, may signify the absence of meaning. Thus the interpretive quest, he writes, “by its indefiniteness shadows forth the
heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and ... stabs us from behind
with the thought of annihilation…. Nature absolutely paints like the harlot,
whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel house within.” Ishmael pulls back from this nightmare, but
Melville pursued it to the end. The
protagonist of his next novel, Pierre, or The Ambiguities, is the
Would-be Great American Author, writing a work that he hopes will “gospelize
the world anew.” What he discovers
instead is rendered by analogy to the search for truth in nature, the past, and
the self: “so far as any geologist has yet gone down into the world, it is
found to consist of nothing but surface stratified on surface. To its axis, the world being nothing but
superinduced superficies. … By vast pains we mine into the pyramid, by horrible
gropings we come to the central room, with joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we
lift the lid – and no body is there! --vacant as vast is the soul of … man.”
This savage
critique of symbolism in a secular world – a world of “surface stratified on
surface,” bereft of stabilizing hierarchies of meaning -- may be said to lead
towards our current post-modern notions of ambiguity. The crucial difference is the savagery itself
of Melville’s critique. The moral anguish
we feel in his despair reflects his shattered faith in the prospects of a
democratic aesthetics. Hawthorne kept the faith. He recoiled from Melville’s
relentless intellectual and spiritual seeking; he deplored Melville’s inability
either to find faith or to rest secure in a world without it. That sort of “vain absolutism” (as he termed
it) tended towards the fatal either/or choice. And Hawthorne believed in
both/and. It was a belief based on the
tenets of the American republic, as he understood it to have evolved,
gradually, through compromise, from the Puritans to his own time. And in The
Scarlet Letter he devised a symbolic form that gave it enduring expression.
He created an aesthetics which, it’s worth repeating, posits a theory of the
mind based on the ideals of pluralism; a theory of culture, based on the ideals
of individualism; and a liberal theory of history (progress through process),
based on an ideal of interpretative community.
What does the
rose signify? What is the message on the tombstone? The only way to read this
book is by: (a) finding your own meaning(s); (b) allowing for other points of
view; (c) acknowledging the reality (the adulterated reality) behind meaning;
and (d) recognizing the need for process in interpretation. That process (to
recall the pluralist principle of Hawthorne’s view of psychology) is not
limited to the perspectives of love, duty, and justice. Together, these offer a
model of the dynamics of interpretation, but it’s a heuristic model, one that
leaves us both enriched by what we’ve learned and perplexed by
what we haven’t fathomed yet.
What we do know is that no view can be ruled out entirely-- not that of
those iron (but flexible) Puritans who wanted scriptural law upheld; not that
of the “sainted Ann Hutchinson” (sainted by whom?), the antinomian who provides
an ambiguous continuity with Emersonian dissent, a link-to-be-interpreted
between the Puritan and the Romantic myth.
We cannot even rule out the view of the Catholic whom Hawthorne conjures
up for us at the start, the imagined “Papist among the Puritans,” who “might
have seen in this beautiful woman . . . with the infant at her bosom, an object
to remind him of the image of Divine Maternity.” That apparent misinterpretation, by a
constituency yet to be represented, is also part of the novel’s symbolic
truth-in-process, indeed a central aspect of it by the end, intrinsic to the
hope invested in Hester’s return. “Divine Maternity” translated at 1850 into
the so-called cult of motherhood, the belief in woman’s redemptive role for the
republic, which in some way informs Hester’s vision. The interpretive windings this entails,
between speaker, reader, and author, between history, psychology, morality, and
culture, make for an exemplary lesson in what in 1850 was a new symbolic mode.
We might call it
the aesthetics of the market-place, remembering that that’s the title of the
chapter where Hester and her A enter the narrative. Or better still,
remembering the election-day scene of penultimate chapter, “The Revelation of
the Scarlet Letter,” we might call it the aesthetics of the ballot-box. To
interpret is to vote your particular meaning and, in that same gesture, to
concede a priori that your meaning is inadequate in itself, dependent on
community. Self-reliance is a
prerequisite, so is self-doubt, because the doubt is grounded in reality, which
is hopeful – adulterated but full of promise -- because it is processual and
inter-subjective. Symbolic meaning
entails an act of faith – for the Puritan, faith in the spirit; for Hawthorne,
faith in the potential of free enterprise democracy. His gift to America – and
to world literature -- was a work of art that integrated the aspirations and
uncertainties of a young nation into a coherent aesthetic for a secular modern
world.