Source Information:

Essay Title: “The Scarlet Letter: Nathaniel Hawthorne”

Editor: Dana Ferguson
Original Publication: Children’s Literature Review, Vol. 163
Copyright: 2011
Page Range: 60-135
Database: Literature Online

*This source also contains criticism essays written by separate authors. These
essays listed under “Criticism” should be cited as separate sources, giving credit to
the appropriate authors and citing the appropriate page range.
 The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne
(Real name Nathaniel Hathorne) American novelist
and children’s book author.
The following entry presents commentary on Haw-
thorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter (1850) through
2009.
INTRODUCTION
Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), a work of
historical fiction closely focused upon the nature of
sin as evoked through the lens of America’s Puritan
history, is regarded as Hawthorne’s finest work and
is sometimes described as the first major American
novel. The most enduring book in Hawthorne’s ex-
tensive and critically hailed canon, The Scarlet Letter
remains a fixture in classrooms, presenting an intro-
duction to Puritan culture through one of the most
iconic works of nineteenth-century American fiction.
Replete with heavy symbolism, the story is the cul-
mination of Hawthorne’s consideration of the inter-
section of human behavior and religious observation,
a theme he obsessively explored throughout his fic-
tion and which may have been the manifestation of
his own religious self-exploration, potentially result-
ing from anxieties born of the sins committed by his
Salem witch-hunting ancestor.
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Born July 4, 1804 as the middle child of Nathaniel
and Elizabeth Manning Hathorne, he was heir to a
complicated familial legacy tied to his birthplace of
Salem, Massachusetts. Descended from the Puritan
settlers of Salem, his most prominent ancestor was
John Hathorne, a man he describes in “The Custom-
House” (a prefatory introduction to The Scarlet Let-
ter) as having “inherited the persecuting spirit, and
made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of
the witches, that their blood may fairly be said to
have left a stain upon him. So deep a stain, indeed,
that his old dry bones, in the Charter Street burial-
ground, must still retain it, if they have not crumbled
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utterly to dust!” John Hathorne’s documented activi-
ties as a leading protagonist of the Salem Witch Tri-
als so embarrassed his ancestor that he is said to have
changed the spelling of his own last name—adding a
‘W’—to avoid future association with him. Haw-
thorne’s father was a ship captain who died in 1808
of dengue fever while on a voyage to Surinam; his
death left Hawthorne’s mother destitute, forcing her
to move to Maine where her family lived to raise her
children. She initially educated her son and two
daughters at home, but later offered him up to the tu-
telage of lexicographer Joseph Emerson Worcester,
before sending him to live with relatives in the Bos-
ton area to better prepare him for college. There, he
studied under Benjamin Lynde Oliver, a lawyer, and
became apprenticed to his uncle in his stagecoach
office. He returned to Maine to study at Bowdoin Col-
lege in 1821, where he became close friends with fu-
ture President Franklin Pierce and poet Henry Wad-
sworth Longfellow. After his graduation in 1825, he
returned to Salem where his mother and sisters had
since settled, and he set about becoming a writer. His
voyage to literary recognition, however, proved to be
long and arduous, with many intervening years of
hardship before he would earn any measure of liter-
ary success. He self-printed his first novel Fanshawe
(1828) after he was unable to secure the interest of a
publisher. A romance styled after the popular writ-
ings of Sir Walter Scott, Fanshawe was an atypical
work for Hawthorne, one that he would later find so
embarrassing that he would seek to hide its existence
from the public. The next ten years were profession-
ally difficult for Hawthorne; while he continued to
believe in his purpose and talent as a writer, he re-
ceived little backing, seeing only a few of his short
stories published in smaller journals. He did briefly
gain an appointment in 1836 as the editor for a small
Boston publication called The American Magazine of
Useful and Entertaining Knowledge with his sister,
until its bankruptcy later that year. Through sheer
perseverance, however, over the course of his career
as a short story writer he began to achieve broader
critical attention for his tales of historical New Eng-
land—particularly his evocative stories of Puritan
Massachusetts. He rereleased these stories as a col-
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
lection called Twice-Told Tales (1837), which earned
him strong critical praise from such contemporaries
as Herman Melville and his old friend Longfellow.
His devotion (and obsession) with his writing left
him increasingly isolated, forcing him into a self-
imposed hermetic shell in which he maintained con-
tact with just family and a close circle of fellow
writers. The release of Twice-Told Tales gained the
attention of educator Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who
became one of Hawthorne’s most vocal promoters as
well as something of a patron of his writing. After
encouraging him to pursue children’s literature, Haw-
thorne quickly released a series of juvenile works in-
tended to present accounts of New England history;
among the more notable of these works are Grandfa-
ther’s Chair: A History for Youth (1841), Famous
Old People: Being the Second Epoch of Grandfa-
ther’s Chair (1841), and Biographical Stories for
Children (1842). Unfortunately, as with many of his
early published works, the books stirred little interest
among the public and failed to find an audience
(though an 1851 collection of these juvenile works
published in the wake of The Scarlet Letter would
find greater traction with the public). Having begun a
relationship with Peabody’s younger sister Sophia in
1833, Hawthorne briefly suspended his writing with
the hopes of earning enough money to provide for
her, as she was of poor health. With her sister’s as-
sistance, he found work as a coal measurer in the
Boston Customs House (a position which would help
inspire the later setting for The Scarlet Letter’s “The
Custom-House”). Due to the poor wage he earned
there, he quit to invest and live in an experimental
community, a venture which again brought him no
closer to his financial ambitions. Leaving the com-
mune, despite his poor financial status he nonetheless
married Sophia July 9, 1842, and together the couple
moved to Concord, Massachusetts where they rented
the former home of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s grandfa-
ther called “The Old Manse.” There, he settled into a
literary bliss, rubbing shoulders with such peers as
Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller.
His first daughter Una was born during this period on
March 3, 1844. He returned to writing, composing a
series of increasingly psychologically-oriented short
stories. Despite the high esteem with which scholars
hold the output from this era in Hawthorne’s career,
he continued to fail to earn enough income from his
writing and was forced once again to rely on the con-
nections of his friends and allies to find more secure
work, this time landing a position at Salem’s custom
house. In 1851, he released a second collection of
new short stories called Mosses from an Old Manse,
but Hawthorne’s ongoing professional misfortunes
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THE SCARLET LETTER
continued with the election of Zachary Taylor as
President in late 1848. His election produced a politi-
cal sea change that resulted in the loss of Haw-
thorne’s own political appointment to the customs
house, a blow that was compounded by the death of
his beloved mother in 1849. Surviving on the fami-
ly’s savings, he refocused upon his writing, compos-
ing a series of stories about Puritan life, including
“Young Goodman Brown,” among his best-known
works of short prose. These works proved to be a
prelude to The Scarlet Letter, probably the most im-
portant work of his career. Unfortunately, despite the
strong critical reviews the novel received upon its
initial publication in 1850, it nevertheless again failed
to earn the Hawthornes enough income to remain in
Salem—a sad irony given its later enduring popular
success. The young family, now with two children
for whom to provide, moved to the intellectual colony
of Lenox, Massachusetts. There, Hawthorne was able
to establish a window of literary productivity and fi-
nancial security at last, publishing such adult fictions
as The House of the Seven Gables, a Romance
(1851), The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-told Tales
(1852), and The Blithedale Romance (1852); two ju-
venile works, A Wonder-book for Girls and Boys
(1851) and Tanglewood Tales for Girls and Boys:
Being a Second Wonder-book (1853); and a biogra-
phy of his college friend and Democratic Presidential
nominee, Franklin Pierce. After the birth of their third
child, Rose, in 1851, the couple moved again, first to
West Newton (where they house sat for Sophia’s sis-
ter, Mary), and then to Concord, where they pur-
chased writer Bronson Alcott’s home. Upon Pierce’s
election to President in 1852, Hawthorne was re-
warded for his loyalty and friendship with a much-
desired and lucrative four-year appointment as the
American consul in Liverpool, England. Upon
completion of his term of office, he finished the mys-
tical romance, The Marble Faun (1860), based upon
his viewing of Praxiteles’s statue of a faun during his
trip to Italy’s art galleries. A best-seller in his life-
time (though its sales were later easily surpassed by
reprinted editions of The Scarlet Letter), The Marble
Faun secured Hawthorne’s immediate financial state,
and he returned to the United States in 1860 to a he-
ro’s welcome among his friends, which included such
luminaries as Thoreau, Melville, and Alcott. How-
ever, Hawthorne quickly overspent on repairs to his
home and found himself once again needing to write
to support his family. He struggled with several dif-
ferent fictional premises (many of which were re-
leased as posthumous fragments), but was unable to
complete another full novel before his death, though
he managed to edit a collection of sketches and es-
HAWTHORNE
says for release in 1863 titled Our Old Home: A Se-
ries of English Sketches. Although the collection sold
well, its candid and unflattering descriptions of the
English—as well as its dedication to Franklin
Pierce—fomented some controversies on both sides
of the Atlantic. His health began to decline rapidly
throughout early 1864, and an aborted trip with his
publisher, William Ticknor, to restore his strength
ended when Ticknor unexpectedly died early in their
travels. He joined former President Pierce for another
trip, but Hawthorne passed away May 19, 1864,
likely from undiagnosed stomach cancer at the age of
fifty-nine.
PLOT AND MAJOR CHARACTERS
The Scarlet Letter offers a psychological examination
of Puritan morals as presented through the story of
an unlikely romance. Set in seventeenth-century Bos-
ton, the story begins with the prefatory essay called
“The Custom-House,” in which an unnamed narra-
tor—presumed to be Hawthorne—offers his thoughts
upon entering a customs house where he finds a
ragged red piece of cloth with an attached written
history, which he then renders into the tale which
follows. The owner of the cloth was a young Puritan
woman named Hester Prynne, whose story begins
with her being led from prison through a taunting
crowd in 1642 Massachusetts. Carrying her infant
daughter, Pearl, and wearing a piece of bright red
cloth in the shape of an ‘A’ branding the breast of
her dress, she seemingly lacks the necessary contri-
tion the gathered crowd demands of her after she re-
fuses to identify the father of her child. A stranger to
the town, an elderly gentleman who remains anony-
mous, is informed of the recent events leading to the
ugly scene: Hester had been sent to America ahead
of her unknown older husband who has since
vanished. In the interim, Hester conceived her daugh-
ter with an unidentified figure in town in apparent
violation of her marital vows. As she has committed
infidelity and subsequently refused to divulge the
identity of the individual with whom she had her af-
fair, she has been branded with a scarlet letter ‘A’
(for adultery) so that all might know her crime.
Though widely believed to have perished, the new
arrival is revealed to be Hester’s missing husband
Roger Chillingworth, who privately asks Hester the
identity of her lover. After she once again declines to
name him, Chillingworth, seemingly unperturbed,
swears her to secrecy with regard to his own true
identity and sets himself upon the task of discerning
Pearl’s father using his new status as a doctor to fer-
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
ret out the truth. He quickly targets the pious and re-
spected Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, who has be-
come ill from a mysterious ailment that Chillingworth
becomes convinced is guilt. Chillingworth is soon
obsessed with Dimmesdale and becomes his personal
physician. In the interim, Pearl grows into a brash
and preternaturally aware child, while Hester’s Chris-
tian actions make her a more acceptable figure among
the community (though she continues to willingly
wear the ‘A’). Dimmesdale, meanwhile, has begun to
waste away, a condition he exacerbates with regular
self-punishment. One day, while staying with the
Reverend, Chillingworth sneaks into Dimmesdale’s
room and uncovers what he identifies as a red ‘A’
burned into the man’s chest, a discovery that he be-
lieves confirms his suspicions. Pearl and Hester later
run into Dimmesdale in the forest, at which time she
informs him of Chillingworth’s true identity and asks
him to run away with her to Europe where they can
be anonymous and together. Pearl repeatedly asks
Dimmesdale to recognize her publically as his daugh-
ter, which he refuses to do. Hester and Dimmesdale
agree to run away together, though Pearl is fright-
ened by their union and subsequent release from their
longtime collective guilt. In joy, Hester removes her
scarlet letter, which causes Pearl to shriek in terror as
she has never seen her mother without it. Hester
quickly replaces the letter and Pearl seems content
once again. Hester soon learns of Chillingworth’s
plans to take the same boat from America and be-
comes worried. On the day before they are to leave,
Dimmesdale offers an elegant sermon—his best—and
asks Hester and Pearl to join him, where he publi-
cally recognizes the paternity of his daughter to the
crowd for the first time. He then collapses and dies
and Pearl gently kisses him. Chillingworth, having
been denied revenge, dies bitterly within the year.
Hester and Pearl leave for Europe, but Hester returns
years later, still wearing the letter, to resume her old
charitable and Christian life. Pearl, who has inherited
Chillingworth’s estate, remains in Europe, apparently
having married into wealth and enjoying the life filled
with happiness that had been denied to her parents.
When Hester dies, she is buried next to Dimmes-
dale—though not together—with both sharing a
tombstone marked with an ‘A.’
MAJOR THEMES
Largely intended by Hawthorne as a romance, The
Scarlet Letter utilizes heavy symbolism and deep psy-
chological tones in its obsessive examination of the
comparative natures of sin and penance. The story
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
contrasts the nature and gravity of Hester’s more ob-
vious violations of her marital vows with that of Dim-
mesdale’s silence and Chillingworth’s dark
motivations. For Hawthorne, the story was meant not
only to scrutinize Puritan morals, but offer a relativist
argument about what constitutes wrongdoing and sin.
Though Hester is forced to be the public face of sin,
she is innately more moral than those around her,
and carries her burden openly and without shame,
while Dimmesdale’s emotional turmoil is held in se-
cret, denying him either peace or release. The mani-
festations of their mutual sins and resultant suffering
are symbolically portrayed through the importance of
the color red and the letter ‘A,’ the signs of which
are interpreted differently by the various characters
of the story. Most obvious of these symbolic appear-
ances is Hester’s scarlet letter, which in and of itself
appears malleable. Hawthorne describes the letter as
being almost alive on several occasions, and initially
its appearance is ascribed blood-like tones. On the
scaffold in her first appearance in the book, Hester is
identified as a vision of “Divine Maternity” and the
red letter as a haphazard mess that becomes identifi-
able as a crimson badge of ‘A.’ It is beautifully ren-
dered, by Hester’s own hand, and causes the women
assembled to see it at first as symbolic of further hu-
bris due to its beauty, but eventually, as a result of
her Christian charity, it begins to appear to her fel-
low townspeople as akin to a red cross beneath her
breasts. Other expressions of these symbolic elements
are seen in Chillingworth’s claim to have found a
similar letter burned into Dimmesdale’s chest as well
as the appearance of a letter in the sky on the night
after Hester has attended to a dying figure of impor-
tance—the latter event occurring on the same day of
her brief reunion with Dimmesdale and Pearl. The
unworldly apparition in the sky is one that the towns-
people come to regard as emblematic of an angel that
they assume appears in deference to the godliness of
the dead man, though Dimmesdale views it as yet
another reminder of his sin. Guilt literally consumes
Dimmesdale throughout The Scarlet Letter as he
hides his role in Pearl’s creation and comes to see
her as the physical materialization of his wrongs—a
living symbolic manifestation of the scarlet ‘A.’ This
view is ultimately shared by both by the omniscient
narrator and Hester, who initially worries that as the
product of sin, Pearl may also be its earthly incarna-
tion—at once a fusion of both her potential for love
and her sins in having loved. However, while she re-
mains outwardly contrite, stoically bearing her sym-
bolic cross, inwardly Hester comes to consider her
union with Dimmesdale as sacred, even religious in
tone, and acts in accordance with the Puritan stan-
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THE SCARLET LETTER
dards only to protect and keep her daughter. In fact,
there are undertones in Hawthorne’s exploration of
Hester that her internal defiance and strength are born
from her belief she is the harbinger of a new truth,
though her penitent return at novel’s end may signal
her acceptance of normative Christian belief and her
own apparent sins within that set of tenets. However,
prior to that point, and particularly in the chapter
“Another View of Hester,” she seems to espouse a
revolutionary doctrine of change which may have
been reflective of Hawthorne’s own anxieties about
the recent revolutions in Europe.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
While critics have remained steadfastly positive in
their reception of Hawthorne’s undisputed master-
piece, views of Hawthorne himself, particularly as
deciphered through the lens of The Scarlet Letter,
have dramatically changed with each succeeding gen-
eration, offering testimony to the complexity and
depth of both the author and his most famous work.
Lionel Trilling and Lawrence Buell characterize such
period descriptions of Hawthorne as ranging from the
“delicate ironist imaged by Henry James to the
troubled Kafka-esque Hawthorne described by Her-
man Melville.” Many critics consider the story to be
the first important American novel, “the inaugural
text of the indigenous canon” of the United States,
suggests Michael T. Gilmore. Similarly, Lawrence
Buell says that among “major pre-modern U.S. fic-
tions, The Scarlet Letter comes closest to rendering a
myth of national origins.” In praising the work as
“beautiful, admirable, extraordinary; it has in the
highest degree that merit which I have spoken of as
the mark of Hawthorne’s best things—an indefinable
purity and lightness of conception,” Henry James,
then living in England, wrote of The Scarlet Letter as
“Something [which] might at last be sent to Europe
as exquisite in quality as anything that had been
received.” The book was an almost immediate best-
seller, though it failed to earn Hawthorne more than
a few thousand dollars in his lifetime. It remains a
landmark work in American literature, a harbinger of
Hawthorne’s future fiction that would later inspire
the so-called Hawthorne School of writers, a collec-
tive that would include such future luminaries of
American letters as Herman Melville, William
Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor. The story is re-
plete with his trademark psychological explorations
of human nature, particularly within the restrictive
Puritanical worldview. Noted novelist Louis Auchin-
closs suggests that the story’s primary elements—
HAWTHORNE
among them darkness, sin, and detailed character de-
velopment, “all make a kind of literary grand opera
of this superb work of art which a reader may accept
with delight and even with awe, no matter how dif-
ferent a view he may hold of the heroine’s conduct.
Call it a myth; a myth speaks to any era.” Key to
Hawthorne’s dramatic construction is the enigmatic
figure of Hester and her connection to the scarlet let-
ter brandishing her chest. As such, the scarlet ‘A’ is
not just a potent symbol of her sin, but of her inher-
ent danger to the community as a result of her sexu-
ality, her silence, and most of all, her disruption of
the normative community modes. Warren argues that
rather than following Puritanical moral constructs,
“Hester’s exemplary conduct in the years which fol-
low her first appearance on the scaffold must be in-
terpreted not as penitence but as stoicism, especially,
a stoical disdain for the ‘views’ of society.” Margaret
Reid agrees with such an assessment, writing that the
“latent danger and power of Hester’s life comes from
her silence rather than from her adultery, just as the
imaginative power of the regicides [in European revo-
lutions] comes from their hidden life rather than from
their known act. In this circuitous acquisition of si-
lent power—associated with the most potent of po-
litical crises but offering, too, a route to consolida-
tion—both the regicides and Hester (with her A)
acquire an authority not only to create, but also to re-
spond to—indeed to palliate—Hawthorne’s sense of
cultural crisis some two centuries later.” The story
proves to be almost as much about Puritan society
(and potentially by extension, the American society
of Hawthorne’s era) as it does about Hester or
Dimmesdale. Margaret Olofson Thickstun contends
that Hawthorne “tries simultaneously to present the
complexities and expose the fallacies of the Puritan
allegorical world view.” However, as he offers “a re-
constructed Puritan milieu without privileging its per-
spective,” he fails in his objectives because “he can-
not adequately distance himself from the Puritan
perspective on Hester’s affair because the transcen-
dentalist alienation of self from world, including
body, simply restates the Puritan problem with sexu-
ality in other terms.” In contemporary America, the
novel remains among the most iconic works of the
national canon, presenting both a dark psychological
tableau and a distinctive presentation of Puritan
society. It has become a fixture of American class-
rooms, read annually as part of history and English
curriculums. As a result, Constance C. T. Hunt ar-
gues that while The Scarlet Letter’s forced study by
high schools students has in fact expanded its reputa-
tion, it has limited both its literary scope and appeal
in the process, creating fatigued analyses that fail to
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
express its appeal. “Such formulaic and one-
dimensional interpretations, which gloss over the
novel’s profound moral and political ambiguities, put
off reflective readers. However, if one can overcome
the prejudice and over-familiar interpretation that the
novel is a one-dimensional morality tale, one will
find that Hawthorne neither reduces the novel’s di-
lemmas to a simple moral dichotomy nor forces his
readers into a hasty, simplistic interpretation of his
intentions. Rather The Scarlet Letter poses funda-
mental questions that encourage readers to reach their
own conclusions.”
PRINCIPAL WORKS
Fanshawe [released anonymously] (novel) 1828
Twice-Told Tales [two volumes] (short stories) 1837
The Gentle Boy: A Thrice Told Tale (novel) 1839
The Celestial Rail-Road and Other Stories (short sto-
ries) 1843
Mosses from an Old Manse [two volumes] (collec-
tion) 1846
The Scarlet Letter, a Romance (novel) 1850
The House of the Seven Gables, a Romance (novel)
1851
A Wonder-book for Girls and Boys (juvenile short
stories) 1851
The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-told Tales (short
stories) 1852
The Blithedale Romance [two volumes] (novel) 1852
Tanglewood Tales for Girls and Boys: Being a Sec-
ond Wonder-book (juvenile short stories) 1853
Transformation: or, The Romance of Monte Beni
[three volumes; republished in two volumes as The
Marble Faun; or The Romance of Monte Beni,
1860] (novel) 1860
Our Old Home: A Series of English Sketches [two
volumes] (short stories) 1863
Pansie: by Nathaniel Hawthorne: His Last Literary
Effort (novel) 1864
Septimius: A Romance [unfinished novel; edited by
daughter Una; published in the United States as
Septimius Felton; or The Elixir of Life, 1872]
(novel) 1872
The Dolliver Romance and Other Pieces [incomplete]
(novel) 1876
Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret: A Romance [incomplete]
(novel) 1883
Hawthorne’s Works: Autograph Edition [twenty-two
volumes] (collection) 1900
Hawthorne’s Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret [edited by Ed-
ward H. Davidson] (novel) 1954
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
Etherege [fragment; published in The American
Claimant Manuscripts] (novel) 1977
Miscellaneous Prose and Verse [edited by Thomas
Woodson, Claude Simpson, and L. Neal Smith;
volume 23 of the Centenary Edition of the Works
of Nathaniel Hawthorne Collection] (collection)
1994
Young Goodman Brown and Other Tales [edited by
Brian Harding] (short stories) 1998
Nonfiction and Other Works
Peter Parley’s Universal History, on the Basis of
Geography. For the Use of Families. Illustrated by
Maps and Engravings [two volumes, co-edited by
Hawthorne and Elizabeth Hawthorne] (nonfiction)
1837
Grandfather’s Chair: A History for Youth (juvenile
nonfiction) 1841
Famous Old People: Being the Second Epoch of
Grandfather’s Chair (juvenile nonfiction) 1841
Liberty Tree: With the Last Words of Grandfather’s
Chair (juvenile nonfiction) 1841
Biographical Stories for Children (juvenile nonfic-
tion) 1842
True Stories from History and Biography [includes
Grandfather’s Chair, Famous Old People, Liberty
Tree, and Biographical Stories] (juvenile collec-
tion) 1851
Life of Franklin Pierce [published in England, 1853]
(biography) 1852
The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded
[author of preface; written by Delia Bacon] (non-
fiction) 1857
Passages from the American Note-Books of Nathaniel
Hawthorne [two volumes] (collection) 1868
Passages from the English Note-Books of Nathaniel
Hawthorne [two volumes] (collection) 1870
Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books of
Nathaniel Hawthorne [two volumes; published in
the United States, 1872] (collection) 1871
Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny: A Diary
[excerpt of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s American Note-
books] (nonfiction) 1904
Love Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne: 1839-1841
(letters) 1907
Letters of Hawthorne to William D. Ticknor: 1851-
1864 (letters) 1910
The Heart of Hawthorne’s Journal [edited by New-
ton Arvin] (nonfiction) 1929
Hawthorne as Editor: Selections from His Writings
in The American Magazine of Useful and Enter-
taining Knowledge [edited by Arlin Turner] (col-
lection) 1941
Hawthorne’s Lost Notebook, 1835-1841 (collection)
1978
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THE SCARLET LETTER
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Letters, 1813-1843 [ed-
ited by Thomas Woodson, L. Neal Smith, and Nor-
man Holmes Pearson] (letters) 1984
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Letters, 1843-1853 [ed-
ited by Thomas Woodson, L. Neal Smith, and Nor-
man Holmes Pearson] (letters) 1985
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Letters, 1853-1856 [ed-
ited by Thomas Woodson, James A. Rubino, and
Norman Holmes Pearson] (letters) 1987
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Letters, 1813-1843 [ed-
ited by Thomas Woodson, James A. Rubino, L.
Neal Smith, and Norman Holmes Pearson] (let-
ters) 1987
CRITICISM
Margaret Olofson Thickstun (essay date 1988)
SOURCE: Thickstun, Margaret Olofson. “Adultery versus
Idolatry: The Hierarchy of Sin in The Scarlet Letter.” In
Fictions of the Feminine: Puritan Doctrine and the Repre-
sentation of Women, pp. 132-56. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1988.
[In the following essay, Thickstun suggests that the alle-
gorical narrative of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter ends
up primarily focusing on the sin of idolatry—as personi-
fied in the usurpation by Dimmesdale of the role as the
story’s ‘fallen woman’—rather than on adultery and Hes-
ter as the author likely intended.]
I
Looking back at the Puritan world from the middle
nineteenth century, Nathaniel Hawthorne attempts to
locate The Scarlet Letter in a reconstructed Puritan
milieu without privileging its perspective.1 He tries
simultaneously to present the complexities and ex-
pose the fallacies of the Puritan allegorical world
view. In the sketch “Mrs. Hutchinson,” Michael Co-
lacurcio notes, as part of “the moral argument against
Calvinism,” Hawthorne shows how seventeenth-
century theological metaphors enabled Ann Hutchin-
son’s contemporaries to reduce the antinomian crisis
to a sexual one. As a protodeconstructionist, Haw-
thorne reads the metaphysical implications of the Pu-
ritan discussion surrounding Hutchinson literally, in
“a clear recognition of the antisocial meaning of self-
conscious female sexuality, first formulated in the
theological context of Puritan heresy.”2 In The Scar-
let Letter, however, the clarity of that critical vision
falters. Hawthorne attempts to undermine the Puritan
community’s judgment of Hester by employing a sen-
HAWTHORNE
timental nineteenth-century narrator, uninformed
about the spiritual complexities of the story he tells.
But Hawthorne cannot adequately distance himself
from the Puritan perspective on Hester’s affair be-
cause the transcendentalist alienation of self from
world, including body, simply restates the Puritan
problem with sexuality in other terms.
The Puritan problem is, simply, the tension between
love of this world and devotion to God, and its sa-
lient locus is the female sexual body. In Puritan lit-
erature, a man, as Spenser’s Guyon and Bunyan’s
Stand-fast illustrate, can transcend biological reality:
he can resist and deny the impulses of the flesh em-
bodied in the sexuality of “fallen women.” Women,
spiritually defined by their biological capability—as
wife, mother, adulteress, whore—remain trapped in
their physical bodies. Because Hawthorne recognizes
that Puritanism superimposes spiritual meaning onto
physical and biological reality, he tries, in Hester’s
adultery and in Pearl’s humanity, to reduce “the Puri-
tan problem” to the human and literal level, to a re-
pression of sexual passion. Hawthorne explores the
“significance” of human sexuality through adultery
because the adulterous act, with its visible conse-
quences, allows private passion to become a public
topic, to become the subject of a novel.
But the action chronicled in the romance itself is
idolatry, not adultery. The sin that intrigues Haw-
thorne in The Scarlet Letter is not the offstage sin of
passion but Chillingworth’s attempts to seduce Dim-
mesdale to despair. The Scarlet Letter reaffirms a hi-
erarchy of sin which elevates the crime of the spirit
over the crime of the flesh by appropriating sexuality
as a metaphor for spiritual truth. Hester’s adultery,
instead of being a literalization of the Puritan dis-
comfort with the physical world, becomes an earthly
shadow of a greater spiritual sin. Dimmesdale, the
bride of Christ whose spiritual chastity is threatened,
becomes the heroine of The Scarlet Letter. In mak-
ing him such, Hawthorne reenacts the artistic dis-
placement of the female present in Puritan allegorical
texts: Stand-fast represents chastity better than Chris-
tiana; Christ expresses female subordination and obe-
dience more perfectly than Eve. Dimmesdale sur-
passes Hester as the fallen woman because his turning
away from God is more serious than her transgres-
sion against an earthly husband.
In the first chapters of The Scarlet Letter, Hester,
like her forerunners in Puritan allegory, attempts to
desex herself in a repression of individuality which
becomes a kind of suicide. Despite her reckless defi-
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
ance during her trial, Hester accepts society’s evalua-
tion of her sexual encounter and seems to relish the
role of the fallen woman, not for its identification of
her passion but for its condemnation of it. Hester ac-
tively participates in her community’s attempt to al-
legorize her “as the figure, the body, the reality of
sin.”3 She embroiders the A fantastically, dressing
Pearl to resemble it in a seemingly rebellious gesture
that ultimately indicates her acquiescence. This fla-
grant behavior not only draws attention to society’s
interpretation of her, it insists on it. Her refusal to
participate in the human community insures her con-
tinued allegorical role: “Giving up her individuality,
she would become a general symbol at which preach-
ers and moralists might point, and in which they
might vivify and embody their images of woman’s
frailty and sinful passion” (79). That her sexual en-
counter was adulterous intensifies but does not occa-
sion her discomfort with her own sexuality. Her love-
less marriage to Chillingworth suggests Hester’s
long-standing attempt to repress her passionate and
sexual nature. The adulterous act finally forces her to
confront her own sexuality but not to approve it.
Hester cooperates in her punishment by remaining in
New England. The narrator, noting that no one re-
quires Hester to stay, offers a series of hypotheses
about her motives: a certain “fatality,” perhaps, de-
rived from her life’s most catastrophic event; her sin-
ful yet intimate connection with Dimmesdale; or what
“she compelled herself to believe,” what the narrator
labels as “half a truth, and half a delusion”: “Here,
she said to herself, had been the scene of her guilt,
and here should be the scene of her earthly punish-
ment” (80). But Hester’s reason, qualified by the nar-
rator’s romantic vision as “half a truth,” speaks con-
vincingly to Hawthorne’s presentation of her
situation. The two options the narrator suggests are,
for Hester, no options at all. He believes that she
could return to Europe “and there hide her character
and identity under a new exterior, as completely as if
emerging into another state of being” or could jour-
ney into the wilderness, “where the wildness of her
nature might assimilate itself with a people whose
customs and life were alien from the law that had
condemned her” (79, italics mine). But when Hester
later suggests these options to Dimmesdale, the nar-
rator condemns her, because he recognizes that for
Dimmesdale flight would indicate despair. For Hes-
ter, newly released from prison, to leave Boston
would be a similar gesture of self-condemnation and
despair.
If the narrator, removed from the rigors of Puritan
social vision by two centuries and a heavy dose of
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
nineteenth-century sentimentality, cannot avoid ste-
reotyping and condemning Hester because she suc-
cumbed to sexual passion, how can she, immersed in
that cultural perspective, be expected to transcend it
immediately and effortlessly? Should she return to
Europe, she would indeed live a lie, for Hester be-
lieves as much as the narrator that the sexual misstep
defines her “character”; she knows, too, that she
could not live among “savages”: the purported “wild-
ness of her nature” is precisely what she cannot ac-
cept, let alone embrace. Chillingworth, not Hester,
acknowledges in the prison interview the injustice
and unnaturalness of their marriage. Although Hester
is a sexual being, she is also a civilized one. She is
bound to Boston, to the scene of her “sin,” but not
for the quasi-mystical reasons the narrator puts
forward. Her sense of guilt is acute: “The infant and
the shame were real. Yes!—these were her realities,—
all else had vanished!” (59). She cannot walk away
from her adultery as if it meant nothing.
The A gives Hester a social identity. Like the mark
of Cain, which at once set him apart and protected
him, the A binds Hester to the group, even as it lim-
its the kind of social interaction available to her. On
the personal level, it gives her an identity outside of
herself, a vantage point from which to objectify her-
self and to deny that part of her being she cannot
accept. Specifically, it protects her from her own
sexuality. The narrator, cataloguing the change in her
appearance, concludes: “There seemed to be no
longer anything in Hester’s face for love to dwell
upon; nothing in Hester’s form, though majestic and
statue-like, that Passion would ever dream of clasp-
ing in its embrace; nothing in Hester’s bosom, to
make it ever again the pillow of Affection. Some at-
tribute had departed from her, the permanence of
which had been essential to keep her a woman” (163).
If this were true, Hester’s “problem” would be
solved: she would have eradicated her sexual nature.
But the process of allegorization which allows Hester
to transcend her “self” prevents her from destroying
or denying her sexuality. She becomes “a living ser-
mon against sin,” necessarily embodied in the fe-
male; as such, she must continually confront her
sexual nature.
Condemned and self-condemning, Hester, like her
lover Dimmesdale, tries to scourge herself of her
sexuality, although her methods are less overtly vio-
lent than his. She moves to an isolated hut, which the
narrator notes for its “comparative remoteness” and
“sterile” soil (81). There she survives on “a subsis-
tence, of the plainest and most ascetic description,”
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THE SCARLET LETTER
wears the “coarsest material” of a “sombre hue.”
Over the course of time, Hester adopts the role of a
sister of mercy, which replaces the A as a means of
effacing her individuality as it more effectively dis-
guises her sexuality. She forces the community to
think of her asexually, as helper, as nurse; should the
role fail to isolate her adequately, she resorts to the A
as a shield against personal contact, for if people
“were resolute to accost her, she laid her finger on
the scarlet letter, and passed on” (162).
The narrator acknowledges the motive for Hester’s
behavior as “an idea of penance” (83) but refuses to
credit her with any “genuine and steadfast penitence”
(84). He considers her self-denial “morbid,” her char-
ity forced, while asserting that “she assumed a free-
dom of speculation, then common enough on the
other side of the Atlantic, but which our forefathers,
had they known of it, would have held to be a dead-
lier crime than that stigmatized by the scarlet letter”
(164). Her conformity, he argues, is a sham, for she
is impenitent.
Clearly the source of both Hester’s compliance and
her seeming impenitence is Pearl. The Puritan com-
munity attributes the newly acquired “purity of her
life” to a real reformation, assuming that “with noth-
ing to lose, in the sight of mankind, and with no hope,
and seemingly no wish, of gaining any thing, it could
only be a genuine regard for virtue that had brought
back the poor wanderer to its path” (160). The narra-
tor, of course, knows better: she could, as the scene
at the Governor’s Hall shows, lose Pearl. The threat
keeps her in line socially, and the narrator believes,
Pearl keeps her in line spiritually, not as a Christ fig-
ure but as a deterrent: “Had little Pearl never come
to her from the spiritual world, it might have been
far otherwise. Then, she might have come down to
us, hand in hand with Ann Hutchinson, as the
foundress of a religious sect” (165). Having to care
for Pearl diverts Hester’s “enthusiasm of thought”
away from the political and theological foundations
of the Puritan establishment4 and onto “the woman
problem”: “Was existence worth accepting, even to
the happiest among them?” (165). In her specula-
tions, Hester imagines that “the whole system of so-
ciety is to be torn down, and built up anew” (165),
but strikingly, in her vision men must only be reso-
cialized; women must change “essentially”: they must
cease to be women. Commenting on Hester’s theory,
the narrator suggests that “a woman never overcomes
these problems by any exercise of thought. They are
not solved, or only in one way. If her heart chance to
come uppermost, they vanish” (165). But contrary to
HAWTHORNE
the narrator’s romantic implication, another kind of
love can “save” a woman: Hester loves Pearl. Alone
and despairing, Hester considers suicide, but her heart
comes uppermost. For Pearl’s sake, her meditations
do not issue in action.
While the responsibility for a child prevents Hester
from becoming politicized, a prophetess in the Ann
Hutchinson—Quaker Catharine line, it is, in fact,
Pearl who forces Hester’s radical critique of Puritan
society. Like the love between Edith and Edgar in
“The Maypole of Merry Mount,” Hester’s love for
Pearl teaches her how to step out of Puritan typologi-
cal time into ordinary history.5 The fact of Pearl ulti-
mately empowers Hester to escape Boston and its
definition of reality. She returns not to resume their
definition of her but because she understands that she
cannot escape her history.6
As she allows herself to be allegorized, Hester tries
hard to allegorize Pearl. Living in a world that be-
lieves spiritual truth expresses itself physically, she
distrusts her daughter. The fruit of a sinful act must
be sinful or, in fact, sin itself: seductive, foreign yet
intimate, and inescapable. At times Pearl seems to
Hester as much a monster birth as Hutchinson’s
“twenty-seven lumps of male seed” seemed to the
Puritan community of the 1630s.7 As such, Hester
identifies her with the cloth symbol: “She is the scar-
let letter, only capable of being loved, and so en-
dowed with a million-fold the power of retribution
for my sin” (113). Hester allows Pearl, as the physi-
cal manifestation of her sin, to dominate her and to
punish her emotionally.
But Pearl is not the Scarlet Letter. She is a child,
Hester’s pearl “of great price,—purchased with all
she had,—her mother’s only treasure!” (89). Although
Hester often suspects the child, when society threat-
ens to remove Pearl from her care, love prevails.
Through Pearl, Hester learns to read the world liter-
ally: a child is a child, not an emblem of sin. Be-
cause she has Pearl, she can come to recognize that
“what we did had a consecration of its own” (195).
For Hester, Pearl not only manifests the fact of her
“sin” but undermines the community evaluation of
that particular sexual act. Because of Pearl, the scar-
let letter does not do its “office.” Hester remains un-
repentant because to repent her “sin” would be to re-
pent Pearl.
Hester’s domestication through Pearl not only pre-
vents her from adopting the political role of Ann
Hutchinson and the Quaker Catharine; it precludes
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
the role of mortally wounded heroine patterned on
Lucrece and Clarissa and manifested in America in
Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple. Clarissa, sev-
eral weeks after her rape, intimates to Anna Howe
that because she now knows that she is not pregnant,
she does not have to marry Lovelace: she can act ac-
cording to her conscience. Conversely, Browning’s
Pompilia, attempting to will herself to death to es-
cape the brutalities of her husband Guido, experi-
ences a kind of Annunciation, which, with the prom-
ise of a new life for which she is responsible, gives
her the will not simply to live but to effect her own,
and the unborn child’s, liberation. Her courage earns
her heroic stature. Like Pompilia, Hester has a child
to live for, but unlike Pompilia, Hester is not mur-
dered on her childbed. She lives on, effecting a com-
promise with sexuality, biological process, and
generation. In allowing her to do so, Hawthorne
writes himself out of a heroine. During the middle of
the novel, as Hester lives the uneventful and anony-
mous life she so desires, she ceases to be heroic.8
However attractive a domesticated woman may seem
to the nineteenth-century narrator, her life, like that
of the chastened Christiana, does not generate the
tension and conflict necessary to literary plotting.
II
Dimmesdale, despite his participation in sex, suffers
no physical consequence that would force him to ac-
cept his sexual nature. From the beginning of The
Scarlet Letter, he is torn between his devotion to
God and his passion for the world, of which his af-
fair with Hester and his masochism are only “types.”9
Unable to discover a disjunction between his physi-
cal and moral nature, Dimmesdale attempts to de-
stroy his body, while searching his soul for evidence
of his Election.10 He is unwilling to believe that ac-
tions mean anything, yet he seems incapable of dis-
missing them. But it is not Dimmesdale’s literal adul-
tery that constitutes his idolatry and threatens his
spiritual status. The real love triangle in The Scarlet
Letter does not involve Hester at all. It is Dimmes-
dale’s philosophical speculation with Chillingworth
that violates his relationship to God. Dimmesdale’s
spiritual struggles become the focus of The Scarlet
Letter as Hawthorne explores Chillingworth’s attempt
to seduce Dimmesdale, the Bride of Christ, to despair.
Because a man’s relationship to God is not defined
through his love for and duty toward an earthly
spouse, Dimmesdale’s sexual encounter with Hester
may or may not affect his spiritual state. Chilling-
worth discovers Dimmesdale obsessed with the spiri-
tual meaning of his physical act; he hopes that Dim-
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
mesdale’s preoccupation will blind him to the more
serious adultery of their own relationship. Capitaliz-
ing on Dimmesdale’s commitment to Puritan theol-
ogy, Chillingworth repeatedly tries to seduce him
away from comfort or assurance, from spiritual or-
thodoxy, to despair. It is an intellectual seduction un-
dertaken for revenge, but in their moments of intense
speculation, Chillingworth and Dimmesdale achieve
a degree of sinful mutuality that Dimmesdale’s sexual
union with Hester can only have parodied.11
By subterfuge Chillingworth has arranged that he and
Dimmesdale take up lodging together. The congrega-
tion, disappointed but resigned to Dimmesdale’s re-
fusal to marry, “as if priestly celibacy were one of
his articles of church-discipline” (125), considers
Chillingworth a worthy and acceptable companion;
Chillingworth, deprived of the woman “in whom he
hoped to find embodied the warmth and cheerfulness
of home” (118), finds Dimmesdale a more than ad-
equate substitute. Chillingworth does not claim or
avenge himself on Hester because she does not inter-
est him: he never loved her and now finds her foolish
and boring. His pride is hurt, not his feelings. The
question of Dimmesdale’s sanctity provides a new
interest “of force enough to engage the full strength
of his faculties” (119), both emotional and
intellectual.
But Chillingworth’s and Dimmesdale’s relationship
is not only sexually charged; it is intellectually illicit.
Their mutual fascination is an attraction of opposites,
not simply in character but in profession and, conse-
quently, moral perspective. Dimmesdale, “a true
priest, a true religionist, with the reverential senti-
ment largely developed, and an order of mind that
impelled itself powerfully along the track of a creed”
(123), feels a fascination “in the man of science, in
whom he recognized a cultivation of no moderate
depth or scope; together with a range and freedom of
ideas, that he would have vainly looked for among
the members of his own profession” (123). Despite
his religious orthodoxy, Dimmesdale finds a “tremu-
lous enjoyment” and “occasional relief” in “looking
at the universe through the medium of another kind
of intellect than those with which he habitually held
converse.” (123). In these discussions, Dimmesdale
steps outside his creed, outside his faith, if only
momentarily. It affects him “as if a window were
thrown open, admitting a freer atmosphere into the
close and stifled study” (123). It is the air of antino-
mianism, of Hester’s private speculations, a draught
of the freer air that Hester and Dimmesdale will
breathe during their forest encounter. But it is air
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THE SCARLET LETTER
“too fresh to be long breathed, with comfort. So the
minister, and the physician with him, withdrew within
the limits of what their church defined as orthodox”
(123-24).
Chillingworth allows Dimmesdale this return to or-
thodoxy; in fact he even encourages it. He does not
wish to free Dimmesdale from the Puritan world
view, only to unsettle his understanding of his place
within it. He wants Dimmesdale to believe, like Mis-
tress Hibbins and other self-styled witches, that he is
damned, that God’s saving grace neither can nor will
redeem him.12 In their daily conversations, Chilling-
worth speaks the language of law, pushing Dimmes-
dale to confess his conviction of his own damnation
within that context. Sensitive to Dimmesdale’s fears,
he argues against “hypocrisy,” a seductive and dan-
gerous argument because, while appearing reason-
able, it assumes that deeds provide proof of spiritual
status; he insists that penitence before God—private
conviction of sin—is inadequate. Dimmesdale at first
resists this legalistic vision: “If it be the soul’s dis-
ease, then I do commit myself to the one Physician
of the soul!” His speech reveals his understanding of
the sinner’s complete dependence on the incompre-
hensible and unreadable will of God: “Let him do
with me as, in his justice and wisdom, he shall see
good” (137). But Chillingworth keeps pressing him
to decide that he can know God’s decree, to exalt
himself above God by defining his sin as too base to
be forgiven.
For Dimmesdale to confess his sin to Chillingworth
would mean more than an expression of guilt; it
would admit despair, because it would acknowledge
the primacy of his physical self. Nina Baym argues
that Dimmesdale cannot accept his “passionate core”
as the definition of his self. “The part of him that is a
Puritan magistrate, and which he thinks of as his
‘self,’ condemns the sinful ‘other.’”13 Chillingworth
posits a psychosomatic origin for Dimmesdale’s ill-
ness, identifying “a strange sympathy between body
and soul” (138), but he believes that he sees mind
manifesting its disease physically. Dimmesdale’s con-
gregation and clerical superiors are perhaps slightly
more aware than Chillingworth of what is really go-
ing on: in his self-denial and self-castigation, Dim-
mesdale’s soul is trying to “kill” his body in order to
prove to himself that his sexual nature does not de-
fine him. He wants to wean his affections from the
world. To avenge himself, Chillingworth hopes to
keep Dimmesdale alive long enough for his soul to
admit defeat. Because an inability to subordinate the
flesh to the will of the spirit would constitute defeat,
HAWTHORNE
Chillingworth’s medical intervention seriously dis-
rupts Dimmesdale’s spiritual security.
Chillingworth begins his investigation into Dimmes-
dale’s sanctity, as Lovelace initially approaches Clar-
issa, “with the severe and equal integrity of a judge,
desirous of truth” (129). Lovelace asks whether Clar-
issa is as pure as she seems to be; Chillingworth asks
whether Dimmesdale is the saint or the adulterer. But
as Chillingworth proceeds, he loses, like Lovelace,
all objectivity: “A terrible fascination, a kind of
fierce, though still calm, necessity seized the old man
within its gripe, and never set him free again, until
he had done all its bidding” (129). The obsession of
both seducers with the idea of fixing an immutable
identity on their respective victims in turn fixes them.
Chillingworth’s uncovering of the sleeping Dimmes-
dale’s chest reenacts the rape of Clarissa: both vic-
tims are helpless—Clarissa drugged; Dimmesdale in
a deep and unnatural slumber, of whose depth Chill-
ingworth seems confident: “Old Roger Chillingworth,
without any extraordinary precaution, came into the
room. The physician advanced directly in front of his
patient, laid his hand on his bosom, and thrust aside
the vestment” (138). Chillingworth responds in “a
ghastly rapture,” an ecstasy that Leslie Fiedler inter-
prets sexually but within the conventional hierarchy
that privileges acts of the spirit: “He knows at last
the ultimate secret of his dearest enemy; and know-
ing it, has possessed him, accomplished a rape of the
spirit beyond any penetration of the flesh.”14 Certainly
Chillingworth believes he has exposed Dimmesdale’s
true identity as sexual and therefore fallen. That is
what Lovelace thought when he raped Clarissa. But
Clarissa remains herself, although she can only prove
it in dying; Dimmesdale, too, will escape his tormen-
tor’s definition. These violations fix the identities of
the actors, not of the victims: Lovelace becomes “a
rapist,” Chillingworth, “a fiend.”
Chillingworth’s violation of Dimmesdale endows him
with a certain coercive power over his victim, not, as
in Clarissa, because he knows something about his
victim but because, for Dimmesdale, Chillingworth’s
identity is as enigmatic as Lovelace’s was to Clarissa
before the rape. Before the “rape,” Dimmesdale’s
“sensibility of nerve,” or intuition, “would become
vaguely aware that something inimical to his peace
had thrust itself into relation with him,” but “trusting
no man as his friend, he could not recognize his en-
emy when the latter actually appeared” (130). After
the event, because he was unconscious when it oc-
curred, Dimmesdale continues to repress his
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
suspicions. Chillingworth’s forbidden knowledge,
combined with Dimmesdale’s ignorance of Chilling-
worth’s true identity, affords him the role of “not a
spectator only, but a chief actor, in the poor minis-
ter’s interior world. He could play upon him as he
chose” (140).
III
In Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie
Fiedler describes The Scarlet Letter as “a seduction
story without a seduction, a parable of the Fall with
the Fall offstage and before the action proper.” He
identifies the action of the romance as “a second
temptation, in the face of which his characters, pos-
tulated as having been powerless before the ‘dark
necessity’ of their original fall, are portrayed as ca-
pable of free choice.”15 In identifying the plot as “a
second temptation,” however, he suggests that the
second recapitulates the first, that Hester’s convinc-
ing Dimmesdale to run away with her is the outcome
most to be feared. This reading casts Hester as the
temptress, in the original as in the second “fall,” and
Chillingworth’s instigations toward confession as cor-
rect and saving. Yet it seems certain that to credit
Chillingworth with either purposefully or inadvert-
ently saving Dimmesdale’s soul from Hester’s temp-
tation is to misunderstand the text. Such a misreading
is understandable. The narrator himself misinterprets
the spiritual significance of the forest discussion be-
tween Hester and Dimmesdale. But in fact, it is Hes-
ter’s decision to intervene in the Chillingworth-
Dimmesdale relationship that “saves” Dimmesdale
from destruction, although not in the way that she
had expected.
Hester correctly identifies Chillingworth’s influence
as the source of Dimmesdale’s despondency. She re-
alizes that “besides the legitimate action of his own
conscience, a terrible machinery had been brought to
bear, and was still operating, on Mr. Dimmesdale’s
well-being and repose” (158). Predictably, she blames
her own “defect of truth” for his psychological and
physical decay, as Eve blames herself for Adam’s
misery after their Fall (PL 10.930-31); she decides to
inform him of Chillingworth’s true identity. The for-
est interview between Hester and Dimmesdale mir-
rors the reconciliation scene Milton creates between
Adam and Eve. Hester finds Dimmesdale in the for-
est, despairing as Adam does after the Fall. Like Eve,
Hester initiates a reconciliation. Like Eve, she is re-
ceived with abuse and rejection that couples the
woman with the fiend.16 In Paradise Lost, Adam ex-
claims, “Out of my sight, thou Serpent, that name
best / Befits thee with him leagu’d, thy self as false /
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
And hateful” (10.867-69). In The Scarlet Letter,
when Hester reveals Chillingworth’s identity, Dim-
mesdale responds, “Woman, woman, thou art ac-
countable for this! I cannot forgive thee!” (194). Like
Eve, Hester flings herself at her lover, embraces him,
and begs forgiveness, as Eve does in her speech be-
ginning “Forsake me not thus, Adam” (10.914-36).
Like Adam, Dimmesdale forgives her, and the couple
consider their future, with Hester—again like Eve—
suggesting possible solutions. What causes the confu-
sion among critics about how to read this scene is
that Dimmesdale, unlike Adam, listens to Hester’s
proposals and seemingly assents. The interview be-
tween Hester and Dimmesdale in the forest mirrors
the postlapsarian conference between Adam and Eve,
except that Dimmesdale takes slightly longer than
Adam to decide what course of action is correct. But
by the morning of his Election Day sermon, Dim-
mesdale, like Adam, “with such counsel nothing
sway’d / To better hopes his more attentive minde /
Labouring had rais’d” (10.1010-12). Like Adam,
Dimmesdale successfully resists a “second tempta-
tion,” but as in Adam’s case, the new temptation of-
fers not earthly pleasure but despair.
The narrator expresses dismay at the thought of Dim-
mesdale’s flight, but he does so for a reason that mis-
understands both Puritan theology and the complex
portrait of Puritan psychology that Hawthorne has
drawn in Dimmesdale. The narrator is both literal
and romantic. He believes in sacred bonds, in “the
sanctity of the human heart,” and in the efficacy of
confession: repent and God will forgive you. He as-
sumes that Dimmesdale’s motive and sin in fleeing
Boston with Hester would be sexual. In those terms,
he interprets flight as a second and more serious sin,
because it would be a crime not of passion but of
conscious will. But when Dimmesdale responds with
horror to the idea of leaving Boston, it is not because
he fears giving way to earthly passion. Dimmesdale
understands that to decide to leave Boston would be
to affirm his own damnation: “‘If, in all these past
seven years,’ thought he, ‘I could recall one instant
of peace or hope, I would yet endure, for the sake of
that earnest of Heaven’s mercy. But now,—since I
am irrevocably doomed,—wherefore should I not
snatch the solace allowed to the condemned culprit
before his execution?’” (201). No matter how
tempted he appears to be at this moment, Dimmes-
dale cannot even express the sinful thought without
qualification. He says he has given up on his Elec-
tion,17 but he ends his meditation with a prayer: “O
Thou to whom I dare not lift mine eyes, wilt Thou
yet pardon me!”
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THE SCARLET LETTER
Hawthorne describes Dimmesdale’s giddiness at this
moment in terms of the idolatrous adultery of thought
to which Chillingworth has been tempting him in
their philosophical discussions. Dimmesdale experi-
ences “the exhilarating effect . . . of breathing the
wild, free atmosphere of an unredeemed, unchristian-
ized, lawless region” (201). He defies the spiritual
code in which he believes; he also inverts the con-
ventional hierarchy of male-female relationships, the
one of which Governor Bellingham reminded him
during the initial scaffold scene: “The responsibility
of this woman’s soul lies greatly with you” (66).
Abandoning his responsibility both for himself and
for Hester, as Adam abandons his responsibilities
when he takes the forbidden fruit from Eve, he speaks
of Hester as his savior: “I seem to have flung my-
self—sick, sin-stained, and sorrow-blackened—down
upon these forest leaves, and to have risen up all
made anew, and with new powers to glorify Him that
hath been merciful” (201-2). But his joy is the giddy
recklessness of the damned, and it lasts only briefly.
Pearl’s return shocks him back into his earlier under-
standing of the world: “As Arthur Dimmesdale felt
the child’s eyes upon himself, his hand—with that
gesture so habitual as to have become involuntary—
stole over his heart” (209). Hester experiences a simi-
lar jolt of reality when Pearl insists that she resume
the letter, but to Hester, Pearl is a person. To Dim-
mesdale, she is a symbol of his sin, capricious, alarm-
ing, and threatening to own him.
Hester’s decision to speak to Dimmesdale forces him
to confront himself and the blasphemy of the despair
Chillingworth urged him toward. She provides the
occasion for his final trial and his triumph. In resist-
ing the solace embodied in Hester, Dimmesdale af-
firms his belief in God’s ability to save whom he
chooses, even adulterous ministers. Hawthorne illus-
trates Dimmesdale’s continuing loyalty to the Puritan
system by having him doubt the reality of his
experience. Leaving the forest, Dimmesdale looks
back, “half expecting that he should discover only
some faintly traced features or outline of the mother
and child, slowly fading into the twilight of the
woods” (214). This impulse suggests a suspicion of
specters; he wonders whether he only dreamed of an
encounter. In his excited condition, he questions the
reality of the town as he approaches; “At every step
he was incited to do some strange, wild, wicked thing
or other, with a sense that it would be involuntary
and irrational” (217). The narrator argues that each
impulse arises from deep within Dimmesdale’s self,
HAWTHORNE
but his language offers another alternative: Dimmes-
dale may suffer from the Devil’s last desperate ef-
forts to win his soul.
The narrator’s description of Dimmesdale’s response
to temptation reveals his inability to distinguish be-
tween temptation and sinful assent. In telling terms,
the narrator comments on the accident of Dimmes-
dale’s youngest female convert happening to walk
by: “Satan, that afternoon, had surely led the poor
girl away from her mother’s side, and thrown her
into the pathway of this sorely tempted, or—shall we
rather not say?—this lost and desperate man” (219,
italics mine). But those two phrases mean very dif-
ferent things. The narrator assumes that Dimmesdale
has, “as it were,” made a pact with the Devil, that,
when “the arch-fiend whispered him” some sordid
idea, Dimmesdale desired, approved, and relished it.
Dimmesdale himself raises this possibility: “What is
it that haunts and tempts me thus? . . . Am I mad?
or am I given over utterly to the fiend? Did I make a
contract with him in the forest, and sign it with my
blood?” (220). But according to received tradition,
Dimmesdale needn’t have “signed a contract” before
the Devil could torment him. He neither acts upon
nor assents to these wicked thoughts; even if he had,
such action would not have “proved” anything to a
Calvinist.18 As Milton has Adam reassure Eve after
her dream, “Evil into the mind of God and Man /
May come and go, so unapproved, and leave / No
spot or blame behind” (5.117-19). Hester urges him
to run away; “Satan” encourages blasphemy; but
Dimmesdale resists these temptations.
Dimmesdale’s Election Sermon confirms his commit-
ment to Puritanism and demonstrates his continuing
faith in his own Election. Roy R. Male discusses
Dimmesdale’s “new vision” as an Emersonian mani-
festo, as “The Divinity School Address” with a little
Manifest Destiny thrown in.19 But the vision of Dim-
mesdale’s sermon is actually ultraorthodox. He
preaches covenant, New England as New Israel, and
from what Hester hears from outside the church, the
True Sight of Sin—“the complaint of the human
heart, sorrow-laden, perchance guilty, telling its se-
cret, whether of guilt or sorrow, to the great heart of
mankind” (243). Within the context of orthodox
Christianity, there is no reason to doubt Dimmes-
dale’s suspicion that the sermon is divinely inspired.
His wonder “that Heaven should see fit to transmit
the grand and solemn music of its oracle through so
foul an organ-pipe as he” (225) is both conventional
self-denigration—he has Saint Paul to imitate—and
conventional behavior on Heaven’s part.
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
Because a man displays no visible sign of his par-
ticular sexual sin, Dimmesdale is able to adopt the
role of the chief of sinners, to claim simultaneously
his horrible unworthiness and special election. He
emerges from the church triumphant but drained:
“The energy—or say, rather, the inspiration which
had held him up, until he should have delivered the
sacred message that brought its own strength along
with it from heaven—was withdrawn” (251). With
his remaining strength, Dimmesdale invites Hester
and Pearl to accompany him on the scaffold. By tak-
ing them with him, Dimmesdale seems to be ac-
knowledging his physical ties, to Hester as his lover
and to Pearl as his child. Readers have assumed that
he does because they know the “facts.” But Dimmes-
dale’s speech and gesture express his relationship to
Hester and Pearl metaphorically; he never explicitly
acknowledges the literal connection. Instead, Dim-
mesdale uses Hester as a text, as other preachers have
before him. Reducing her to the type of a sinner, he
claims to have a far more repulsive and significant
letter not on his clothing only or on his mortal flesh
but seared on “his inmost heart” (255). His confes-
sion has an effect opposite to that of the Reverend
Mr. Hooper’s sermon from underneath the Black Veil.
There, the congregation—enlightened, literal
people—tried to attach physical, or “real,” meaning
to the symbol. Here, the congregation—Puritan,
raised on spiritual analogy and hyperbolic expres-
sions of sinful community—interpret the real event
symbolically. Dimmesdale “had desired by yielding
up his breath in the arms of that fallen woman, to ex-
press to the world how utterly nugatory is the choic-
est of man’s own righteousness” (259).
Dimmesdale, I think, anticipates this reaction, be-
cause it is spiritually “correct.” Had he made his
guilty connection to Hester and Pearl explicit and lit-
eral, he would have sabotaged his point. Dimmes-
dale’s most spiritual parishioners recognize his death
as an educational device: “He had made the manner
of his death a parable, in order to impress on his ad-
mirers the mighty and mournful lesson, that, in the
view of Infinite Purity, we are all sinners alike” (259).
He dies believing that he is saved, although he
doesn’t know about Hester, for her rebellious and
impenitent attitude does not indicate to him the pres-
ence of prevenient grace, and his vision of eternity is
limited. On the scaffold, as in the forest, Dimmesdale
tries to correct Hester’s understanding of their affair.
Then, when Hester cried, “What we did had a conse-
cration of its own” (195), he bade her hush. Now,
when she suggests that their mutual suffering has ran-
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
somed them, he silences her again. He reminds her
of their “sin,” offering her as encouragement the
record of his own assurances:
He hath proved His mercy, most of all, in my
afflictions. By giving me this burning torture to
bear upon my breast! By sending yonder dark and
terrible old man, to keep the torture always at
red-heat! By bringing me hither to die this death
of triumphant ignominy before the people! Had
either of these agonies been wanting, I had been
lost for ever! Praised be his name! His will be
done! Farewell!
[256-57]
Dimmesdale has mounted the scaffold triumphantly;
he offers Hester the route of triumphant martyrdom.
Like Bunyan, he ventures his “eternal state with
Christ”: “If God doth not come in, thought I, I will
leap off the ladder even blindfold into Eternitie, sink
or swim, come heaven, come hell; Lord Jesus, if thou
wilt catch me, do; if not, I will venture for thy
Name.”20 Like Bunyan, Dimmesdale does not know
for sure that Christ will catch him, but the Christian
does not jump off the ladder knowing that he won’t;
the Christian jumps on faith, hoping that he will.
Dimmesdale’s triumphant death, however, is not
available to Hester. She cannot mount the scaffold si-
multaneously to affirm and deny her passionate na-
ture, because society equates her spiritual and physi-
cal states absolutely. She cannot act upon the
narrator’s suggested moral—“Be true! Be true! Be
true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet
some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!”
(260)—because Pearl stands beside her as visible ex-
pression of her defining sexuality. In his death, Dim-
mesdale at once rejects his body and the sexual act
that threatened to locate him in it. He kills the
“woman” in himself, his sexual, fleshly body, but in
the process, like Clarissa and like Georgiana in “The
Birthmark” before him, he kills himself. Hester, bur-
dened with Pearl, has been prevented from pursuing
this course. She must remain behind, to carry on as
best she can.
IV
At the close of Middlemarch, George Eliot remarks,
“A new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of
reforming a conventual life, any more than a new
Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for
the sake of a brother’s burial: the medium in which
their ardent deeds took shape is forever gone.”21 Like
Dorothea, Hester finds the old mediums for heroism
unavailable to her, but her failure to achieve heroic
73
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THE SCARLET LETTER
or tragic stature as a character derives not only from
historical restrictions. Ann Hutchinson and Quaker
Catharine have found ways to be heroic; Dimmesdale
successfully appropriates the heroine motifs of the
eighteenth century. But Hawthorne is reluctant to al-
low Hester’s political consciousness to develop fully.
The depiction of Quaker Catharine in “The Gentle
Boy” illustrates Hawthorne’s ambivalence about fe-
male heroism, particularly when expressed through
enthusiasm and prophecy. Catharine, like Hester, has
desexed herself. She wears shapeless sackcloth, has
strewn ashes in her unkempt hair; her pale face,
“emaciated with want, and wild with enthusiasm and
strange sorrows, retained no trace of earlier beauty.”22
When she ascends the pulpit, violating traditional sex
roles, her unnatural appearance and behavior shocks
the minister into “speechless and almost terrified as-
tonishment” (80); she seems a kind of Medusa. The
congregation responds to her with the same horror
the Puritan divines felt at the trial of Ann Hutchin-
son; she threatens their political and theological order
in the same way.
The narrator in “The Gentle Boy,” however, con-
tinually undermines our admiration of Catharine. He
reports that “when her fit of inspiration came. . . .
Her discourse gave evidence of an imagination hope-
lessly entangled with her reason” (81). He dismisses
her jeremiad as a “flood of malignity which she mis-
took for inspiration” (82). Positing the conflict in her
life as between “natural duty” and “fanaticism,” the
narrator affirms that Catharine “violated the duties of
the present life and the future by fixing her attention
wholly on the latter” (85). Although her understand-
ing of priorities conforms to seventeenth-century
practice, the narrator refuses to acknowledge her call.
The story vindicates her in leaving Ilbrahim with
Dorothy and Tobias but presents her spiritual convic-
tion as dangerously desexing and dehumanizing. The
story offers as its religious and heroic ideal Ilbrahim,
a gentle boy caught between the poles of Catharine’s
enthusiasm and Puritan intolerance.
Having saved Hester from the religious heresy of an
Ann Hutchinson or the physical tragedy of a Char-
lotte Temple, Hawthorne seems to feel compelled to
rescue her from the social heresy of feminism. He
circumscribes Hester’s political power by giving her
a self-defeating, because literally interpreted, version
of Margaret Fuller’s prophetic feminism. Margaret
Fuller imagines the evolution of human beings and
their relationships toward a millennial perfection in
which the equality and dignity of Adam and Eve’s
HAWTHORNE
prelapsarian union would be restored. She urges
women to develop their intellects to aid the process
of evolution.23 Hester, too, imagines “that, at some
brighter period, when the world should have grown
ripe for it, in Heaven’s own time, a new truth would
be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation
between man and woman on a surer ground of mu-
tual happiness” (263). But as the tentativeness of Hes-
ter’s language indicates, her millennial expectation
involves a more restricted course of action.
Hester returns to New England, perhaps motivated,
as the narrator suggests, by repentance for her adul-
tery, perhaps simply to resume her place in her per-
sonal history. As the narrator remarks, “There was
more real life for Hester Prynne here, in New Eng-
land, than in the unknown region where Pearl had
found a home” (262-63). Part of Hester’s reality is
suffering, a suffering linked to the Scarlet Letter,
which has become “a type of something to be sor-
rowed over” (263), a type of “woman’s lot.” As a
young child, Pearl, innocent of the significance of the
A but curious and perceptive, interpreted it as a sym-
bol of womanhood:
“I wear nothing on my bosom yet!”
“Nor ever will my child, I hope,” said Hester.
“And why not, mother?” asked Pearl. . . . “Will
it not come of its own accord, when I am a
woman grown?
[183]
Hester, through her experience of the Scarlet Letter,
comes to recognize the universal significance of her
mark. She becomes the confidante and counselor of
the Salem women, but Hawthorne does not allow her
comfort and speculation the energy of her earlier
speculations.
Unlike Fuller, who insists, to the point of advocating
celibacy, on the need for women to become indepen-
dent and “self”-centered in order to stand in equal re-
lation to men, Hester advises patience and persever-
ance within the present patriarchal order until the
apocalyptic revelation. The women she counsels are
caught “in the continually recurring trials of wounded,
wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful pas-
sion,—or with the dreary burden of a heart unyielded,
because unvalued and unsought” (263). They suffer
from lovesickness of various sorts and need a man,
the “right” man, to set them straight. Such descrip-
tions of the nature of women’s dissatisfaction iden-
tify marriage as the sole source of earthly fulfillment
for women and attempt to reduce all protests against
74
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
patriarchal suppression of women’s minds and wills
to a personal emotional complaint. Sophia Haw-
thorne, writing to her mother about Fuller, articulates
this point of view quite decorously: “It seems to me
if she were married truly, she would no longer be
puzzled about the rights of women. This is the rev-
elation of woman’s true destiny and place, which
never can be imagined by those who do not experi-
ence the relation. In perfect, high union there can be
no supremacy.”24 Her romantic investment in com-
panionate marriage makes it impossible for her to
credit Fuller’s social criticism as anything other than
spinsterish quibbling.
The ineffectiveness of Hester’s feminism derives
from the metaphysics of her Puritan heritage, a heri-
tage she shares with the Hawthornes. As a woman,
the subordinate and silent half of the couple-body,
Hester is excluded from the tradition of prophecy in
which Heaven transmits its messages through “foul
organ-pipes”; neither can she completely free herself
from such a self-denigrating evaluation of her status.
Because she is female, Hester cannot find that prece-
dent of grace abounding to the chief of sinners which
offers Dimmesdale hope. Unable to transcend her
sexual nature, Hester renounces her claim to spiritual
insight: “[She] had long since recognized the impos-
sibility that any mission of divine and mysterious
truth should be confided to a woman stained with
sin, bowed down with shame, or even burdened with
a life-long sorrow” (263). Hawthorne gives Hester a
vision of Fuller’s Virgin Champion without Fuller’s
understanding that the virginity is spiritual, not physi-
cal, that it involves independence, not sexual chastity.
Hester imagines her “Virgin Champion” as a chaste
married woman, “showing how sacred love should
make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful
to such an end!” (263). Fuller’s vision of the proph-
etess of sexual equality—virginal, pure, asexual—
undercuts her own feminism by idealizing woman as
some spiritual, refining force, denying her physical
nature and restricting her to a different stereotype.
Hester’s vision of a prophetess of matrimonial bliss
conforms, appropriately, to the seventeenth-century
understanding of a woman’s purpose and place. But
in order to have Hester accept sexual hierarchy as a
given, Hawthorne must substitute for her earlier
awareness of the need for social reform the fairy-tale
solution of romantic love, a solution that is no solu-
tion at all.
But despite the retractions and restrictions of the fi-
nal chapter, Hester’s experience and speculations of-
fer a model for a way out of Puritanism. She learns
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
to acknowledge sexuality, generation, and history. As
the novel’s emphasis on psychology and the indi-
vidual undermines the idealizing and stereotyping of
woman inherent in the allegorical world view, the
pressure that the nineteenth-century writer felt to
“wrap up the plot” requires a kind of closure that ac-
knowledges history and generations. Dimmesdale has
the big death scene, but Hester remains; Pearl mar-
ries; the female line, at once representative of and
accepting of the body, moves forward in history.
Notes
1. Lawrence Buell’s “Rival Romantic Interpreta-
tions of New England Puritanism: Hawthorne
versus Stowe,” Texas Studies in Literature and
Language 25 (1983): 77-99, argues that “Haw-
thorne’s fictional treatments of Puritanism are
apt to be as much about the problem and pro-
cess of reconstructing the Puritan era as a dra-
matization of it” (82); he identifies in Haw-
thorne’s writings about New England
Puritanism the detachment of an intellectual his-
torian who “continued to see it as a seventeenth-
century phenomenon” (84). Buell adds, how-
ever, that “his figurative strategies are likely to
have been equally if not more informed by non-
New England sources like Spenser’s Faerie
Queene and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress” (93).
Hawthorne’s interest in Puritanism is not purely
nationalist nor his understanding of it provincial.
2. Michael Colacurcio, “Footsteps of Ann Hutch-
inson,” English Literary History 39 (1972): 472.
3. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, in The
Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Centenary Edi-
tion, ed. Fredson Bowers, 16 vols. (Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 1962), 1:79. All
further references to The Scarlet Letter will be
made to this edition by page number in the text.
4. For a complete discussion of the relation be-
tween Hester Prynne and Ann Hutchinson, see
Colacurcio, “Footsteps of Ann Hutchinson,”
esp. pp. 466-78.
5. See Colacurcio’s discussion of “The Maypole
of Merrymount” in The Province of Piety:
Moral History in Hawthorne’s Early Tales
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984),
pp. 251-82.
6. Nina Baym comments that Hester’s return to
New England “admits that the shape of her life
has been determined by the interaction between
that letter, the social definition of her identity,
75
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THE SCARLET LETTER
and her private attempt to withstand that defini-
tion” in The Shape of Hawthorne’s Career (Ith-
aca: Cornell University Press, 1976), p. 129.
7. John Winthrop quotes John Cotton’s suggestion
that the miscarriage signified Mrs. Hutchinson’s
error that “all was Christ in us” (A Short Story
of the Rise, Reign, and Fall of Antinomianism
in The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-1638: A
Documentary History, ed. David D. Hall
[Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University
Press, 1968]); Cotton Mather considers it evi-
dence of her many heresies, or “false concep-
tions,” turning the tragedy into a huge bio-
theological joke. See Magnalia Christi
Americana, 7 vols. (Hartford, Conn.: Silas An-
drus and Sons, 1853), 2:519.
8. In “The Gentle Boy” (Works of Hawthorne, vol.
9), Dorothy, whom the narrator can only praise
by comparing her blameless and uninteresting
personality to “a verse of fireside poetry” (85),
fades into obscurity despite her faithful stew-
ardship of what the narrator calls “the holiest
trust which can be committed to a woman” (95).
It is Catharine for whom Ilbrahim waits on his
deathbed; it is Catharine who provides the dra-
matic and moral interest of the story. She obeys
a higher law than nineteenth-century domestic
sentiment, and she seems to have chosen rightly.
What the voice told her when it called her to
leave her son—that “his place is here” (87)—
proves to be true: even for his infant hands,
there was labor in the vineyard.
9. See Frederick Crews, The Sins of the Fathers
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), for
a discussion of Dimmesdale’s masochism as li-
bidinal repression and displaced sexual
gratification.
10. Colacurcio, “Footsteps of Ann Hutchinson,” pp.
486-92.
11. Leslie A. Fiedler discusses “the passionate con-
nection” between Dimmesdale and Chilling-
worth, which seems “an odd combination of the
tie between Faust and Gretchen, on the one
hand, and Faust and Mephistopheles on the
other” in Love and Death in the American
Novel, rev. ed. (New York: Stein and Day,
1966), p. 234. But Fiedler is too involved in his
archetypal reading to recognize the spiritual
character of the relationship and love triangle.
12. Baym points out the distinction between Hes-
ter’s rebellion and the activity of witches, whose
“rebellion arises from accepting the Puritan
HAWTHORNE
world view and defining themselves as evil”
(Shape of Hawthorne’s Career, p. 134). She also
explores Chillingworth’s role as a father figure
representing both the superego and Puritan
patriarchy.
13. Ibid., p. 138.
14. Fiedler, Love and Death, p. 235.
15. Ibid., pp. 224, 232.
16. See Roy R. Male, Hawthorne’s Tragic Vision
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1957), p.
111.
17. See Colacurcio, “Footsteps of Hutchinson,” p.
491.
18. In his autobiography, Grace Abounding to the
Chief of Sinners, John Bunyan records fears that
“some wicked thought might arise in my heart
that might consent thereto; and sometimes also
the Tempter would make me believe I had con-
sented to it” (p. 42). Then, at the penultimate
moment of the “Sell Christ for this” episode, he
relates that “after much striving, even until I
was almost out of breath, I felt this thought pass
through my heart, Let him go if he will! and I
thought also that I felt my heart assent freely
thereto” (43). He despairs for two years before
he begins to experience moments that suggest
that the Tempter manufactured this “evil mo-
tion” to trick him.
19. Male, Hawthorne’s Tragic Vision, pp. 114-15.
20. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, p. 101.
21. George Eliot, Middlemarch (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1956), p. 612.
22. Hawthorne, “The Gentle Boy,” p. 81, hereafter
cited in the text by page number.
23. Margaret Fuller, “Woman in the Nineteenth
Century,” in Bell Gale Chevigny, The Woman
and the Myth: Margaret Fuller’s Life and Writ-
ings (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press,
1976), p. 278.
24. Sophia Hawthorne to her mother, July 1843,
quoted ibid., p. 231.
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Margaret Reid (essay date 2004)
SOURCE: Reid, Margaret. “History’s Revolutions in
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter: The Artifact in
the Attic.” In Cultural Secrets as Narrative Form: Story-
telling in Nineteenth-Century America, pp. 71-80. Colum-
bus, Ohio: The Ohio State University Press, 2004.
[In the following essay, Reid explores how contemporane-
ous events involving social and political revolution may
have influenced Hawthorne’s creation of The Scarlet
Letter.]
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
In “The Custom House,” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
narrator claims to revive the story of Hester Prynne
within what he calls the “neutral territory” of ro-
mance, but the historical and imaginative space of
both his world and hers may be considered “neutral”
only in a profoundly ironic sense of the term.1 Here
as for Cooper’s Spy, the emblematic American story
is lived and then re-imagined on ground so steeped
in history’s conflicts, disruptions, and reversals—so
contradictory in all of its signs—that it may be pre-
sumed pristine only because it is vacant of legible
meaning.2 But the novel courts a belief in the possi-
bility—however tenuous—of new beginnings invited
by this setting. As his heroine emerges from the dark
prison door, Hawthorne floods his text with images
of the new—the sunlight, the infant, the just-
blooming rose, and—particularly—the letter A: All
of these images conspire to “transfigure” (55) Hester.
The result, Hawthorne writes, is that the “SCARLET
LETTER, so fantastically embroidered and illumi-
nated upon her bosom. . . . had the effect of a spell,
taking her out of the ordinary relations with human-
ity, and inclosing her in a sphere by herself” (55).
Both in the novel’s fictional Puritan community and
in 1850, Hester is brought forth before an audience
to embody a new world, a world of meanings not yet
spoken (though clearly active, perhaps even domi-
nant) within present culture. In both contexts, Hes-
ter’s life animates the self-conscious construction of
an American story out of particularly American mate-
rials—the child, born in the new colony, the rose
rooted in its earth, the A, designed and woven in the
new world and later stored for centuries within the
town’s space of public record. In the tradition of
Noah Webster, an American language promised the
words for what the Revolution had claimed by deeds:
separate, distinct, and specifically national self-
definition. This project necessarily would begin with
an examination of already active forms of social dis-
course along with bold new experiments with their
dangers and powers, particularly as they might apply
to the early stages of a culture.3 Like Cooper’s Spy,
Hester Prynne—another storyteller—is one such
experiment. Contemporary reviewers were quick to
extol Hawthorne for “found[ing] a new principality
of his own” without “dethron[ing] any established
prince in literature,” and indeed the image is apt:4
Hawthorne’s historical fiction focuses on the revolu-
tionary possibilities of a new story, incorporating an
accumulated—rather than obliterated—past.
These revolutionary possibilities—as situated in mid-
nineteenth-century America—comprise the context
for my reading of The Scarlet Letter, and in turn, my
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THE SCARLET LETTER
understanding of Hawthorne’s interests and sympa-
thies owes much to recent scholarly works that have
revised our understanding of the political engage-
ments of the canonical authors of the “American
Renaissance.” Larry Reynolds has argued that “revo-
lutionary struggle stirred at the front of Hawthorne’s
consciousness as he wrote The Scarlet Letter”;5 evi-
dence for this claim abounds in the novel. For Rey-
nolds, this revolutionary consciousness is primarily
nourished by Hawthorne’s interest in the European
revolutions abroad from 1848 to 1849, and I would
like to extend this argument by layering this proven
concern—Hawthorne’s skeptical and even fearful in-
terest in the upheavals in Europe—with a long-
established interpretive truism about Hawthorne, that
is, his known interest in landmark moments in Ameri-
can colonial and national history.
Jonathan Arac has argued that Hawthorne’s life and
writings bear witness to his “uncertainty between
‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’” impulses and show
that this uncertainty led him to embrace “the contra-
dictory wish of the Democrats in the early 1850s . . .
to go ahead into the future without losing control of
what they had established: let us call this the tension
between motion and regulation.”6 If the colonial
Revolution as a story of origins in America had pro-
vided the nation with—in Arac’s term—“regulation,”
establishing aspects of cultural life and identity not
to be risked, the revolutions of 1848, as Reynolds
has shown, offered far too much in the way of “mo-
tion”: “[T]o a man of Hawthorne’s temperament, the
violence, the bloodshed, the extended chaos that ac-
companied the revolutions of 1848-49 were deeply
disturbing.”7 For Arac, the space between what has
been regulated and what remains in motion, what the
nation “fear[ed] to lose” and what it “wish[ed] to
gain” is Hawthorne’s America of 1850, a “political
impasse” in “a structure of conflicting values.”8 Per-
haps we might see, then, as one outcome of this ten-
sion—one expression of this impasse—Hawthorne’s
interest in revolution seeking a space less overdeter-
mined than the America of 1776 and less volatile
than the Europe of 1848.
Indeed the America of “The Custom House” is one
such example. Many critics agree that there Haw-
thorne displaces both the real violence and the poten-
tial glories and tragedies of revolutionary ages when
he uses the rhetoric and imagery of revolution in re-
lation to his own removal from the Custom House.
In so doing, as Arac points out, Hawthorne returns
the word “revolution” to “the etymologically related
action of ‘rotation’ in office.”9 But there is more than
HAWTHORNE
a wry parallel here; in “The Custom House,” Haw-
thorne’s narrator instructs readers how and why to
understand antebellum America as distinctly, if oddly,
revolutionary. First the narrator pushes us to consider
the chaos that ensues for any party affiliate as a shift
in power, however regulated, occurs; this we under-
stand as a subjective sense of mock-heroic
disenfranchisement. Despite the narrator’s disdain for
government work, he concedes, “[t]he moment when
a man’s head drops off is seldom or never, I am in-
clined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his
life” (44). More broadly, however, “The Custom
House” offers a world so rigid, so moribund, that
any change—no matter how small—might be imag-
ined most vividly as the overturning of governments
and kingdoms. Among this world of idle chatter, with
his mind free (or empty) of the distractions of imagi-
nation, the narrator finds a peculiar capacity still ac-
tive: “[I]t lay at my own option to recall whatever
was valuable in the past” (28). Much to his own sur-
prise, the very past he envisions evokes revolutions
of thought.
Sacvan Bercovitch has shown that “antebellum cul-
ture was particularly volatile—in the sense now not
of transition but of consolidation: volatility redirected
into channels of social growth.”10 In such a world,
revolution comes in minute forms; every small shift
asks again what will be carried forward and what
will be left behind. No time is more dangerous to na-
tional narrative than that of consolidation; in such
ages, aspects of national experience—not unlike
small-time political players—are most easily left
behind. At this moment, then, of world revolutions
coupled with a strange and tense stasis at home—
with the northern call for consolidation, in all of its
willful compromises—it is no surprise to find that
the very means and subjects of national storytelling
would fall into question.
In this atmosphere, too, broadly cultural imaginative
desires for consolidation may be seen working at the
level of historiography; if George Bancroft is the best
known of the historians writing with these goals, he
is hardly the only one.11 In nineteenth-century United
States historiography, treatments of previous revolu-
tions—Cromwell’s, as well as that of the colonies—
were favorite subjects, as if in traditional romance
style these progressive histories might effect consoli-
dation in narrative by recasting conflict and thus dis-
pelling it before it might recur of its own accord. The
U.S. Civil War is history’s direct response to those
efforts at containment, and the rise of tensions before
the war adds perhaps the most significant layer to
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
Hawthorne’s cultural context. Critics have come to
see the Civil War as “the latent context of the Ameri-
can Renaissance,” which, in turn, is filled with works
that “depend on [a] utopianism . . . that circumvents
or submerges actual divisions of time.”12 As I have
been arguing throughout this book, the voice of the
storyteller most clearly emerges within (as well as
against) such determined idealism, and so we find
Hester Prynne among this matrix of utopian impulses.
With the rise of regional tensions preceding the Civil
War, newly established conceptions of the national,
cultural identity of the United States came into
question. For antebellum America, early republican
rhetorics of an independent nation, unified and ex-
panding, clearly were not only inadequate but actu-
ally false as accounts of contemporary historical pro-
cess; they were, in fact, variations on a theme, a
theme, that is, of that “circumvent[ion] or submer-
[sion]” of the “actual divisions” all too clearly mani-
fest within historical life. In relation to this narrative
tradition, the experiences of everyday life threatened
to exceed the bounds of national imaginings, perhaps
even to overturn the stated meanings of American
identity. There are many important ways to under-
stand the complexities of antebellum culture and its
crises, and foremost among these will always be the
emergent crisis of slavery in mid-nineteenth-century
America. Nevertheless, it is not tangential to note
that northern liberalism in 1850—in its ambiguities
so central to the problem of understanding race in its
time—has at its core a crisis of identity, experienced
by self-consciously American authors as a crisis of
storytelling. This crisis is one built of responses to
the European revolutions, to the shifts in party power
in the United States, and to the legal and political
maneuvering of both North and South. This crisis of
national narrative provides the primary context within
which I see Hawthorne’s fiction working.
For Cooper, particular matters of revolutionary his-
tory—the character of leaders, the confusion of
causes—were at stake in the narrative silence of The
Spy. For Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter, Hester’s
silent story puts at stake the possible belief in the
continuity of American cultural history.13 Gordon Hut-
ner demonstrates the significant pattern of “secrets[,
which] so predominate Hawthorne’s plots, settings,
characters, and style.”14 In this tradition I would like
to continue a study of such secrecy now more spe-
cifically within the realm of the historical. Within
Hester’s silence are a variety of matters of dissent—
from the most personal to the most socially en-
gaged—all with the potential to challenge a fragile
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
story of continuity. Within her silence, however, are
also the possibilities of creating links between seem-
ingly remote ages. Through its experiments in bind-
ing language to history, The Scarlet Letter enacts an
experimental repair of a proto-revolutionary situa-
tion, a moment of rupture between history and its
known narratives; the romance thus becomes, as
Brook Thomas argues, a “civic myth.”15
To be able to use language in such a way that it can-
not be immediately divorced from a living historical
voice—from a memory, personal or inherited—is, as
I noted earlier in this book, the art of Walter Ben-
jamin’s Storyteller. For Benjamin, the late conditions
of narrative are such that “no event any longer comes
to us without already being shot through with
explanation.”16 Hawthorne encounters a similar world,
where language is structured with a nationalist rheto-
ric so superfluous as to be almost deadening, carry-
ing with it certainly nothing to address the emergent
sense of the United States as a country divided within
and against itself. Under such conditions the language
of the nation’s story would need careful revitalization
if it were to continue as a system of social cohesion.
As he addresses it, then, Hawthorne’s America is not
what so many in the Jacksonian era believed it to be,
a “vast new country,” yet free of known “boundaries”
and “heaving with restless impatience . . . to exem-
plify new ideas in new forms.”17 It is instead a coun-
try vastly burdened with histories and thus filled with
dissension. Just as a new national narrative would
have to take in the ever-accumulating past even as it
wrote a new history, so also in The Scarlet Letter
Hawthorne gives readers a world focused on the con-
ditions of creating while inheriting a story. “The Cus-
tom House,”’s narrator receives, in that remarkably
material form, the inheritance of a story about life in
the New World. Interestingly, however, that inherit-
ance includes profound implications about the way
stories are told—about how language meets, evades,
or denies the experiences of life itself.
When Hester is reanimated from that scrap of cloth
and its attendant manuscript left in the Custom House
attic, her return to American culture embodies a
theory of history’s return deeply complicated by both
overt and silent connections to more than one
revolution.18 In this sense Hester is a more fully de-
veloped image than that of a similar embodiment of
history and revolution that Hawthorne introduces in
“The Gray Champion” (1835), and perhaps surpris-
ingly she will prove more radical, too. There, with
reference to feared Old World Puritan leaders, Haw-
thorne invokes a legend familiar to nineteenth-century
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THE SCARLET LETTER
audiences:19 the legend of the three judges—from the
Puritan regicide court—who had escaped into hiding
in New England to live out their lives in exile after
the Restoration. The story of the regicides in New
England is the story of a new culture, able to contain
(shelter and tame) old world radicalism. As such, it
is the story of lives—meanings—wrapped within the
fabric of an emergent society and thereby understood
in new contexts rather than returned to the site of
origin, where they would be bound by purposes un-
derstood and acts taken within a no longer coherent
context. It is then a story of dissenters who are pro-
tected from feeling with immediacy the full ramifica-
tions of their dissent because they have come to live
within a world that looks past their time-bound po-
litical position and choice, seeing in them instead
something useful for present cultural purposes. The
appeal of such a tale to a country on the brink of
civil war is easy to see.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, legends of
the regicides and of the Puritan revolution in gen-
eral—not only as they came to exist in stock fictional
form but also as they might be more fully imagined
given popular historians’ familiarity with colonial
texts—had come to suggest not only a pattern of re-
currence in history (a prefiguration of the American
revolution and later national successes), but also the
critical problem of assimilating these recurrences into
present consciousness.20 It is this necessary reintegra-
tion that Hester Prynne enacts in her life as a symbol
to Puritan Boston. Like the judges, Hester Prynne is
overdetermined, so much so that what she represents
is newly enfolded in secrecy—a strange condition of
excessive solitude and silence that must eventually
generate its own story, even its own language.
The A that she wears bears witness to her story but
more pointedly to her secrecy—her refusal to name
her child’s father, to reveal her husband’s presence,
or to record her own knowledge and passion; any
such revelation would shatter the very principles of
her community. The latent danger and power of Hes-
ter’s life comes from her silence rather than from her
adultery, just as the imaginative power of the regi-
cides comes from their hidden life rather than their
known act. In this circuitous acquisition of silent
power—associated with the most potent of political
crises but offering, too, a route to consolidation—
both the regicides and Hester (with her A) acquire an
authority not only to create, but also to respond to—
indeed to palliate—Hawthorne’s sense of cultural cri-
sis some two centuries later.
HAWTHORNE
The crises in Hester’s (and Hawthorne’s) worlds may
be imagined as political and moral, but they are first
and foremost rooted in language. There we see the ri-
gidity of communal expectations and the failure to
yield to the evidence of experience. Hawthorne por-
trays these social limits within the text’s community
through the frame provided by two of the town lead-
ers and major players in the action. Dimmesdale, the
preacher and unacknowledged father of Pearl, and
Chillingworth, the doctor and wronged husband of
Hester, are set up in the romance as models of the
ways in which language has heretofore both sustained
and entrapped the colony.
At one end of the spectrum is Dimmesdale, who is
nothing less (and nothing more) than a self-styled
symbol. His manipulation of context makes the pro-
cess of demystifying his character impossible for his
congregation, and through a series of well-
orchestrated performances, Dimmesdale severs refer-
ential language from experiential existence. He can,
as Hawthorne notes, confess to being “altogether vile,
a viler companion of the vilest, the worst of sinners”
(142), only to have his audience “reverence him the
more” (143). Dimmesdale’s language is on constant
display, but it never leads to knowledge.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is Chillingworth.
He too keeps meaning inaccessible from his commu-
nity, denying his very name and identity by “with-
draw[ing] his name from the roll of mankind, . . .
vanish[ing] out of life as completely as if he indeed
lay at the bottom of the ocean” (117). However, he
does so not with the distracting flourishes of rhetoric
but with the silent, even primal, expressions of rage
and joy that Hawthorne places as prior to language
itself. Within this paralyzing context, the image of
language (though as yet unspoken) that Hester brings
to the community has clear radical potential. In both
her world and that of her narrator, Hester’s letter is
much more than the emblem of an unspoken sin. It is
an image of language at its most basic, referencing
the most primary of experiences, nearly—but not
quite—erupting into conscious meaning that will dev-
astate the order offered (indeed forced) by a commu-
nity bound between the false rhetoric of the preacher
and the inarticulate madness of the physician.
It is in this sense that the real power of the A within
the fiction lies in its positive force. In trying so hard
to define Hester, the colony realizes that it cannot
make sense of her. By revealing these interpretive in-
adequacies, Hawthorne identifies Puritan Boston as
the dangerous utopia that it is. In terms helpful to
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
specifying the nature of this incarnation of utopia,
Hans Blumenberg writes that “in its intensified in-
stances utopia is the sum of negations, when it is fo-
cused solely on avoiding contamination by what cur-
rently exists and when it culminates in a prohibition
against saying anything positively imagined. . . .
The utopian prohibition of images demands submis-
sion, by refusing to provide stories.”21
Hester’s disapproving society gives her a badge rich
with cultural capital. The image will not submit to
any one inscribed meaning and so turns on the order
of the utopia by generating a myriad of stories, not
only as Hester evolves to be known as “Angel” or
“Able,” but even from the start. Like the haunting
laughter echoing in the streets of “My Kinsman,
Major Molineux,” the A in The Scarlet Letter is the
means of revelations beyond the known language of
the community. It is a force conveying an unnamed
negative message into a world where such negations
of form and knowledge have, as yet, no codified
place. With more potential interpretations than places
in the culture for those interpretations, the force given
to Hester is, by definition, radical.22
If we imagine that the maintenance of utopia is the
job of the colony’s most powerful leaders, it is then
no surprise that they choose to mark Hester with a
letter that is to stand in for a word, to forestall the
generation of language. But as if to remind his fic-
tional magistrates that their act works within only a
single, limited context, Hawthorne emphasizes re-
peatedly the historical life of the image itself, the in-
evitable birth and persistent materiality of the “posi-
tively imagined” essential facts of America’s living
record. Though given in the impulse of exclusion,
the letter, like the laughter in “My Kinsman, Major
Molineux,” derives a power from the significance of
the gesture of giving: Through the giving, the abdica-
tion of powers unknown to the giver, new cultural
roles evolve that only the recipient can play.23 In giv-
ing her this symbolic object, the town fathers add to
Hester’s private share of the community’s history
and knowledge. The A, in fact, comes to represent
revolutionary possibility and danger in its capacity to
transform identity for a world trapped by otherwise
static modes of knowing.
In his perusal of Surveyor Pue’s antiquarian papers,
the narrator of “The Custom House” reports, “a por-
tion of his facts, by and by, did [him] good service in
the preparation of the article entitled ‘Main Street’”
(33). With this in mind, certain distinctive qualities
of the scarlet letter as one among these “facts” be-
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
come particularly apparent. In Hawthorne’s story
“Main Street” (1849), history is communal, con-
flicted, and dark. There the narrative moves through
several generations of history, providing images pri-
marily of town crisis. Apologizing for the “all too
sombre” nature of the visions he presents, the narra-
tor of “Main Street” claims the burden of historical
accuracy: “[T]he blame must rest on the sombre spirit
of our forefathers, who wove their web of life with
hardly a single thread of rose-color or gold.”24 The
contrast, then, between the bulk of the inherited ma-
terials found in the Custom House attic and the lumi-
nescence of the A is immediate and profound: “[T]he
object that most drew my attention, in the mysterious
package, was a certain affair of fine red cloth, much
worn and faded. There were traces about it of gold
embroidery, which, however, was greatly frayed and
defaced. . . . It was the capital letter A” (34). Worn
by time, this artifact too signifies a story of dark com-
munal conflict, yet it is woven of those rare threads
of “rose-color” and “gold”; in the simplest visual
sense, the letter announces itself as both representa-
tive and novel among the attic’s holdings.
As an emblem of history, the letter has an uncanny
record of survival indicating some dimension of its
exceptional power in the romance by drawing out its
explicit connection to American revolutionary history.
According to the narrator, the letter survives into his
own day only by virtue of an odd accident of history:
It is one of very few relics not pillaged in the violent
discord of two hundred years of New England’s
existence. Specifically, the narrator recounts that
among the holdings in the Custom House attic, “there
is a dearth of records” from all years “prior to the
Revolution.” He explains that “the earlier documents
and archives . . . probably [were] carried off to Hali-
fax, when the King’s officials accompanied the Brit-
ish army in its flight from Boston,” and he laments
what he imagines among the lost, speculating that
“going back, perhaps to the days of the Protectorate,
those papers must have contained many references to
forgotten or remembered men, and to antique cus-
toms” (31).
Imagining the king’s army robbing New England of
its stories because it could not rob the colonies of
their future, the patriotic narrator endows the A with
historical authority derived from both of America’s
mythic founding eras; it thus becomes both a Puritan
and a Revolutionary artifact, thus both foundational
and disruptive.25 Like the exiled judges of legend, the
A is tied explicitly to the recurrence of crisis. Whether
surviving because it was hidden from the king’s offi-
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THE SCARLET LETTER
cials, or whether to English eyes the artifact appeared
insignificant, the endurance of the A through British
raids lends it a little-recognized symbolic authority—
that of revolution, concentrated and ready to flower
into any of its myriad forms.
As Hester accepts and then decorates her emblem,
then, her life animates a revolution in both history
and language. She uses her “delicate and imaginative
skill . . . of needle-work” (81) to create an American
symbol. As she does so, Hester and her symbolic
work—including both the letter and her daughter—
suggest that in Hawthorne’s world she stands as a
dangerous and formidable challenge to her culture.26
If, as Walt Whitman predicted, an American language
would emerge out of the stories of its people (“words
follow character—nativity, independence, individual-
ity”; “words are a result”27), Hester Prynne represents
the most radical challenge to American identity, a
thorough reconception of communal consciousness.
It is then the narrator’s task, as he reanimates Hester,
to see that she, like the Puritan judges, is allowed her
momentary radicalism and then contained as a cul-
tural secret.
Like those judges, Hester will stand for both a devas-
tating break in history and its reintegration into com-
munal knowledge as something entirely different, a
mythic vehicle for continuity between her world and
that of Hawthorne’s readers. All of this will be true,
however, only if the narrative can catch up with, even
outpace, the flowering interpretations of the letter on
Hester’s dress, and it is hardly clear that this will be
the case. Unlike the judges, then, Hester embarks on
a journey fraught with moments in which her extraor-
dinarily material tie to the American story allows (or
compels) her to elude the control of the narrative
frame surrounding her, including the fictional ro-
mance, Hawthorne’s own designs, and her reception
in culture. Hester is revolutionary: The question re-
mains, is she revolution as prelude to reform and con-
solidation, or revolution, defiant of all such cultural
uses? Placing her in context with her fellow revolu-
tionaries of legend, the regicide judges, may provide
an answer.
Notes
1. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 38. All subse-
quent quotations from the romance are identi-
fied parenthetically by page number as taken
from this edition.
2. As Evan Carton puts it, this is “the charged,
shifting, perilous, and anything but ‘neutral
territory’ of romance” (The Rhetoric of Ameri-
can Romance, 151).
HAWTHORNE
3. My understanding of the powers and dangers of
language within particular cultural formations is
informed by Mary Douglas’s Purity and Dan-
ger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution
and Taboo, 94-113. For a detailed account of
what Dennis E. Baron calls “Federal English,
an American language independent of its ori-
gins (though not necessarily cut off from them),
a language that could be planned to reflect the
peculiar American political, social, and cultural
genius, a language in which the laws and litera-
ture of the new nation could be inscribed,” see
his Grammar and Good taste: Reforming the
American Language, 7-67, passim. See also
Michael P. Kramer, Imagining Language in
America: From the Revolution to the Civil War,
and David Simpson, The Politics of American
English, 1776-1850.
4. E. P. Whipple, review of The House of the Seven
Gables, in Graham’s Magazine 38 (May 1851),
in Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage, ed. J.
Donald Crowley, 201.
5. Reynolds, European Revolutions and the Ameri-
can Literary Renaissance, 89.
6. Arac, “The Politics of The Scarlet Letter,” 258.
7. Reynolds, European Revolutions and the Ameri-
can Literary Renaissance, 96.
8. Arac, “The Politics of The Scarlet Letter,” 258,
259.
9. Ibid., 253. As Bercovitch points out, though,
this is not just a play on words: “It is no acci-
dent that Hawthorne would have connected the
revolutions abroad with his loss of tenure at the
Salem Custom House,” as many Democrats—
suddenly and with great surprise put out of
power by Polk’s loss in 1848—saw in the in-
surgent powers abroad figures for their native
opposition (The Offıce of the Scarlet Letter, 75).
10. Bercovitch, The Offıce of the Scarlet Letter, 87.
11. Here and throughout, my use of Bancroft is not
intended as a parallel to Hawthorne, but rather
as an example of a notable and dominant cul-
tural voice; Bancroft and Hawthorne share some
broad interests in the American past, but their
politics are different. As John P. McWilliams
has written, “Superficially, Hawthorne may re-
semble Bancroft in portraying the Revolution as
an expression of the Puritan temper, but where
Bancroft detects progress, Hawthorne detects
only restoration.” In Hawthorne’s work, as op-
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
posed to Bancroft’s, “acts of king resisting can
be valid types of the Revolution only if one ac-
knowledges the underside of Puritan character”
(Hawthorne, Melville, and the American Char-
acter, 77-78). For more on the complicated simi-
larities between these men of different political
temperaments, see Brook Thomas, “Citizen
Hester: The Scarlet Letter as Civic Myth,” 182-
83, and Sacvan Bercovitch, The Offıce of the
Scarlet Letter.
12. Bercovitch, The Offıce of the Scarlet Letter, 86.
13. As Reginald Horsman has shown, a central dif-
ference between the prehistory of Cooper’s
novel and the context of Hawthorne’s is one of
political mood. Horsman demonstrates that the
American chauvinism of the revolutionary era
is inherently “optimistic,” while America in
1850 was infused with a sense that its own “ide-
alistic mission had been corrupted” (Race and
Manifest Destiny, 300, 297).
14. Hutner, Secrets and Sympathy: Forms of Dis-
closure in Hawthorne’s Novels, 4.
15. Thomas, “Citizen Hester: The Scarlet Letter as
Civic Myth,” 181-211. In terms helpful to illu-
minating what I mean by revising national lan-
guage, Thomas argues, “The Scarlet Letter does
not so much reject civic notions of good citi-
zenship as question empty platitudes about them
while expanding our sense of what they can
entail.” Further, Thomas notes the troubling lim-
its of the efficacy of Hawthorne’s experiments
with language: “That expanded sense of good
citizenship is by no means sufficient to solve is-
sues of racial inequality” (201).
16. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations,
89.
17. In fact, such rhetoric of the new is shown to be
perhaps one of the most burdensome of Haw-
thorne’s inheritances. These quotations, from
Henry F. Chorley’s review of The Blithedale
Romance in the Athenaeum (July 10, 1852), in
Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage, ed. Crowley,
245, are representative of so many reviews of
nineteenth-century fiction and of that perceived
inheritance that, I argue, shapes Hawthorne’s
historical consciousness.
18. As Larry Reynolds has shown, “Hester’s ven-
tures into new areas of thought link her, signifi-
cantly, with the overthrow of governments” (Eu-
ropean Revolutions and the American Literary
Renaissance, 931).
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
19. The popularity of this legend (from the 1820s
through the 1850s especially, but also even fur-
ther into the nineteenth century) is noteworthy
and is not restricted to the United States. Cer-
tainly, as George Dekker points out, the legend
is a mythic type, recurrent in world literatures
(“the ancient topos of the national champion re-
divivus,” like “Charlemagne, Frederick Bar-
barossa, and especially King Arthur” [The
American Historical Romance, 137]).
Whether—as Dekker further argues (The Ameri-
can Historical Romance, 135)—the American
popularity of this tale stems from the legend’s
appearance in Walter Scott’s Peveril of the Peak
(1822), or whether it comes about from an in-
creased interest in native accounts of the early
Puritan era (I would argue that both forces are
at work, though my immediate concern is more
with the latter), it is true that the regicide tale
became one of the most popular historical
source legends for American fiction, poetry, and
drama during Hawthorne’s era. See for example
James Nelson Barker’s Superstition (1824),
Cooper’s Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish (1829), and
James McHenry’s Specter of the Forest (1823).
20. With Richard H. Millington, I would argue that
these recurrences are “returns with a difference”
and, further, that such a pattern leaves open cer-
tain radical possibilities. Millington argues,
“freedom is achieved not by acts of transcen-
dence but by acts of revision” (Practicing Ro-
mance: Narrative Form and Cultural Engage-
ment in Hawthorne’s Fiction, 59, 65).
The problem of assimilating recurrences is ex-
panded later with reference to Yuri M. Lotman’s
Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of
Culture.
21. Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 221.
22. As Brook Thomas argues, “Hester dramatizes
how important it is for the state to promote
spaces in which the capacity for sympathy can
be cultivated while simultaneously guarding
against the dangers of natural liberty. Thus, even
though Haster has no space within the civic
sphere, she, unlike Dimmesdale, helps to bring
about a possible structural realignment of Puri-
tan society by having it include what we can
call the nascent formation of an independent
civil society” (“Citizen Hester: The Scarlet Let-
ter as Civic Myth,” 197).
23. We might think of this dynamic as something
like the inverse of Marcel Mauss’s theory of
83
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THE SCARLET LETTER
the gift. Here, in accordance with Mauss’s
theory, the “gift” may be given in order to in-
debt the recipient to the giver. In tension with
this function, however, is the function that
eludes the giver’s control and turns the recipi-
ent from the object of action into potential
subject.
24. Hawthorne, “Main Street,” Tales and Sketches,
1047.
25. The parallels work reciprocally, too. Puritanism
here signifies foundation, of course, but also
disruption, by reference to Cromwell’s England.
The American revolution similarly has a pri-
mary symbolic quality of the disruptive, but
within American history has long been marked
as a continuity of independent spirit.
26. The dangers Hester poses are interestingly
analogous to those associated in her culture with
witchcraft (cf. Michel de Certeau, The Writing
of History, 244-68).
27. Whitman, An American Primer, 2, 8.
Bibliography
Arac, Jonathan. “The Politics of The Scarlet Letter.”
In Ideology and Classic American Literature. Sacvan
Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen, eds. New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1986, 247-66.
Bancroft, George. History of the United States, vol.
1. Boston: Little, Brown, 1882.
———. History of the United States, vol. 2., 14th ed.
Boston: Little, Brown, 1848.
Barker, James Nelson. The Tragedy of Superstition.
Philadelphia: A. R. Poole, 1826.
Baron, Dennis E. Grammar and Good Taste: Reform-
ing the American Language. New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1982.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and
Reflections. Hannah Arendt, ed. Harry Zohn, trans.
New York: Schocken Books, 1986.
Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Offıce of the Scarlet Letter.
Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1991.
Blumenberg, Hans. Work on Myth. Robert Wallace,
trans. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985.
Carton, Evan. The Rhetoric of American Romance.
Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1985.
HAWTHORNE
Certeau, Michel de. The Writing of History. Tom Con-
ley, trans. New York: Columbia University Press,
1988.
Cooper, James Fenimore. The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish.
Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1836.
Crowley, J. Donald, ed. Hawthorne: The Critical
Heritage. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970.
Dekker, George. The American Historical Romance.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of
the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Ark,
1988.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter, ed. Harry
Levin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960.
———. Tales and Sketches, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce.
New York: Library of America, 1982.
Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: The
Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981.
Hutner, Gordon. Secrets and Sympathy: Forms of
Disclosure in Hawthorne’s Novels. Athens: Univer-
sity of Georgia Press, 1988.
Kramer, Michael P. Imagining Language in America:
From the Revolution to the Civil War. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1992.
Lotman, Yuri M. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic
Theory of Culture. Umberto Eco, ed. Ann Shukman,
trans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: Form and Reason for Ex-
change in Archaic Societies. W. D. Halls, trans. Mary
Douglas, foreword. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990.
McWilliams, John P. Hawthorne, Melville, and the
American Character: A Looking-Glass Business. New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Millington, Richard H. Practicing Romance: Narra-
tive Form and Cultural Engagement in Hawthorne’s
Fiction. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1992.
Reynolds, Larry. European Revolutions and the
American Literary Renaissance. New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1988.
Scott, Walter. Peveril of the Peak. Edinburgh:
Archibald Constable, 1822.
Simpson, David. The Politics of American English,
1776-1850. New York: Oxford University Press,
1986.
84
(c) 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
Thomas, Brook. “Citizen Hester: The Scarlet Letter
as Civic Myth.” American Literary History 13, no. 2
(2001): 181-211.
Whitman, Walt. An American Primer. Facsimile ed.
Horace Traubel, ed. San Francisco: City Lights
Books, 1970.
Louis Auchincloss (essay date 2004)
SOURCE: Auchincloss, Louis. “The Scarlet Letter.” In
Hawthorne Revisited: Honoring the Bicentennial of the
Author’s Birth, edited by David Scribner, pp. 65-7. Lenox,
Mass.: Lenox Library Association, 2004.
[In the following essay, noted literary critic Auchincloss
suggests Hawthorne, as a result of his anxiety about a
perceived moral decline of society, offered an implicit
agreement with bygone Puritanical codes that viewed infi-
delity as an egregious sin worthy of severe punishment in
The Scarlet Letter.]
I suppose that one of the first things that strikes a
modern reader of The Scarlet Letter is that its adul-
terous heroine, Hester Prynne, would not be consid-
ered so much of a sinner today. Consider her story.
As a girl she is married off to a rich old man who is
actually deformed. She is taken to a bleak new world,
where her husband is captured by Indians and pre-
sumably lost forever, and she is left to her own de-
vices in a colony where she has neither relatives nor
friends. A beautiful young preacher, as silver-tongued
as he is spiritual, falls in love with her, and a child is
born of their guilty passion. If theirs were a sin, it
nonetheless created an immortal soul.
There was, at any rate, no question about its sinful-
ness in the minds of the leaders of the Massachusetts
Bay Colony in the fifth decade of the seventeenth
century. Hawthorne was perfectly clear about this.
Governor John Winthrop, who appears in the novel
to die and whose shroud is woven by the heroine, re-
corded in his diary the actual hanging of a man and
woman for adultery.
The woman proved very penitent and had deep ap-
prehension of the foulness of her sin. The man was
very much cast down for his sins, but was loath to
die and petitioned for his life, but they would not
grant it, though some of the magistrates questioned
whether adultery was death by God’s law. They were
both executed; and died very penitently, especially
the woman who had some comfortable hope of par-
don for her sin, and gave good exhortation to all
young maids to be obedient to their parents and to
take heed of evil company.
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
Yet Hawthorne found in these stern judges and
conscience-stricken adulterers the perfect laboratory
in which to study guilt. Sin and guilt were almost
synonymous in the Bay Colony; they fused to form
darkness in the heart of man. It did not so much mat-
ter what Hester had actually done, or whether the Pu-
ritans were right or wrong in condemning her, or
whether the faith of the colonists was valid or their
religion true. What Hawthorne is depicting is a hu-
man soul isolated from the crowd by an act deemed
foul and shameful by the community and hence by
the sinner. Hester accepts her shame not so much as
a judgment as a fact. It is hers; it is she, and she must
live with it, for it has made her what she is. It is this
existential element in the drama that makes it so close
to us today.
The theme, the era and the setting were all perfect
for Hawthorne’s peculiar literary genius. His other
three novels are very fine, but The Scarlet Letter is
his masterpiece. The dark forest running down to the
sea, dark as the sins of the settlers but dappled by
glimpses of brilliant sunshine, somehow evoking na-
ture’s wild freedom from the moral laws of man, the
grim righteousness of the Puritan elders, stern but
just by their own lights, the silent bitter loneliness of
the shame-accepting Hester, the demonic gaiety of
her exotic child, and the redemption of the wretched
Arthur Dimmesdale’s soul on fire, all make a kind of
literary grand opera of this superb work of art which
a reader may accept with delight and even with awe,
no matter how different a view he may hold of the
culpability of the heroine’s conduct. Call it a myth; a
myth speaks to any era. One would no more judge
Hester than Heathcliffe in Wuthering Heights.
But one can, of course, if one insists, go into the
question of what Hawthorne the individual, as op-
posed to Hawthorne the writer, thought of the guilt
of Hester and her minister. Did he share John Win-
throp’s view? Certainly not as to the rigor of the
penalty. But there can be little doubt that he believed
that theirs was a grave sin, despite all the mitigating
circumstances, and that their plan to flee the new
world to renew their love in Europe an equally dire
one. That the community overreacted in its scornful
and cruel treatment of Hester could in no way excuse
her in the eyes of her author, and it may be noted
that he always differentiates between the serious and
disciplined elders who condemned her to wear the
odious emblem of her offense and the vulgar mob
who pelted her with refuse. Indeed, he goes so far as
to imply that the change of mores in his own day
that had brought about a more casual view of marital
infidelity was a symptom of degeneration.
85
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THE SCARLET LETTER
Here is what he has to say about the public display
of Hester to the mob, adorned with her scarlet letter:
“The Scene was not without a mixture of awe, such
as must always invest the spectacle of guilt and
shame in a fellow-creature, before society shall have
grown corrupt enough to smile, instead of shuddering
at it.”
Yes, there was always that side of Hawthorne.
Lawrence Buell (essay date 2005)
SOURCE: Buell, Lawrence. “Hawthorne and the Problem
of ‘American’ Fiction: The Example of The Scarlet Letter.”
In Hawthorne and the Real: Bicentennial Essays, edited
by Millicent Bell, pp. 70-87. Columbus, Ohio: The Ohio
State University Press, 2005.
[In the following essay, Buell reviews critical perceptions
of both Hawthorne and his most famous work, The Scarlet
Letter, particularly with regard to their roles in the estab-
lishment of a uniquely American national literature.]
This essay is intended as a kind of contemporary
equivalent to Lionel Trilling’s (1964) landmark cen-
tennial assessment of changing conceptions of the
tenor of Hawthorne’s work.1 Trilling’s “Our Haw-
thorne” concentrated on a particular shift in critical
perception from the delicate ironist imaged by Henry
James to the troubled Kafka-esque Hawthorne de-
scribed by Herman Melville but not prevalent until
the twentieth century. Hawthorne emerges from this
analysis both as a moving target fascinating in and of
itself and as a barometer of changing dispensations
of critical inquiry (Trilling). Since Trilling wrote, the
variability and contestedness of the “essential” Haw-
thorne and his legacy, or legacies, have been further
underscored by such excellent influence/reception
studies as Richard Brodhead’s The School of Haw-
thorne (1986) and by a plethora of fictive reworkings
of his plots, particularly The Scarlet Letter. Not only
is the issue of what ought to count as “our” Haw-
thorne far more problematic now than it seemed in
1964. To reflect seriously about the issue through a
turn-of-the-twenty-first-century lens also requires en-
gaging the much vaster question of what ought to
count as “American” literary history. The case of
Hawthorne’s masterpiece demonstrates this
especially.
1
The Scarlet Letter holds a unique place in Anglo-
American literary history. It was the book that made
Hawthorne famous, his most incontestably “perfect”
HAWTHORNE
book, the book most crucial in establishing him as
the most consummate artist in American fiction be-
fore James. James was not alone in looking back
upon it as a landmark event in U.S. literary emer-
gence: “Something might at last be sent to Europe as
exquisite in quality as anything that had been re-
ceived” (James [1878] 1984, 403).
The Scarlet Letter’s exquisite self-circumscription
has been held against it as well. James thought it
lacked passion. New historicists have seen it as evad-
ing the slavery issue, or giving aid and comfort to a
conservative consensualism through some of the very
strategies of ambiguation that make it so aesthetically
resplendent (Arac 1986). Fault has been found with
the practice of making this text and/or “Hawthorne”
generally so central to the narrative U.S. literary his-
tory, as in Jane Tompkins’s argument that Haw-
thorne’s high critical reputation relative to the “scrib-
bling woman” he denigrated is an artifact of a
“dynastic cultural elite” (Tompkins 1985, 30).2 Yet
The Scarlet Letter will surely continue to be a key
reference point for U.S. literary history. It remains
the single most taught long work of premodern
American literature. Although far from being the ear-
liest U.S. novel of consequence, it is widely looked
upon as “the inaugural text of the indigenous canon”
(Gilmore 2003, 84). Were a vote taken among Ameri-
canist critics as to the first indisputable Anglo-
American classic in the genre, The Scarlet Letter
would almost surely win.
This status derives not just from its qualities as a
freestanding text but from its historical representation
and historical impact. Among major premodern U.S.
fictions, The Scarlet Letter comes closest to render-
ing a myth of national origins. It has also become a
masterplot for American writers, from Harold Fred-
eric (The Damnation of Theron Ware) and Henry
James to Toni Morrison (Beloved) and Bharati
Mukherjee (The Holder of the World). In this sense
James was prophetic in his explanation of why, in
addition to its craftsmanship, The Scarlet Letter
seemed “in the United States a literary event of the
first importance.” For “the best of it was that the thing
was absolutely American; it belonged to the soil, to
the air; it came out of the very heart of New Eng-
land” (James [1878] 1984, 402, 403).
Some have not found the connection between Ameri-
canness and Hawthornian romance so self-evident. In
a contentious essay as significant in its own way as
James’s assessment a decade later, novelist J. W. De-
Forest looked in vain for “The Great American
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
Novel” he wished to call into being. Hawthorne, “the
greatest of American imaginations,” was part of the
problem. His “personages” seemed to “belong to the
wide realm of art rather than to our nationality,” to
be “as probably natives of the furthest mountains of
Cathay or of the moon as of the United States of
America” (DeForest 1868, 28). This was actually
quite close to the view Hawthorne himself expressed
in his Preface to The House of the Seven Gables
(3):
The personages of the tale—though they give
themselves out to be of ancient stability and con-
siderable prominence—are really of the author’s
own making, or, at all events, of his own
mixing. . . . He would be glad, therefore, if . . .
the book may be read strictly as a Romance, hav-
ing a great deal more to do with the clouds over-
head than with any portion of the actual soil of
the County of Essex.
Of course, in this instance Hawthorne had a special
interest in distancing himself from actual personages
and locale (to ward off charges of libel), whereas
“The Custom-House” makes the opposite ap-
peal—to lococentricity and provincial antiquarian-
ism—under the guise of observing the law of literary
“propriety” that justifies an account of how the “au-
thentic” manuscript came into the author’s posses-
sion (4). Hawthorne scholarship has demonstrated the
accuracy of The Scarlet Letter’s historical geography
(Ryskamp 1959), and the uncanny correspondence of
its plot and two main protagonists with those of the
Antinomian Controversy (Colacurcio 1972). But
these meticulous historical readings also presuppose
a detached cosmopolitan intelligence. It wasn’t just a
dodge for Hawthorne to claim that Seven Gables
came from cloudland, nor was he concealing his de-
pendence on documentary sources in affirming of The
Scarlet Letter that, save for “the authenticity of the
outline,” he had allowed himself “nearly or altogether
as much license as if the facts had been entirely of
my own invention” (33).
Americanists, who constitute the overwhelming ma-
jority of Hawthorne scholars, have generally read
such disclaimers in the spirit of James rather than of
DeForest: as attempts to claim elbow room for ro-
mantic stylization without taking his protestations of
detachment from native place and history too
seriously. Even if Hawthorne invokes New England
and/or national ideology only to dismantle it, surely
the cultural reference point remains U.S.-ness, New
England-ness, post-Puritanness, antebellum ideologi-
cal ferment.
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
Lately, however, a more quizzical conception of The
Scarlet Letter’s investment in the national has begun
to emerge. “Underlying the primary attention given
to New England history in the novel,” has been de-
scried “a subsurface of English history that Haw-
thorne has carefully structured in order to examine
American Puritans within a framework larger than
the provincial boundaries of New England” (New-
berry 1987, 168). Again and again “residual attach-
ments to Old World culture and theology” seem to
“permeate the consciousness of these emigrant char-
acters” (Giles 1962, 178), making The Scarlet Letter
as much a text about cultural migration and diaspora
as a text about settlement, founding, and the Puritan
origins of national culture. Hester and Pearl seem
more like creatures of the author’s fascination with
the “Orient” than figures who belong in a Puritan co-
lonial setting (Luedtke 1989, 181-87). And what are
we to make of the oddity that a text so influential for
national letters as The Scarlet Letter should be so
tenuously affiliated, so tenuously committed in its
own cultural allegiances? We need to rethink once
more that penultimate flourish in “The Custom-
House,” “I am a citizen of somewhere else” (44).
The old, now widely discredited way of thinking
about such a remark only takes us back to American-
ness again: Hawthorne was declaring allegiance to
the romance mode because the cultural “thinness” of
the comparatively young, open country made impos-
sible the thick social representations of the novel.
From such fictions as his (and Cooper’s and
Melville’s and others), the distinctive shape of the
“American novel” took form.3 So it was once thought.
We can do better than that, better too than anti-
romance revisionist theory has done. To do so, at the
risk of seeming perverse I should like to start at the
very end of The Scarlet Letter and work back from
there.
The Scarlet Letter confirms its residual skepticism
about the possibility of radical breaks and new depar-
tures by ending with a glimpse of the spot where Hes-
ter Prynne is buried, next to the “old and sunken
grave” of Arthur Dimmesdale, with a space between
but a single tombstone marking both, those markings
worn by the weathering of two hundred years. “On
this simple slab of slate,
—as the curious investigator may still discern,
and perplex himself with the purport—there ap-
peared the semblance of an engraved escutcheon.
It bore a device, a herald’s wording of which
might serve for a motto and brief description of
our now concluded legend; so sombre is it, and
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THE SCARLET LETTER
relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light
gloomier than the shadow:—
“ON A FIELD SABLE, THE LETTER A,
GULES”
Well indeed might “the curious investigator” be per-
plexed, so encrypted is this passage. To be sure, there
is an obvious return-to-starting-point fitness to the
book’s ending: Chapter 1 mentions the cemetery, in
the same breath as the prison, as being among a co-
lonial government’s first allotments of space for pub-
lic use; and “The Custom-House” is suffused with
elegiac images of burial, exhumation, and mystified
musing à propos the musty packet containing the
“original narrative” of Surveyor Pue. But so strange
a return! What seems as if it ought to be a distinct
visual image cannot be visualized. The basic idea is
plain enough: a red letter against a black background.
But the rhetoric is teasingly oblique. The carving on
the gravestone is rendered neither quite as language
nor quite as picture, but via the arcane semiotics of
heraldry.
To be sure, it is typical of Hawthorne’s colonial tales
to proliferate emblematic schemata and instill a sense
of remoteness of past from present. They squint back
at quaint old tombstones, houses, furniture, and other
colonial artifacts from an immense aesthetic distance,
like Henry Thoreau prompted by an old painting of
seventeenth-century Concord to wonder whether real
people could truly have existed then. In this Haw-
thorne and Thoreau were both engaging in a familiar
ritual of romanticized gothicization of the Puritan
primordium and revealing themselves—more than
they let on—as children of the early industrial age,
the first generation to undergo what we now call fu-
ture shock. Yet The Scarlet Letter’s closing scene
feels alien even by that standard. Though identified
as a particular burying-ground, the colony’s first, it
feels more like an English graveyard than a New
England one, whose old slabs generally sported no
such adornments.4 Is the reader to assume the design
is the work of the grown-up Pearl, the new world’s
richest heiress long since resocialized into old-world
elegance? Might it also, or alternatively, be a potshot
at the rising interest in pedigree among northeastern
elite families as the nineteenth century unfolded?
(The New England Historic Genealogical Society, the
nation’s first such organization, had been founded
just five years before the novel’s publication.) In any
case, the inscription is atypical of standard colonial
and antebellum funerary design.
But I want to concentrate especially on a still more
occluded element: the intertextual palimpsest the he-
raldic reference creates. The text here recalls two
HAWTHORNE
passages by classic English writers that turn on the
symbolic contrast of sable and gules. One is the con-
cluding stanza of the English Puritan poet Andrew
Marvell’s “The Unfortunate Lover,” a weirdly con-
torted metaphysical lyric that dates from the approxi-
mate time of Hawthorne’s plot. The other is a pas-
sage from Walter Scott’s “Introduction” to Waverley,
the first in the series of fictionalized renderings of
Scottish history from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-
eighteenth century that secured his reputation as the
father of the historical romance, Hawthorne’s own
genre. Neither of these texts is unknown to Haw-
thorne criticism, but neither have they been much
discussed (cf. Gale 315, Stubbs 175-76).
This is the only Banneret
That ever Love created yet:
Who though, by the Malignant Starrs,
Forced to live in Storms and Warrs;
Yet dying leave a Perfume here,
And Musick within every Ear:
And he in Story only rules
In a Field Sable a Lover Gules.
(Marvell 1: 29)
[My story will emphasize] those passions com-
mon to men in all stages of society, and which
have alike agitated the human heart, whether it
throbbed under the steel corslet of the fifteenth
century, the brocaded coat of the eighteenth, or
the blue rock and white dimity waistcoat of the
present day. Upon these passions it is no doubt
true that the state of manners and laws casts a
necessary colouring; but the bearings, to use the
language of heraldry, remain the same. . . . The
wrath of our ancestors, for example, was colored
gules; it broke forth in acts of open and sangui-
nary violence against the objects of its fury. Our
malignant feelings, which must seek gratification
through more indirect channels, and undermine
the obstacles which they cannot openly bear
down, may be rather said to be tinctured sable.
But the deep-ruling impulse is the same in both
cases; and the proud peer who can now only ruin
his neighbor according to law, by protracted suits,
is the genuine descendant of the baron, who
wrapped the castle of his competitor in flames,
and knocked him on the head as he endeavoured
to escape from the conflagration. It is from the
great book of Nature, the same through a thou-
sand editions, whether of black-letter, or wire-
wove and hot-pressed, that I have venturously es-
sayed to read a chapter to the public.
(Scott 1901, 1:13-14)
We cannot be sure if Hawthorne had either passage
consciously in mind, though almost certainly he knew
them both. He was an attentive reader of Renaissance
allegorical poetry, and he read and reread Scott, “his
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
boyhood favorite among novelists” (Dekker 1987,
131), from youth until near his death.5 In any case,
the passages underscore fundamental implications of
the main plot: that love-longing is fulfilled in fantasy,
not in real life, and that ancient and modern forms of
deviance and oppression are nonidentical but akin.
Hawthorne’s romance fuses the discrepant sable-
gules polarities from the two pre-texts. Marvell and
Scott use heraldry to achieve a stylized diagnostic
control over very different passions. For Marvell, the
passion of love; for Scott, aggression. Marvell’s
sable/gules antithesis refers to violently conflicted
emotions within the lover, which can be resolved only
in a certain kind of idealizing story. Scott’s antithesis
is between different kinds of revenge. The Scarlet
Letter subsumes both antiheses within its dominant
polarity between the one passion and the other: love
versus patriarchal repression, whether exerted from
without or from within.
Would the author of The Scarlet Letter—supposing
him to have had these pre-texts in mind—have ex-
pected readers to catch the allusions? I suspect not,
seeing that a basic gestalt of some sort can be grasped
without perceiving the esoterica, although it piquantly
enhances the effect when you do. You’re bound to
feel a sense of the story of Hester and Dimmesdale
being converted into “legend” even if you remain
oblivious to the antecedent realms of legend—all the
more so given that the scene of graveyard pondering
was a stock memorial and literary device in the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries, Thomas Gray’s “El-
egy Written in a Country Churchyard” and the frame
narrative of Scott’s Old Mortality being familiar to
most middle-class readers of Hawthorne’s day.
To catch the two more deeply buried allusions helps
make better sense of the ending’s strangeness,
however. The injection of heraldry seems less freak-
ish, seems indeed a sophisticated preemption of tra-
dition by a mind steeped in the Anglo-European
inheritance. For Marvell, the device urbanely evokes
such courtly love topoi as the typical lover’s prover-
bial throes. Only in never-never land can he attain
the apotheosis of the banneret (knighthood on the
spot for valor in the field of battle). Abstraction un-
derscores the remoteness of the prospect. Scott’s in-
vocation of the topos is more complex, simulta-
neously bringing the past nearer and exoticizing the
bourgeois present by the parallel to bygone feudalism.
But here, too, the formal sable versus gules contrast
urbanely rises above and displaces the phenomenon
of aggression by rendering it as design. In The Scar-
let Letter, the two levels of signification merge (the
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
contortions of love and the aggressions of patriar-
chy), and on Scott’s complex terms, dramatizing a
counterpoint of opposition versus affinity between
the then and the now.
In so doing, Hawthorne and his precursors also em-
phasize something timeless, perennial, about their
stories. Costumes differ, emotions remain the same.
Marvell’s hapless wight is a perennial lover-loser.
The Scarlet Letter’s quiet affiliation with these texts
helps establish its story not just as a Puritan tale but
also as part and parcel of Euro-diasporic collective
memory stretching back to the Middle Ages. Haw-
thorne’s redeployment of the sable-gules schema is
no more hermetically American than filmmaker Akira
Kurosawa’s retelling of Shakespeare’s King Lear in
Ran is hermetically Japanese.
The more we start to think of Hawthorne in relation
to figures like Scott and Marvell, the less The Scar-
let Letter looks like a text firmly and unshakeably
embedded within a line of American descent from
Puritan history or as a critique of American Tran-
scendentalism or nineteenth-century American Victo-
rian moralism. The more it makes sense that the pre-
cursor to which Henry James thought to liken it was
Scottish writer John Gibson Lockhart’s Adam Blair
(1822), a novel of ministerial adultery in an old-world
puritanical culture. The more it begins to make sense
that the first rewriting of The Scarlet Letter was not
an American novel but George Eliot’s Adam Bede. It,
too, is a historical fiction that features a pair of illicit
lovers named Hester and Arthur, with an illegitimate
child—also in a provincial social context that intensi-
fies the mixture of guilt, suffering, and repression.
Why should not an English country town of the turn
of the nineteenth century be every bit as promising a
venue for a Hester-Arthur story as seventeenth-
century New England?
That is not the way the majority of Hawthorne schol-
ars, who are mostly Americanists, have been condi-
tioned to think about Hawthorne’s legacy. We are
much more inclined to think of Hawthorne in rela-
tion to William Faulkner or John Updike or Toni
Morrison than to compare him to George Eliot, even
though Eliot is on record as declaring Hawthorne “a
grand favorite of mine” (Eliot 1954-78, 2: 52). The
underlying assumption is that Hawthorne was a clas-
sic American writer chiefly of importance to “our”
literary history as an agent of U.S. literary emergence
and the propagation of distinctive strains in national
fiction thereafter.
With one side of his mind this was also how Haw-
thorne himself thought. He was attracted to the idea
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THE SCARLET LETTER
of writing “tales of my native land” (the working
title of an early, uncompleted project). He was one of
the several dozen antebellum New England authors
who answered lawyer-orator Rufus Choate’s call for
a series of New England-based fictions—in a lecture
given in Hawthorne’s native Salem, Massachusetts—
that would rival Scott’s Waverley novels (Choate
1852, 1: 319-46). Hawthorne was by far the most tal-
ented of the lot (Bell). Historically ordered, his colo-
nial tales together with his first three book-length ro-
mances constitute an episodic epic of New England
history from the first generation of settlement through
Transcendentalist communitarianism.
Yet with another side of his mind, Hawthorne
doubted whether a distinctively national fiction or
narrative was possible or even desirable. Much of his
late writing was devoted to the Anglo-American con-
nection and unfinished romances of ancestral linkage
and/or inheritance. His American masterpiece indi-
cates a hesitancy about the viability of the story of
an autonomous American history repeated soon after-
ward in seriocomic form in his last published histori-
cal tale, “Main-Street,” in which an earnest, voluble,
but self-undermining showman attempts to stage a
series of tableaux of colonial history to a marginally
invested audience of townsmen, only to break down
during the Great Snow of 1717 when his crude me-
chanical contrivance fails. So much for the patriotic
boosterism of Rufus Choate.
In The Scarlet Letter, likewise, the story of Hester
and Arthur is not shown as having any lasting Ameri-
can issue. The mother country is pictured wistfully as
a place of healthy vitality and merriment, the new
world of Puritan Boston seen as a diminished shad-
owland by contrast. “We have yet to learn again the
forgotten art of gaiety,” the narrator sighs (232) as he
describes the book’s one festive scene. “The
Custom-House” portrays a nineteenth-century
America already moribund. That this was an age of
unparalleled national expansion and economic growth
one could never tell from Hawthorne’s essay. The
author’s home town is in decay. The country doesn’t
seem to be going anywhere. That is perhaps the most
strikingly idiosyncratic aspect of this novel’s vision
of history: not its representation of Puritan nostalgia
for the mother country (for many Puritans did return
home, as Hawthorne would have known); not the
comparison between Puritan austerity and latter-day
lightening-up (already a cliché in Hawthorne’s day),
but rather the sense that the whole new world experi-
ment may be fizzling out. Two centuries of New Eng-
land history end in the anticlimax of the aptly named
Custom-House.
HAWTHORNE
This was not, of course, the biographical Hawthorne’s
full view of the matter. In other moods, George Dek-
ker usefully reminds us, “Hawthorne could argue ear-
nestly that the sadly imperfect liberal democracy nur-
tured in the United States, and especially in New
England, was the best hope of mankind” (Dekker
1987, 170). This may even have been his prevailing
view as a citizen. But it was not a view that Haw-
thorne could make prevail in either his fictive rendi-
tions of New England or in his history for children,
Grandfather’s Chair, neither of which manages to
draw the line between colonial New England and the
present-day national efflorescence that was axiomatic
to the likes of Choate and Daniel Webster, not to
mention the New England-dominated schoolbook in-
dustry of Hawthorne’s day. In The Scarlet Letter, the
one moment during either the introduction or the ro-
mance proper that the grand narrative is told with
any enthusiasm, it remains inaudible and suspect.
That is the point before the denouement when Dim-
mesdale sermonizes on the glorious destiny of New
England—a standard topic for ministers on certain
ceremonial occasions, then and (even more) in Haw-
thorne’s day. The Scarlet Letter makes sure to put
the reader at a great distance from this performance—
outside the church alongside Hester, who doesn’t
catch a word of it. All we know for sure is that Dim-
mesdale is in an abnormal and agitated state. His rap-
turous prophecy is not to be believed.
The skepticism Hawthorne generally evinces toward
historical pieties in both “The Custom-House” and
The Scarlet Letter has generally been explained in
Americanist terms. Lauren Berlant brilliantly reads
Hawthorne as offering “a counter-National Symbolic
marked by a hermeneutic of negativity and defamil-
iarization” (Berlant 1991, 34). Catherine Jones, in a
thoughtful comparative discussion of the uses of his-
tory and tradition in Hawthorne and Scott, sees in
Hawthorne a distinctly American tendency to disown
the past. (“The self-definition of America precludes
direct access to a continuous folk memory” [Jones
2000, 136].) There is much to be said for these views
of the case: the image of Hawthornian narrative prac-
tice as a process of wily skeptical negotiation within
certain forms of ideological blockage attendant upon
his inevitable embeddedness within his national
and/or regional culture at a particular point in time.
But we also need to question the prior assumption
that the most fruitful way to situate Hawthorne should
be in terms of his or his text’s standing as an “Ameri-
can” discourse, whether acquiescent or dissenting.
The cosmopolitanism of perspective that his histori-
cal fictions imply in the course of engaging in their
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
provincial struggles—as with The Scarlet Letter’s
glimpses backward to the motherland, or the intertex-
tual knot at the close—may indeed be so construed,
but it is hardly imperative so to construe them. Hes-
ter’s return to Boston to her old role as letter-wearer,
which Sacvan Bercovitch reads—thoughtfully, subtly,
learnedly—as an enactment of the national covenant
of consent (Bercovitch 1991),6 might also be con-
ceived as confirmation of the impoverished options
to which the decision to emigrate condemns one. The
old world past cannot be disowned in this romance
because the new world avatar is only a diminished
version of the old. The reduction of the protagonists
to ghosts of their former selves shows this plainly
enough. Dimmesdale “had come from one of the
great English universities, bringing all the learning of
the new age into our wild forest-land” (66). It’s all
downhill from there. Internalization of the provincial
thought police socializes him into such timidity that
Hester’s challenge in the forest (“[B]e a scholar and
a sage among the wisest and the most renowned of
the cultivated world. Preach! Write! Act!”) sickens
rather than invigorates him (198). Hester’s mind, by
contrast, expands to the point that she assumes “a
freedom of speculation, then common enough on the
other side of the Atlantic.” But by colonial Puritan
standards this is “a deadlier crime than that stigma-
tized by the scarlet letter” (164). In this brave new
world, what Hester has become cannot socially exist.
Despite the fact that The Scarlet Letter takes place
entirely on American soil, despite its attention to co-
lonial culture and institutions, despite its having been
written in the heyday of national expansion, it re-
mains at heart a diasporic rather than a nativized
imagination of place, in the sense that the standard of
cultural vitality remains transatlantic and colonial life
and culture by contrast diminished, underactualized,
and without issue—with characters, narrator, author
all self-consciously detached from the new world
place that is supposed to be their habitat.
As such, The Scarlet Letter seems less a reflection
on issues of national consensus and less a template
for narratives of American nationalization than a story
of transnational dislocation whose investment in is-
sues of nationhood is peripheral at best. To the extent
that we take it as a barometric indicator or reference
point for new world imagination, its closest affilia-
tions are narratives of rebuffed or imperfect assimila-
tion of a place conceived through unassimilated eyes
as alien ground, from the narratives of Mary Row-
landson and Olaudah Equiano to James’s The Euro-
peans to Cather’s O Pioneers! and Flannery
O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person” to Chang Rae
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
Lee’s Native Speaker and A Gesture Life. Like all
these texts and others like them, The Scarlet Letter
does not so much insinuate “Here is national fiction”
as pose the question: “Can there be such a thing?” or
“Why should there be?”
2 tale. That is why it is not utterly outrageous for the
Here, then, is the “problem of ‘American’ fiction”
The Scarlet Letter exemplifies and to which the title
of this essay alludes. The cultural work that The
Scarlet Letter has been made to perform is not quite
the work it undertakes to perform. The book is argu-
ably not an “American” performance so much as one
that critical and creative repossessions have by and
large tended to Americanize in ways that play down
its cosmopolitan and deracinated aspects. In this re-
spect, it is hardly unique among the canonical writ-
ings of our literary history. On the contrary, the larger
significance of belaboring the point at hand is pre-
cisely that it is exemplary of a much larger-scale fore-
shortening of vista. The foreshortening I have de-
scribed is akin to the centripetalism that leads
Americanists to claim Equiano as an “American”
writer or to block out the transnationalism of (say)
Melville’s account of business culture in “Bartleby
the Scrivener” (Why not Dickens? Why not Gogol?
Why not Joyce’s “Counterparts”?). The examples are
endless, especially for immigrant and expatriate
writing. But The Scarlet Letter is an especially im-
posing case, insofar as more than any other premod-
ern American novel it has come to stand as a point of
origin in the history of American literary-cultural
emergence and as a point of textual origin for later
artists. Few other novels have seemed for so many
critics so pivotal for the solidification of national his-
torical imagination.
Indeed, the sequence of American reinventions of
The Scarlet Letter plot from Frederic and James to
Updike and Mukherjee—the legacy of Hawthorne’s
masterpiece as a master-plot for national writers—
has unquestionably helped to create a solider sense
of national literary tradition than Hawthorne could
ever have felt. The ironic effect of this remarkable
success story is its tendency to distract one from how
desolidifying a text The Scarlet Letter is—although
the plethora of rewritings testifies to that, too. “Most
persons of ability,” Emerson remarks, “meet in soci-
ety with a kind of tacit appeal,” as if to imply “I am
not all there” (Emerson 1971-, 3: 127). The Scarlet
Letter imparts just such an impression through its
structural tightness, its laconic restraint of emotional
tone, and its oscillation of narrative judgment—sug-
gesting tortuous, self-conflicted operation within the
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THE SCARLET LETTER
reluctant confines of the mind’s own making. Among
the various explanations for the amount of exegesis
and reenactment that The Scarlet Letter has pro-
voked, one is that its uneasy, self-conscious narrato-
rial reticence invites second-guessing reappraisal and
active rewriting of the author’s version of his own
1990s Hollywood adaptation of The Scarlet Letter to
end with the Indians rescuing Hester, Dimmesdale,
and Pearl and burning down Boston. For the narrator
repeatedly emits signals to the effect that he might
wish that things could work out differently, even
though he fears they can’t and (in some moods, par-
ticularly near the end) agrees they shouldn’t.
One of the book’s early reviewers praised The Scar-
let Letter on just such grounds: for the author’s ethi-
cal restraint, allowing “his guilty parties to end, not
as his own fancy or his own benevolent sympathies
might dictate, but as the spiritual laws, lying back of
all persons dictated to him” (Whipple 346). Modern
readers have tended by contrast to long for a break-
away from the book’s self-imposed emotional/
ethical/ ideological confines—most especially as they
constrain its heroine. So Frederic I. Carpenter, in the
classic essay in this vein, assigns Hawthorne a grade
of A-minus for inability to get past “emotional” to
full “intellectual” realization of Hester’s potential for
“embodying the authentic American dream of free-
dom and independence in the new world” (Carpenter
1944, 180). Since the advent of critical feminist stud-
ies, debate around the general issue of whether the
narrative undercuts Hester has continued—at a far
higher level of sophistication—as in Nina Baym’s
defenses of The Scarlet Letter’s feminism (“Hester
has certainly changed the Puritans more than they
have changed her”) and David Leverenz’s critique of
its misogyny (Baym 1986, 29; cf. Baym 1976, 142-
51; Leverenz 1983). Even more variable have been
the fictive rewritings of Hester, such as Frederic’s
flirtatiously sophisticated Celia Madden; Faulkner’s
matriarch-victim Addie Bundren; Updike’s wily, self-
indulgent, misnamed Sarah Worth; and Mukherjee’s
picaresque world-traveling Hannah Easton. Read
them in a series, throw in for good measure the filmic
Hesters from Lilian Gish to Demi Moore, and well
might the curious interpreter perplex him or herself
with the question: “Whose Hawthorne?”
Even if one agrees that The Scarlet Letter is the kind
of text that provokes revision, it does not follow that
the revisions thereby provoked will question the le-
gitimacy of reading Hawthorne in Americanist terms.
Indeed, few of the just-mentioned texts do so. One
HAWTHORNE
that does, however, and with a metahistorical self-
consciousness whose perspicacity compensates for its
intervals of zany froth, is Mukherjee’s The Holder of
the World (1993). This novel is equally instructive
for its resistance to The Scarlet Letter’s status as a
founding document in the history of imagined nation-
ness and for the form in which it eventually succumbs
to a version of the temptation that it critiques in
Hawthorne.
The Holder of the World features a female latter-day
narrator, Beigh Masters, who, like Hawthorne, is a
skilled historian conscious of her family’s New Eng-
land antecedence, nominally engaged in money-
making (“asset management”) but overtaken—more
wholeleartedly than Surveyor Hawthorne—by an
identification with the novel’s primary Hester-figure,
Hannah. (Holder also features two other characters
provocatively named Hester.) This Hannah is not an
immigrant but a Massachusetts frontier child whose
widowed still-youthful mother deserts her during
King Philip’s War for the sake of her Indian lover.
Thus begins a picaresque plot that takes Hannah
through a Puritan girlhood in Salem, brief residence
in London, then to the original India—the obverse
transit from that of the Indo-American author. There
she becomes the mistress of the ruler of a Hindu state,
fleeing it after his death (which she unintentionally
helps bring about) at the hands of the Moghul em-
peror in order to return to New England with her un-
born child, predictably named Pearl. The shady
merchant-pirate who whisks her from Salem to Eng-
land to India is a blow-up of the swashbuckling sea
captain who makes a cameo appearance near the end
of The Scarlet Letter, contracting to take Hester,
Dimmesdale, and Pearl back to England. Hannah’s
marriage to Gabriel Legge, in order to escape stulti-
fying Salem, is one of several exploitations of The
Scarlet Letter’s fleeting glimpses of the wider, live-
lier world beyond—and behind—the infant colony.7
Hannah’s extrication from her stiff, monitorial Puri-
tan foster-parents does not save her from a series of
irksome domestic enclosures thereafter. But it makes
for a vertiginous and mind-expanding peripeteia
starkly different from The Scarlet Letter’s intense
confinement. Hawthorne multiculturalized, Haw-
thorne transnationalized, Hawthorne in technicolor.
Holder wants to put the New England experiment in
the global Anglophone context just barely visible in
Hawthorne’s text: to connect the remotest ends of
Empire, and dramatize in the process the hyperactive,
raffish fortuity of colonial enterprise, as against the
tightly regimented affair The Scarlet Letter
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
foregrounds. Significantly, two of the clues by means
of which the narrator reconstructs Hannah’s lifeline
are a youthful fantasy-sampler of “the uttermost
shore”—yes, like Hester Prynne, Hannah is deft with
the needle—and an Indian artist’s renditions of “the
Salem Bibi”: two happenstance mirror images of the
termini of the Anglophone world.
In all this one sees a more lighthearted version of
Carpenter’s judgmentalism: The Scarlet Letter lacked
the courage of its best convictions. Hawthorne
“sh[ied] away from the real story of the brave Salem
mother and her illegitimate daughter,” even though it
was Hannah’s “stories of the China and India trade”
that induced Hawthorne’s great-grandfather to be-
come the first of the clan to go to sea (Mukherjee
1993, 283-85). In applying her corrective, Mukher-
jee’s narrator far outdoes “The Custom-House”’s
ponderously whimsical anecdote of imagined recon-
nection with the past, when the surveyor puts the
moth-eaten letter to his chest and feels that strange,
unexpected pulsation of heat. With the aid of virtual
reality simulation software designed by her Indian
boyfriend, an MIT researcher, Beigh is transported
back to the moment Hannah and her servant-
companion Bhagmati (whom she has renamed Hester
after a childhood friend) are fleeing the emperor with
“the world’s most perfect diamond.” One-upping
Hawthorne, Beigh feels the diamond as it is handed
off by faltering Hannah to the fleeing Bhagmati/
Hester, feels herself mowed down by the sharpshoot-
er’s bullets that mortally wound Bhagmati, then feels
herself wield Bhagmati’s knife and “plunge the dia-
mond into the deepest part of me” (283). The boy-
friend’s program doesn’t get Beigh precisely where
she’d expected—into Hannah’s mind/body—but at
least she meets Hannah (virtually) face to face.
Given Holder’s insistence on deterritorializing Haw-
thorne, one of its most arresting moves is its Ameri-
canization of the denouement. Mukherjee’s Hester
and Pearl come back to New England to stay. What’s
more, they come back as proto-republican
libertarians. “‘We are Americans to freedom born!’
White Pearl and Black Pearl [their local nicknames]
were heard to mutter, the latter even in school.”
Holder here sets itself against Hawthorne’s “morbid
introspection into guilt and repression that many call
our greatest work. . . . He wrote,” she adds, “against
the fading of the light, the dying of the old program,
the distant memory of a shameful, heroic time,”
whereas this novel seeks to “bring alive the first let-
ter of an alphabet of hope and of horror stretching
out, and back to the uttermost shores” (285, 286).
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
This is intriguingly congruent with Colacurco’s and
Bercovitch’s diagnoses of a Hawthorne fascinated by
America’s Puritan origins—although Holder posits
a(n even) more culturally embedded Hawthorne and
arrives at the diagnosis through a very different route:
locating national beginnings in the experience of glo-
bal roaming rather than in the localized Puritan ex-
periment per se.
Holder might have given The Scarlet Letter more
credit for anticipatory resistance to Americanist-
centripetal historical criticism. For The Scarlet Let-
ter anticipates something of Mukherjee’s geocultural
plenitude at those moments when it pauses to wonder
whether “we perhaps exaggerate the gray or sable
tinge” of early Puritan manners, when, after all, these
“were native Englishmen, whose fathers had lived in
the sunny richness of the Elizabethan epoch; a time
when the life of England, viewed as one great mass,
would appear to have been as stately, magnificent,
and joyous, as the world has ever witnessed” (230).
Asides like this one show that the author was
aware—as was his heroine—that The Scarlet Let-
ter’s here and now was not the whole seventeenth-
century world, certainly not the whole Anglophone
world and indeed not even the whole world of early
Massachusetts settlement culture. Such passages are
calculated fissures in the seeming monolith, standing
invitations to tell this provincial tale differently if
one feels so moved. But nothing more than hints.
The Scarlet Letter finally leaves it to the curious in-
quirer to decide whether to read the book more as an
open secret (deliberately a fragment of all that it
knows might be said) or as a closed book (a reso-
lutely self-contained local tale “of human frailty and
sorrow” [48] notwithstanding whatever cracks and
fissures). The Holder of the World seems—too hast-
ily—to have presumed the latter intent, at least for
the purpose of establishing by contrast its own wider
geocultural horizon.
Mukherjee is not alone in this sort of rewriting. En-
glish novelist Christopher Bigbsy’s concurrent Hes-
ter (1994) is in some ways an even more de-centered
retelling than The Holder of the World. Its best ener-
gies are devoted to the in-England, voyage-over, and
pre-Scarlet Letter back-story of Hester’s involve-
ments with Chillingworth and Dimmesdale. Bigsby’s
elaboration of Hawthorne’s Hester’s memory-
snatches, on the scaffold, of her former family and
married life are comparable to Mukherjee’s exfolia-
tion of Hawthorne’s skipper into Gabriel Legge; and
the result is almost as much of a re-Englishing of
The Scarlet Letter as Adam Bede. The New England
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THE SCARLET LETTER
phase of the novel, particularly the recapitulation of
The Scarlet Letter plotline, is perfunctory by com-
parison to the earlier life and adventures of the three
principals. Holder of the World expends an even
smaller percentage of text than Hester on American
shores; but it is careful to begin in New England ini-
tially so as to make its protagonist an American origi-
nal whose idiosyncracies are brought out, broadened,
then returned home through globalization. The con-
trast makes sense in light of Mukherjee’s insistence
that “I am an American writer, in the American main-
stream, trying to extend it . . . I am not an Indian
writer, not an exile, not an expatriate. I am an immi-
grant” (Alam 1996, 11). So Holder of the World, rela-
tive to Hester, participates in the “Americanization”
of The Scarlet Letter, even as it critiques Hawthorne
for Yankee parochialism. Participates not only in the
sense that Holder finally becomes still another self-
identified American writer’s rewriting of an Ameri-
can classic, but also in that it strives to make its ver-
sion of The Scarlet Letter into an image of/reflection
on Americanness no less strenuously than do (say)
Updike or Berlant or Bercovitch in their own quite
different ways. So too with Toni Morrison’s Beloved,
whose reweaving of the tropes of the pariah-mother,
the elf-child, and remembered diaspora turned poten-
tial cul de sac constitute in its own way perhaps the
single most brilliant contemporary heterodox re-
Americanization of The Scarlet Letter plot, though
less to my purpose here since for Morrison The Scar-
let Letter is a secondary and more occluded pre-text.8
Altogether, the 500-year palimpsest from Marvell to
Mukherjee reviewed here shows, I hope, that the ab-
sorption of The Scarlet Letter as American discourse
makes cultural-historical sense, but that it is not the
only plausible outcome. The romance offers itself as
a portable archetype. “The Puritan community in The
Scarlet Letter,” as Baym declares, can be thought of
as “a symbol of society in general” (Baym 1976,
141). Solemn visitants to Hester’s grave who “on a
certain day still lay blood-red roses in the tangled
grass,” opines Bigsby’s narrator in similarly general-
izing fashion, “tell the story of a woman’s love and
of man’s capacity for good and ill” (Bigsby 1994,
186). England, New England, India, the essential
story is the same, one might argue. This is not to
deny the presence of cultural particularities. Berco-
vitch writes no less cogently that “Hawthorne ren-
dered Puritan intolerance more vividly than any other
historical novelist,” because “better than any other”
he understood the complexities of Puritanism “as an
interpretive community” (emphasis in original)—as
well as both the dead and living dimensions of that
HAWTHORNE
legacy for the nineteenth century (Bercovitch 1991,
48). But then again, insofar as Puritanism itself is di-
asporic, one might reply that Hawthorne’s chief glory
is of a transcultural kind: to have represented Puritan
doctrines “as an expression of an enduring states of
the human soul,” or to have rendered Puritanism
“lyrically, with a purity of intensity of focus which
makes it, for the time, inescapable” (Manning 1990,
181). And beyond that, insofar as the Puritan experi-
ment in Massachusetts was but a variant manifesta-
tion of the Anglophone diaspora generally, an experi-
ment itself fissiparous and pluriform, should not a
more sprawling and unglued diasporic rendition like
Mukherjee’s be prized, however fanciful at certain
points?
There is no end to such rumination. No end to the re-
interpretations and the retellings. After 150 years, it
is clear that the percolation effect of The Scarlet Let-
ter won’t diminish anytime soon, and with it the mul-
tiplication of possible Hawthornes. Lionel Trilling
anticipated this, though somewhat grudgingly. For
Trilling, some versions (the modernist) were undeni-
ably closer to the true Hawthorne than others
(James’s), and there seemed something wrong with
Hawthorne’s artistry “in the degree that he does not
dominate us” but leaves us with unresolved questions.
In closing, Trilling went so far as to blame Hawthorne
for instilling in readers the “sensation of having been
set at liberty. . . . We find ourselves at a loss and
uncertain in the charge of an artist so little concerned
to impose upon us the structure of his imagination.”
Yet in final qualification Trilling speculates that even
though “our judgment of Hawthorne may have to be
that he is not for today, or perhaps not even tomor-
row,” he may nonetheless, as Nietzsche remarks in
another context, be “one of the spirits of yesterday—
and the day after tomorrow” (Trilling 1964, 457).
Early-twenty-first-century postmodern transnational-
ism bears this speculation out. Today Hawthornian
indeterminacy (at the heart of James’s admiration for
Hawthorne’s delicacy, I think) is more in phase. No
longer does it seem necessary to posit, much less to
defend, an essential Hawthorne. We can feel more at
home with the kind of interpretative liberty The Scar-
let Letter invites, even while holding its narration un-
der restraint.
The particular form of liberty for which this essay
has argued, is willingness to suspend, even if not to
scrap, the assumption that The Scarlet Letter must
be read as a symptomatically “American” tale, as a
cornerstone of “American literature.” It can, of
course, be so read. It will continue to be so read. But
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
it is neither necessary nor desirable that it should in-
evitably be so read. And if it is to be so read, it should
be in consciousness of the extraterritorial circles of
discourse, history, and migration lurking—often un-
seen by Americanist eyes—in such underexplored
portions of the text as the encrypted closing allu-
sions, and elaborated in transnational readings and
repossessions of Hawthorne of the past dozen years
or so. Reimagining in such terms a text like The
Scarlet Letter—so salient and durable a cornerstone
in the organization of Americanist thinking about na-
tional narrative imagination—might go a long way
toward a more expansive understanding of how
“American” narratives actually do take form and
work.
Notes
1. For preparation of this essay I am grateful to
Jared Hickman.
2. It is important to stress that Tompkins does not
deny the excellence of Hawthorne or The Scar-
let Letter; her concern is rather to demonstrate
the contingency as against the inevitability of
what counts as literary merit. As such she pro-
vides a more self-consciously theoretical ac-
count than Trilling does—though by no means
the only possibly account—of the instability of
what counts as “our Hawthorne.”
3. The first comprehensive critical formulation of
the romance-as-American-fictional-difference
hypothesis was Chase. The most influential at-
tack has been Baym (1976, 1981). The two most
significant recent attempts at reviving a more
critically scrupulous version of the romance hy-
pothesis, in both of which Hawthorne figures
significantly, are Budick and Thompson/Link.
4. An earlier scene, however, offers a glimpse of
Pearl skipping among the tombstones of the
same burying ground, stopping to dance upon
“the broad, flat, armorial tombstone of a de-
parted worthy,—perhaps of Isaac Johnson him-
self,” the lot’s first owner.
5. Hawthorne wrote his sister Elizabeth in 1820
that he had read all of Scott’s books except for
Lord of the Isles (Letters, 1813-1843, 132). His
son Julian Hawthorne remembered his father
reading aloud to the family “the whole of Walter
Scott’s novels” a few years before his death (J.
Hawthorne 2: 9).
6. Like Berlant’s serendipitously concurrent study,
Bercovitch argues that “Hawthorne sought to
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
rise above [party] politics not by escaping his-
tory, but by representing it ironically” (Berco-
vitch 1991, 107).
7. Of the several critical discussions of Mukherjee
as a reviser of Hawthorne, the most helpfully
informative and satisfyingly complex to my
mind is Newman, although I disagree with its
argument that the novel attempts a “deconstruc-
tion” of new historicism.
8. For published discussions of Hawthorne-
Morrison, see especially Stryz. I am especially
indebted, however, to a comparative study still
in ms. by C. Namwali Serpell, “Ghostly Secrecy
and Palimpsest Secrecy.”
Works Cited
Baym, Nina. The Shape of Hawthorne’s Career.
Ithaca,N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976.
———. “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theo-
ries of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors.”
American Quarterly 33 (1981): 123-39.
Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Offıce of “The Scarlet
Letter.” Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1991.
Berlant, Lauren. “Fantasies of Utopia in The
Blithedale Romance.” American Literary History 1
(1989): 30-62.
———. The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Haw-
thorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life. Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1991.
Budick, Emily Miller. “The World as Specter: Haw-
thorne’s Historical Art.” PMLA 101 (1986): 218-32.
———. Engendering Romance: Women Writers and
the Hawthorne Tradition, 1850-1990. New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994.
Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its
Tradition. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday and Co.,
Inc., 1957.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Vol. 1. The
Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel
Hawthorne. Ed. William Charvat, Roy Harvey
Pearce, and Claude M. Simpson. Columbus: The
Ohio State University Press, 1962.
———. The House of the Seven Gables. Vol. 2. The
Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel
Hawthorne. Ed. William Charvat, Roy Harvey
Pearce, and Claude M. Simpson. Columbus: The
Ohio State University Press, 1965.
95
(c) 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
THE SCARLET LETTER
Stryz, Jan. “The Other Ghost in Beloved: The Specter
of The Scarlet Letter.” In The New Romanticism: A
Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Everhard Alsen,
137-57. New York: Garland, 2001.
Thompson, G. R., and Eric Carl Link. Neutral
Ground: New Traditionalism and the American Ro-
mance Controversy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1999.
Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural
Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985.
Trilling, Lionel. “Our Hawthorne.” In Hawthorne
Centenary Essays. Ed. Roy Harvey Pearce, 429-58.
Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1964.
Clark Davis (essay date 2005)
SOURCE: Davis, Clark. “Ethics and the Face: Hawthorne
and Levinas.” In Hawthorne’s Shyness: Ethics, Politics,
and the Question of Engagement, pp. 53-73. Baltimore,
Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
[In the following essay, Davis utilizes the theories of phi-
losopher Emmanuel Levinas for an exploration of Haw-
thorne’s “veiled” fiction, including The Scarlet Letter.]
To speak of Hawthorne and ethics has probably never
been easy. Any author who so clearly declares his
own disengagement, his “childish” retreat into moon-
lit fantasies, is either genuinely uninterested in
worldly behavior or is so completely interested that
he insists on highlighting the problematics of
engagement. In recent years, this subdivision of the
so-called Hawthorne problem has grown in complex-
ity owing in large part to the dominance of revision-
ist political criticism. In a theoretical period deeply
concerned with worldly engagement, as ours is, au-
thorial strategies that rely on withdrawal or “veiling”
(for which Hawthorne is famous) can seem irrespon-
sible, otherworldly, and potentially evasive of ethical
concern. Accordingly, some readers have chided
Hawthorne for failures to commit himself linguisti-
cally, personally, or politically to direct or “correct”
action in the material world. Jonathan Arac, for ex-
ample, argues that Hawthorne established “indetermi-
nacy” as an excuse or as protection from direct ac-
tion: “Hawthorne’s derealizing style represents
objects so that we doubt their reality, yet while thus
questioning what offers itself as our world, he refuses
to commit himself to the authenticity of any other
world or way of seeing.”1 Criticizing at once Haw-
thorne’s aesthetic strategy, the “hermeneutics of inde-
terminacy” in “current criticism,” and the “politics of
HAWTHORNE
Freudian compromise-formation,” Arac suggests that
Hawthorne’s failure to advocate active opposition to
slavery undermines the ethical content of his work
by exposing a connection between aesthetic with-
drawal and inaction.2
This line of argument is opposed by critics such as
Emily Miller Budick, who, like Kenneth Dauber in
The Idea of Authorship in America, argues that sepa-
ration, the freedom to turn away, is a necessary con-
dition for commitment. Citing Cavell’s description of
Emerson’s “aversive thinking,” Budick underscores
the necessary relationship between skepticism and re-
sponsibility: “Aversive thinking, by preserving the
force of both metaphysical and linguistic skepticism,
compels readers and writers, listeners and speakers,
to take responsibility for their words.”3 A similar no-
tion, without direct reference to Cavell, is put forth
by Dauber: “And yet the hard truth which Hawthorne
is asking his readers to face is that, despite any long-
ings to the contrary, they must take the passage at
‘face’ value precisely. It is in the difficulties the pas-
sage raises, not in resolving them, that Hawthorne
exists. Or better, if he appears to conceal himself in
the face he puts on, then as one declaring his con-
cealment exactly, he takes responsibility for himself
all the more.”4 In this sense, the ethical basis of Haw-
thorne’s work, as these readers describe it, rests upon
an acknowledgment of otherness, an insistence upon
separation as a precondition for any sort of meaning-
ful connection. To conceive the relationship in differ-
ent terms, as simple “commitment,” for instance,
raises the possibility of compromising the autonomy
of that to which one commits. The appropriative
grasp of thinking, even if understood as a provisional
agreement on an “authentic” reality, reduces other-
ness to an idea; it transforms the other by replacing it
within a totality. That Hawthorne at times resisted
such “custom house” reductions and cherished the re-
sistance of experience to systematic thought is clearly
evident; that this resistance is the basis for the ethical
function of his work may be more difficult for cur-
rent readers to accept.
The introductory sketch that Hawthorne called “The
Old Manse” offers a clear starting point. How are
we to take so blatant a refusal of the intimacy read-
ers commonly seek?
Has the reader gone wandering, hand in hand with
me, through the inner passages of my being, and
have we groped together into all its chambers,
and examined their treasures or their rubbish? Not
so. We have been standing on the green sward,
but just within the cavern’s mouth, where the
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
common sunshine is free to penetrate, and where
every footstep is therefore free to come. I have
appealed to no sentiment or sensibilities, save
such as are diffused among us all. So far as I am
a man of really individual attributes, I veil my
face; nor am I, nor have ever been, one of those
supremely hospitable people, who serve up their
own hearts delicately fried, with brain-sauce, as a
tidbit for their beloved public.
(CE, 10: 32-33)
This famous step back echoes the similarly defensive
letter to Sophia Peabody in which Hawthorne tells
his fiancée that only God, an angel, or “any mortal
. . . capable of full sympathy” can “come into [his]
depths” (CE, 15: 612). There he calls his attitude an
“involuntary reserve” and insists upon his distance
from all readers, both of his “heart” and of his fiction.
He “veils his face” to his individual peculiarities, dis-
cussing only general characteristics shared by all. In
other words, he insists upon his own ability to with-
draw from the presence of the reader/other at the
same time that he remains in that presence as “objec-
tive” author. He seeks both connection and separa-
tion and uses his fiction at least in part as a means to
realize this double desire.
In Totality and Infinity Levinas describes the “face”
as “the way in which the other presents himself, ex-
ceeding the idea of the other in me” (50, original
emphasis). The face is a “mode” that, like the idea of
infinity, overflows its own limits, becoming “expres-
sion” (51). What he designates the “face to face” is
thus a confrontation between self and other that ex-
ceeds thought and yet initiates “discourse,” “the rela-
tionship of language”: “The relationship of language
implies transcendence, radical separation, the strange-
ness of the interlocutors, the revelation of the other
to me. In other words, language is spoken where
community between the terms of the relationship is
wanting, where the common plane is wanting or is
yet to be constituted. It takes place in this
transcendence. Discourse is thus the experience of
something absolutely foreign, a pure ‘knowledge’ or
‘experience,’ a traumatism of astonishment” (73,
original emphases). This astonishment might be
thought of simply as unpredictability, the freedom of
others to speak beyond the thematic limits imposed
upon them. Such a situation requires a recognition of
the self’s vulnerability, its inability to extend through
the exterior world. The ego is “put into question” un-
der a prohibition that is fundamentally ethical: “The
reason for this is relatively simple: the Other makes
me realize that I share the world, that it is not my
unique possession. . . . The Other puts me into ques-
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
tion by revealing to me that my powers and freedom
are limited. But the face does not annihilate the self;
on the contrary, it is the condition of its separateness.
It instigates dialogue, teaching, and hence reason, so-
ciety and ethics. It also gives a proper foundation to
freedom. The transcendental Ego would like to be
the sole source of its own knowledge, actions and
meanings; the encounter with the Other shows such
freedom to be egotistical, arbitrary and unjustified.”5
This relationship suggests a choice between an ille-
gitimate self-extension and an intentional withdrawal
that recognizes the demand of otherness—the choice
between “knowledge” and “respect,” between “grasp-
ing” and “welcoming.”6
What then does Hawthorne mean when he tells read-
ers of “The Old Manse” that he veils his face?
Clearly, he is not, like Mr. Hooper of “The Minis-
ter’s Black Veil,” walking around Concord with a
“piece of crape” over his eyes. Perhaps he is simply
withholding personal information, private details. In
this reading, “face” would refer to a set of facts or
feelings associated with the private self. And yet, the
face itself is the site of public identity, the set of fea-
tures that determines the public self, what one shows
to the world. So Hawthorne chooses an image of pub-
lic or external identity to figure the private or internal
self. He then offers to “veil” that public/private self
by presumably withholding one set of information
and simultaneously offering another. In this way
“veiling” is not so much hiding one’s “face” with a
blank mask as it is refusing to show one face by
showing another in its place. And what is this other
“face” but the “veil” itself, the “sentiment or sensi-
bilities . . . diffused among us all.” Thus, when Haw-
thorne “veils his face” he is assuming the general
characteristics of human personality; he is displacing
his private self in order to receive and perceive the
thoughts and feelings of others.
This ability to take on common attribute, to be “ob-
jective,” does not imply special knowledge of the
private selves of others. Hawthorne’s “involuntary
reserve” is an epistemological position that contains
an awareness of both the limits of knowledge and the
limitations on the aggressive understanding of the
artist. “Veiling” then can be seen as a way of ex-
pressing an understanding of such limits, of the dis-
tance between author and audience. To “veil the face”
is to acknowledge the otherness of the world, to see
one’s separation from it and one’s connection to it as
a product not of knowledge but of the sympathy made
possible through withdrawal. In this respect, Haw-
thorne’s artistic choice to “veil his face” stands on
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THE SCARLET LETTER
the same ground, oddly enough, as Levinas’s philo-
sophical injunction to come “face to face” with
otherness. Face to face implies a revelation based
upon withdrawal, an approach to otherness made pos-
sible only by the surrender of attempts at knowledge.
“FACE TO FACE” WITH HOOPER: “THE
MINISTER’S BLACK VEIL”
In addition to Hawthorne’s representations of his own
“self-veiling,” there are well-known and much-
discussed instances of veils and veiling in his fiction,
the most famous of which is clearly “The Minister’s
Black Veil.” The story has attracted an astonishing
number and variety of readings, including unusually
lengthy accounts from Michael Colacurcio and J. Hil-
lis Miller.7 Despite this abundant response, those
wishing to understand how Hawthorne’s “self-
veiling” relates to Mr. Hooper’s donning of a “piece
of black crape” may find that significant questions
remain—not so much unanswered as answered in
ways that deserve further consideration.
Colacurcio’s historicist reading attempts to cover ev-
ery angle, including both general context (the Great
Awakening) and specific reference (Hooper gathers
John Hooper, Thomas Hooker, and William Cooper).
Colacurcio examines the romantic interest in “sor-
row” and weighs it in the story’s scales against the
Puritan “true sight of sin,” concluding at the end of
some seventy pages that the story’s author is prob-
ably not a Puritan sympathizer but something like a
pragmatist:
Surely Hawthorne knew—as sorrowfully as any
seventeenth-century Puritan—that the “self” was
“the very figure or type of Hell.” He might even
accept, more tentatively, a whole class of Puritan
propositions about Sin and the Self. But in his
view the last thing anybody should have to en-
dure was a whole life looking at (or for) that self.
The thing might not, in itself, even exist; and even
if it did, it never could be adequately expressed.
No one can show forth his inmost heart. But can-
not one show his face? The literal face will be, of
course, partially deceptive: a parson will smile
and smile and be a sinner still. . . . But the alter-
native turns out to be worse: the symbolic veil
will always be destructive of available commu-
nity; it will continuously heighten and feature
what cannot be overcome. Better not wear it. Bet-
ter do what one can.8
Colacurcio describes a Hawthorne potentially sympa-
thetic to the pragmatic turn of William James: “Our
account of truth is an account of truths in the plural,
of processes of leading, realized in rebus, and having
HAWTHORNE
only this quality in common, that they pay.”9 The
tone in James’s Pragmatism may be a good deal less
anguished, but the surrender of ultimate knowledge
(whether of truth or self) that Colacurcio depicts rests
upon the same basic contention: Knowledge should
be restricted to what is knowable; the search for ulti-
mate truths is futile and self-destructive.
For Miller, on the other hand, Hawthorne is less the
pragmatist than the deconstructor, a connoisseur of
conceptual vertigo. “The Minister’s Black Veil,”
Miller argues, is a story designed at least in part to
“unveil” the “ideology of unveiling.”10 This ideology
is precisely the trap of seeing everything on the sur-
face as a deception, a mask, so that truth is hidden
forever or at least until the apocalypse. Referring to
the story’s final scene, Miller explains that “the most
disquieting effect of Hooper’s veil, as the story makes
clear in Hooper’s last speech, is to show the face it-
self as already an impenetrable veil. A veiled face is
a veil over a veil, a veiling of what is already veiled”
(ibid., 100). Rather than pragmatically refusing such
conceptual hazards, Miller’s Hawthorne, like Miller
himself, both criticizes and participates in such
thinking. As the deconstructive position would have
it, the ideology of the veil can be exposed only from
within that ideology: “Have I not . . . through an in-
eluctable compulsion, unavoidably used as the ‘tool’
of reading the very thing I have most wanted to put
into question, just that ideology of apocalypse with
its associated figure of the veil and prosopopoiea?”
(123).
Despite their exhaustive attentions, these two read-
ings continuously beg a central question: How close
is Hawthorne to Hooper? For Colacurcio the distance
appears to be substantial; in order to demonstrate the
practical failure of Hooper’s ideology, Hawthorne
cannot afford to disappear into Hooper. From a prag-
matic perspective, Hooper is mistaken or mad, and
even if we sense some sympathy in the presentation,
Hawthorne ultimately turns away from Hooper’s self-
imposed “death” toward the uncertainties of
preapocalyptic existence. Miller’s reading suggests a
much closer relationship, not full identity but a like-
ness so near that what he calls the “story’s” horror
and Hooper’s darkened vision become very nearly
the same. Hooper’s point, that faces are veils and
“unveiling” an earthly impossibility, feeds the story’s
argument that the “ideology of unveiling” must be
“unveiled.” Hawthorne may be aware of the prob-
lems of his minister’s position, but as a self-conscious
critic of such thinking, he is also aware that he shares
those problems.11
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
Given these possible relationships, where does the
“self-veiling” Hawthorne of “The Old Manse”
stand? If, as I have argued, the “self-veiling” he de-
scribes is an expression of epistemological and ethi-
cal distance, how does this stance relate to Hooper’s
self-veiling and its possible purposes? For Hooper
the veil has both positive and negative results. It
makes him a more effective minister, gives him
greater sympathy with sinners and “all dark affec-
tions,” and makes him a well-known if somewhat
suspect religious leader. On the other hand, it divides
him from the community, ruins his engagement and
potential family life, and leaves him gloomy and pos-
sibly deranged. This double effect suggests that
Hooper may be Hawthorne’s stand-in, the isolated
artist who participates in communal life but only from
behind a protective mask. And yet Hooper’s veil is
also the veil of a Calvinist and as such implies an at-
titude toward knowledge and otherness difficult if not
impossible to ascribe to Hawthorne. Hooper’s veil
and its attendant theology depend upon the Calvinist
understanding of history as it is reflected in predesti-
nation and apocalypse. In this sense Hooper’s history
is already written, already complete. There can be no
actual mystery in his world because all answers ex-
ist; even his own uncertain fate (salvation or damna-
tion) has already been decided and, in this sense, is
already certain. Answers exist for Hooper in a system
“solved” to its last degree; the veil, while it divides
in life, implies a unification in death and apocalypse,
where all deception vanishes in the face of a single,
knowable truth—a single history.
While Hawthorne’s “self-veiling” produces some of
the same effects that Hooper’s veil creates, the differ-
ence in philosophical context undermines any easy
similarities. In terms of sympathy, for instance, both
appear to rely upon separation to enable a sympa-
thetic response to others. However, Hooper’s sympa-
thy is not an “involuntary reserve” that allows him to
see “what is common to human nature.” Instead, the
veil creates an “awful power, over souls that were in
agony for sin. . . . Its gloom, indeed, enabled him
to sympathize with all dark affections” (CE, 10:104).
Hooper’s sympathy is for sin or darkness, for the
hidden truth beneath the veil of secular history. In
this sense it is less the sort of sympathy Hawthorne
describes than it is an effect of what Hooper treats as
absolute knowledge. The truth of Calvinist history is
the sinfulness of humankind and its eventual redemp-
tion or damnation. As Hooper says at the end of the
story, everyone sins and everyone hides it; therefore,
the truth of every individual is hidden behind a false
front, and every individual can and will be reduced
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
to that hidden truth at the apocalypse. Hooper’s smile
reinforces this perception. Described as “sad” and
“faint,” it not only suggests an ironic perception of
his isolation but also reflects the voyeur’s privileged
position. It is a knowing smile, and while the knowl-
edge may be painful to Hooper, it is also satisfying.
Like that of his counterpart, Wakefield, his smile sug-
gests “craftiness,” not so much a tendency to play
tricks as a desire to adopt the privilege of secret
knowledge.
In contrast, Hawthorne tells Sophia Peabody that his
resistance to self-exposure is not due to “caprice or
stubbornness” or to “a love of secrecy and darkness”
(CE, 15:612) but follows instead from an understand-
ing of how knowledge, especially knowledge of oth-
ers, is limited. Only “full sympathy” enables another
to “come into [his] depths,” and even this fullness is
not necessarily the same as the complete knowledge
ascribed to God or angels. As a Calvinist with a spe-
cial insight into sin, Hooper believes that he does or
will have complete knowledge of others; as a roman-
tic influenced by the “noble doubt” of skepticism,
Hawthorne suggests that “full sympathy,” not knowl-
edge, is the best that any “mortal” can do.12 The self
and other are mysteries that resist definition and
limitation. They will not and should not be “pinned
down.”
The story’s most important scene in terms of this
contrast is the encounter between Hooper and his fi-
ancée, Elizabeth. It is important first because Eliza-
beth presents an alternative to Hooper’s apocalyptic
thinking:
“Have patience with me, Elizabeth!” cried he
passionately. “Do not desert me, though this veil
must be between us here on earth. Be mine, and
hereafter there shall be no veil over my face, no
darkness between our souls! It is but a mortal
veil—it is not for eternity! Oh! you know not how
lonely I am, and how frightened to be alone be-
hind my black veil. Do not leave me in this mis-
erable obscurity for ever!”
“Lift the veil but once, and look me in the face,”
said she.
“Never! It cannot be!” replied Mr. Hooper.
“Then, farewell!” said Elizabeth.
(CE, 9:47)
Hooper bases his plea on Elizabeth’s “patience” for
the apocalypse. The present, he implies, is false;
therefore, she should be able to devalue the physical
world in favor of the spiritual truth to come. But
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THE SCARLET LETTER
Elizabeth insists upon Hooper’s physical presence in
or through his face. She does not ask for truth or cer-
tainty, only presence and language with all the uncer-
tainty that accompanies them. “First lay aside your
black veil: then tell me why you put it on” (CE,
10:46). First join me on an equal footing where we
both realize how difficult it is to know ourselves and
others; then talk to me. Her position may not be fully
expressed, but it is fully implied by contrast to
Hooper’s. “‘No,’ she said aloud, and smiling, ‘there
is nothing terrible in this piece of crape, except that
it hides a face which I am always glad to look upon’”
(CE, 10:46). A face that she is “always glad to look
upon” is not a mask that hides spiritual truth through
potential hypocrisy. It is the experience itself, with-
out pretensions to the secret knowledge or penetra-
tion that Hooper’s conception demands.13 In this sense
Elizabeth comes closer to Hawthorne’s sense of “self-
veiling” than does Hooper. Her request to see the
face is, ironically, more accepting of mystery than is
Hooper’s insistence that she wait until the apocalypse
to see his “true face.”
It is also useful in this regard to contrast Elizabeth’s
attitude toward what Miller identifies as the story’s
central horror—the perception that the face is already
a veil. For Hooper such an insight prompts the as-
sumption of the “two folds of crape”; that is, it pushes
him to “reveal” the horror of the face as veil in order
to restate his faith in apocalyptic truth. For Elizabeth
such a perception is not necessarily horrific as long
as she can “face” Hooper on equal terms. “‘Lift the
veil but once, and look me in the face,’ said she”
(CE, 9:47). Hooper’s veil terrifies her only when she
surrenders to his ultimate refusal to enter into the un-
certainty of earthly knowledge, his refusal of the
skeptical acceptance of otherness.
But while Elizabeth may be the romantic alternative
to Hooper’s Calvinism, that alternative does not suc-
ceed within the story. In what can be read as a tragic
loss, Hooper’s apocalyptic thinking overcomes Eliza-
beth’s desire for equality and acknowledgment, even
to the point that she is forced to cover her eyes as
she leaves the room. She succumbs to Hooper’s con-
ception of the world and, at the same time, to the
Calvinist vision of history. As we will see in Part
Three of this study, the moment is similar to the en-
counter between Holgrave and Phoebe in The House
of the Seven Gables. There Holgrave refuses to take
his revenge and so reduce Phoebe to playing a part
in the history of guilt. His “withdrawal” from the
moment suggests a momentary transcendence of (Cal-
vinist) history similar to what Elizabeth offers to
HAWTHORNE
Hooper. Unlike Phoebe, however, Elizabeth assumes
her own mask because she is “mesmerized” by
Hooper and so reduced to his “totalized” vision of
history.
The failure of acknowledgment in this case suggests
that Hawthorne placed himself somewhere between
Hooper and Elizabeth, aware of the need for a “veil”
but suspicious of the assumption of masks: “An es-
say on the misery of being always under a mask. A
veil may be needful, but never a mask. Instances of
people who wear masks in all classes of society, and
never take them off even in the most familiar mo-
ments, though sometimes they may chance to slip
aside” (CE, 8:23). This notation in Hawthorne’s jour-
nal not only records the germ of “The Minister’s
Black Veil” but it also establishes a crucial distinc-
tion between a veil and a mask. In this case Haw-
thorne appears to use both terms as figures for differ-
ent attitudes toward the exterior world. To wear a
mask is to hide, to be cut off from the world and
therefore miserable. The veil, on the other hand, here
implies some limitation within the relationship with
otherness, a permeable barrier that represents a
heightened awareness of distance. Hawthorne himself
may have found this type of veil “needful” and so re-
jected Elizabeth’s (or Sophia’s) appeal for simple
revelation. But he also considered this sort of mask a
terrifying possibility, one that the philosophically
veiled individual should avoid. Despite the shift in
terms, Hooper’s veil is or becomes a mask; it is not a
permeable barrier that regulates the relationship with
otherness. It destroys otherness by reducing it to the
terms of Hooper’s apocalyptic thinking.
Hawthorne’s middle ground, between masking and
revelation, returns us to the Levinasian “face.” The
“veiled” self that Hawthorne describes does indeed
reflect the “metaphysical desire . . . without satisfac-
tion which, precisely, understands [entend] the re-
moteness, the alterity, and the exteriority of the
other.”14 “Veiling” includes such an understanding as
part of its complex representation of encountering
other people. Clearly, for Hawthorne, anyone can
“wear” a “veil” or “mask” without wearing a piece
of crape; to come “face to face” then, as Levinas de-
scribes it, is closely related to coming before the
world “veiled”—with an understanding of the limita-
tions that the other (as “face”) imposes upon the self.
As Colin Davis explains, “The face may be a real
part of the human body available to be encountered,
seen and experienced; but for Levinas it is before all
else a channel through which alterity presents itself
to me, and as such it lies outside and beyond what
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
can be seen or experienced.”15 The face overflows all
ideas that might be used to reduce or control it. Its
main effect is to initiate the “idea of infinity,” the
idea that “overflows itself.” For Hawthorne, this
might be modified to say that the “veiled” face is a
“mode” that recognizes the limitations of the self
with respect to the other. In this sense the other does
indeed “overflow itself”; it can be understood only
through sympathy—that is, through a relinquishment
of the narrow confinements of conceptual knowledge.
THE SCARLET LETTER: ETHICS AS FIRST
PHILOSOPHY
The ethical implications of Hooper’s failure to face
the world receive extended attention in The Scarlet
Letter. Just as Dimmesdale is often seen as a devel-
opment of Hooper, so can Hester Prynne be consid-
ered a more complicated Elizabeth, a working out of
the earlier figure’s implied positions. As is true of all
Hawthorne’s veil-centered fictions, the relationship
between truth and ethics, between knowledge and be-
havior, remains central. As a result, Hester’s relation-
ships become the focal point for Hawthorne’s increas-
ingly powerful assertion that personal, one-to-one
encounters precede and provide a basis for the indi-
vidual’s orientation toward society.16 Just as Hooper’s
failed engagement to Elizabeth figures his larger fail-
ure to engage his community, so do Hester’s face-to-
face encounters with Pearl, Dimmesdale, and Chill-
ingworth allow her to see the primacy of
responsibility over abstraction. The approach to the
other, the primary ethical relation, founds (and con-
founds) Hester’s attempts to idealize her struggle. At
the same time, such a relation establishes, through
the course of her experience, a vision of truth that in-
sists upon its own limitations, one that, in other
words, acknowledges its own partiality and thereby
its secondary status to the unpredictable “astonish-
ment” of the other.17 The most obvious starting place
for such a discussion is Hester’s relationship to Pearl.
If any character in The Scarlet Letter can claim to
exceed understanding, it is Pearl, the uncontrollable,
“bewildering,” and “baffling” “outcast of the infantile
world” (CE, 1:92, 93). Critics have described her as
representing, among other things, “the intuitive, law-
less poetic view of the world,” the “volatile forces at
the center of the self,” the Wordsworthian “child of
nature,” and, more recently, the political power of
communal conformity.18 She is, in general terms then,
beyond limits (“The child could not be made ame-
nable to rules” [CE, 1:91]), though it is her very ex-
ternality, her existence beyond understanding, that
gives her the power to disrupt Hester’s thoughts.
Most significantly, through this disruption, she para-
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
doxically keeps Hester in the world, forcing her to
deal with individuals rather than abstractions, to face
others, to speak to them rather than reducing them to
a part in a systematic vision of society.19
Pearl’s function arises clearly enough in Hester’s fa-
mous defense of her right to keep and raise her child:
“‘God gave me the child!’ cried she. ‘He gave her, in
requital of all things else, which ye had taken from
me. She is my happiness!—she is my torture, none
the less! Pearl keeps me here in life! Pearl punishes
me too! See ye not, she is the scarlet letter, only ca-
pable of being loved, and so endowed with a million-
fold the power of retribution for my sin? Ye shall not
take her! I will die first!’” (CE 1:113). Hester’s lan-
guage recalls Mary Rowlandson’s: “Yet the Lord still
showed mercy to me and upheld me, and as He
wounded me with one hand, so He healed me with
the other.”20 The paradox of the blessing-blow, the
wounding as healing, operates here but less to dem-
onstrate the unfathomable grace of God than to re-
cover, through its very paradox, Hester’s humanity
(or alterity), her existence as something more than an
icon or a figure for punishment. “Pearl keeps me here
in life!” This is not merely a threat of suicide, which
surfaces elsewhere in the text, but a significant decla-
ration that to be “here in life” is to be involved with
others as individuals, in agreement or disagreement,
to speak and be spoken to, to look someone else in
the face.
In terms of Levinas’s project, the appropriate term
here is shame, and though this special definition no
doubt differs from nineteenth-century uses of the
word, it can serve to highlight the ethical implica-
tions of Hester’s defense. In a section of Totality and
Infinity titled “C. Truth and Justice: 1. Freedom
Called Into Question,” Levinas first connects “know-
ing” to a theoretical stance that “puts itself into ques-
tion, goes back beyond its origin” (82): “This self-
criticism can be understood as a discovery of one’s
weakness or a discovery of one’s unworthiness—
either as a consciousness of failure or as a conscious-
ness of guilt” (83). This “guilt” and its manifestation
as “shame” are not the result of specific violations;
instead, they form the very ground of the relationship
with others, the basis from which truth can be said to
arise: “The freedom that can be ashamed of itself
founds truth (and thus truth is not deduced from
truth.) The Other is not initially a fact, is not an ob-
stacle, does not threaten me with death; he is desired
in my shame” (83-84, original emphasis). Hester’s
passionate declaration acknowledges these limitations
even as it suggests a basic understanding that the
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THE SCARLET LETTER
limits she faces are integral to her condition—are, in
fact, her very condition. Hester acknowledges Pearl
as in some sense unfathomable while seeing herself
as bound to the fundamental demand Pearl makes
upon her. In this sense her insistence that Pearl “is
the scarlet letter, only capable of being loved” trans-
forms the Puritan punishment for adultery into a fig-
ure for human relationships; the punishment Hester
feels is not for her violation of Puritan law but for
her tendency to withdraw from the world, to harden
herself against it and so transform both herself and
the world into petrified figures.21 Pearl, who exceeds
any attempt at figural control, provides moments of
rupture and astonishment that allow Hester to avoid
the sort of premature death already experienced by
Dimmesdale.
Understood in this way, Hester’s famous “freedom of
speculation” passage, in which she theorizes social
revolution, directly opposes, and is opposed by,
Pearl’s insistent, painful questioning about the letter
and her own origins. There is no need to summarize
the well-known section of “Another View of Hes-
ter,” except to say that the passage has a definite tra-
jectory that moves from a consideration of revolution
to the thought of suicide. Political critics, particularly
Sacvan Bercovitch, have argued that this is part of
Hawthorne’s attempt to contain dissent by eventually
rechanneling it into process and consent.22 But if we
follow the passage through to the chapter’s end we
can see how the “office” of the scarlet letter, in this
particular context, is not to bring Hester to the limits
of Puritan law but to bring her back into the world,
to enable her to acknowledge that the immediate de-
mands of others precede and supersede idealized con-
ceptions of social reformation.
The primary distinction that governs the speculation
passage appears in its first sentence: “Much of the
marble coldness of Hester’s impression was to be at-
tributed to the circumstance that her life had turned,
in a great measure, from passion and feeling, to
thought” (CE, 1:164). There follows a description
that not only connects Hester to other revolutionary
figures but also establishes her theoretical tendency
to abstraction: “Indeed, the same dark question often
rose into her mind, with reference to the whole race
of womanhood. Was existence worth accepting, even
to the happiest among them? As concerned her own
individual existence, she had long ago decided in the
negative, and dismissed the point as settled” (CE,
1:165). The emphasis here falls on “the whole race
of womanhood” rather than on the particular condi-
tion of individuals. Hester uses her own experience
HAWTHORNE
as a figure for all women and thereby reduces their
condition to the operations of her own ideas. The
danger of such a reduction Hawthorne makes plain
by referencing Poe’s favorite subject: the self caught
within the maze of its own mind: “Thus, Hester
Prynne, whose heart had lost its regular and healthy
throb, wandered without a clew in the dark labyrinth
of mind; now turned aside by an insurmountable
precipice; now starting back from a deep chasm” (CE,
1:166). Such an excess of interiority leads to suicide
unless the individual can find a way to break out into
the world of others. That is, it is precisely the ethical
failure of Hester’s abstract speculations that Haw-
thorne seems intent on highlighting—her inability to
see and acknowledge other individuals outside the
limits of her own thinking.
In this particular context, then, the office of the letter
is very much the office of Hawthorne’s authorial veil:
to indicate the space between individuals, to high-
light the limitations of thought that are already in
force for Hester. Thus, again in this specific context,
the letter is less an agency of Puritan law than it is a
force for romantic self-limitation; after all, what fol-
lows the notation of its failed office is nothing less
than Hester’s return to others, in this case Dimmes-
dale: “Now, however, her interview with the Rever-
end Mr. Dimmesdale, on the night of his vigil, had
given her a new theme of reflection, and held up to
her an object that appeared worthy of any exertion
and sacrifice for its attainment. She had witnessed
the intense misery beneath which the minister
struggled, or, to speak more accurately, had ceased to
struggle. She saw that he stood on the verge of lu-
nacy, if he had not already stepped across it” (CE,
1:166). The shift to the present should not be under-
estimated here. “Now” Hester has returned to the
present because of her “interview” with the minister.
It is through speaking to another person, through the
unpredictability of that interview, that coming face to
face, that Hester is brought out of the abstract and
into the uncertainty of human relationships. Now she
“witnessed,” now she “saw” what was before her:
another person in trouble, facing madness at the hand
of an enemy in whose crimes Hester is implicated. It
is almost as if Hawthorne is suggesting that the failed
office of the letter is being accomplished after all.
“Now, however . . .” (as opposed to her earlier
speculativeness), Hester is leaving the trap of ab-
straction and reentering the unpredictable, human
world.23
That such a reentry is difficult and therefore momen-
tary is evident from Pearl’s persistent attempts to
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
goad her mother into just this sort of “interview.”
However, Hester’s resistance converts the potential
conversation into an interrogation:
“What does the letter mean, mother?—and why
dost thou wear it?—and why does the minister
keep his hand over his heart?”
“What shall I say?” thought Hester to herself.—
“No! If this be the price of the child’s sympathy,
I cannot pay it!”
(CE, 1:180-81)
This seemingly innocent maternal evasion fails to
satisfy Pearl, who pushes Hester to a threat: “Do not
tease me; else I shall shut thee into the dark closet!”
(CE, 1:181). The choice that here faces Hester—be-
tween speech and silence, opening and closing—is
the same choice she faces in her interactions with
other characters and with the community. It is Hoop-
er’s choice between veiling and masking or, in Levi-
nasian terms, between “facing” and the frozen figura-
tion of the face. As Jill Robbins explicates it,
Levinas’s distrust of figuration shares significant
ground with Hawthorne’s warnings about self-
allegory: “To speak, then, of the petrification of the
face is to announce an event which, within the terms
of Levinas’s ethical thought, is one of the worst
things that could happen. . . . This ‘image’ of the
petrified face, the frozen face, denotes at once the
violence directed at the face of the other—the loss of
the other’s face—and also the loss of face on the part
of the figural interpreter. . . . To take on a character
(une figure) is to risk becoming a figure, and thereby
to lose what is human, to be turned into a statue, to
be turned into stone.”24 We have only to recall Rich-
ard Digby, the “man of adamant,” to realize the threat
to Hester and to recover for Hawthorne the powerful
opposition between unpredictable human interaction
and the “certainty” and finality of the hardened face:
“He had discovered the entrance of a cave, closely
resembling the mouth of a sepulchre, within which
sat the figure of a man, whose gesture and attitude
warned the father and children to stand back, while
his visage wore a most forbidding frown” (CE,
11:168). This is the end Hester risks, from which
Pearl, by demanding speech, by being aggressively
“in her face,” saves her.
Hawthorne presents a similar situation, though with a
different outcome, in his earlier story, “The Gentle
Boy.” In a communal and dramatic situation notably
like those of The Scarlet Letter, a persecuted Quaker
(Catherine) follows her religious “enthusiasm”—the
religious and political fight to end the persecution of
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
her sect—at the expense of her relationship with her
son, Ilbrahim, the gentle boy of the title. Her intense
devotion to spiritual idealism contrasts with the sim-
pler actions of Tobias Pearson, a Puritan of “military
rank” (CE, 9:86), who repeats the samaritan’s act of
taking in his enemy. Throughout the tale Hawthorne’s
emphasis falls on the destructive effects of zealotry,
of placing the idea over the individual, or worse, of
converting individuals into ideas. At its most basic
level, his critique aims not at any particular doctrine
or historical set of beliefs but at a systematic, totaliz-
ing thought that translates all personal relationships
into preestablished intellectual categories. In this
sense Catherine, who, like Hester, has “raven hair”
and “dark,” “wild” features, comes off no better than
the Puritans who persecute her (CE, 9:81). She reluc-
tantly chooses her wilderness quest over the needs of
Ilbrahim and so is faced at the tale’s end with her
son’s death, a sacrifice of sorts to her absence and a
rupture within her idealism. Ilbrahim’s death teaches
her “a true religion” (CE, 9:104) that has less to do
with domestic ties than with the disruption of thought
by the demands of responsibility.
The tendency in recent criticism has been to read this
opposition between ideal and personal commitments
as Hawthorne’s way of celebrating middle-class do-
mesticity and motherhood. And while it is certainly
true that the cult of domesticity plays a role in Haw-
thorne’s works, it is more often than not a symbolic
language used to suggest a larger, and more complex,
ethical vision. Thus, T. Walter Herbert’s assertion
that Hester is “preserved from the wilder excesses of
rebellion by the devotion she pours into the rearing
of Pearl” is accurate to an extent, but only if we un-
derstand “rebellion” to denote a particular type of
idealistic thinking and “devotion” to encompass genu-
ine engagement with Pearl as an individual.25 The
tendency of Herbert’s reading is to flatten Hester into
“mother” and Pearl into “child” without considering
the larger implications of their relationship as a model
for all human interaction. Hester’s resurgent “femi-
nine nature”—as opposed to Chillingworth and Dim-
mesdale’s intellectual “masculinity”—is more than a
model for nineteenth-century mothers; it is just as
clearly an ethical force capable of structuring rela-
tionships of all sorts, regardless of gender. “The
Gentle Boy” points the way: Catherine’s failure as
mother encapsulates the inability of the community
to transcend ideology and recognize Ilbrahim as a
fellow human. Her abandonment of responsibility as
a mother becomes a powerful symbol of all abandon-
ments in which individuals are sacrificed to idealistic
orders.
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THE SCARLET LETTER
A similar symbolic dynamic operates in The Scarlet
Letter, in which Hester’s relationship with Pearl sets
the terms for her interactions with Dimmesdale,
Chillingworth, and the Puritan community. In the case
of Dimmesdale, for instance, their “interview” on the
scaffold leads to her decision to reveal Chilling-
worth’s secret as a way of restructuring the one-sided,
parasitic bond between the two men. The process fol-
lows this pattern: from the face-to-face meeting on
the scaffold to Hester’s understanding of “the intense
misery beneath which the minister struggled” (CE,
1:166) to her new resolution to “reveal the secret”
(CE, 1:173)—to speak, that is, where speech has been
hostage. This shift of concern appears most force-
fully at the beginning of chapter twelve, “Another
View of Hester”:
In her late singular interview with Mr. Dimmes-
dale, Hester Prynne was shocked at the condition
to which she found the clergyman reduced. . . .
Knowing what this poor, fallen man had once
been, her whole soul was moved by the shudder-
ing terror with which he had appealed to her,—
the outcast woman,—for support against his in-
stinctively discovered enemy. She decided,
moreover, that he had a right to her utmost aid.
Little accustomed, in her long seclusion from so-
ciety, to measure her ideas of right and wrong by
any standard external to herself, Hester saw—or
seemed to see—that there lay a responsibility
upon her, in reference to the clergyman, which
she owed to no other, not to the whole world
besides. The links that united her to the rest of
human kind—links of flowers, or silk, or gold, or
whatever the material—had all been broken. Here
was the iron link of mutual crime, which neither
he nor she could break. Like all other ties, it
brought along with it its obligations.
(CE, 1:59-60)
The emphasis here is on the movement from personal
encounter to the recognition of responsibility. Admit-
tedly, this is the responsibility of “mutual crime,” but
it is precisely this understanding of her guilt toward
him and his toward her that initiates a new sense of
ethical obligation for Hester. Her recognition that she
has a “responsibility” to Dimmesdale, whose pres-
ence asserts a “standard external to herself,” under-
scores her turn away from the general and toward the
specific, from the idea to the other being whose suf-
fering she cannot ignore. Put another way, we might
say that she here moves from monologue to dialogue,
from dangerous isolation to the uncertainty and risk
of facing others.
What partially enables this step is Hester’s pragmatic
conception of truth. Unlike Dimmesdale, who finds
himself trapped in the Platonic-Calvinist division of
HAWTHORNE
worlds, Hester seems capable of a sophisticated with-
drawal from the opposition of surface and depth. She
is far less concerned than the minister that the truth
about the self or the soul be absolutely known and
far more aware of the limitations of self-knowledge
and the knowledge of others. The contrast repeats the
similar split between the Reverend Mr. Hooper and
Elizabeth, between Calvinism and skeptical
romanticism. First Dimmesdale: “As concerns the
good which I may appear to do, I have no faith in it.
It must needs be a delusion. What can a ruined soul,
like mine, effect towards the redemption of other
souls?—or a polluted soul, towards their
purification? . . . Canst thou deem it, Hester, a con-
solation, that I must stand up in my pulpit, and meet
so many eyes turned upward to my face, as if the
light of heaven were beaming from it!—must see my
flock hungry for the truth, and listening to my words
as if a tongue of Pentecost were speaking!—and then
look inward, and discern the black reality of what
they idolize? I have laughed, in bitterness and agony
of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and
what I am!” (CE, 1:191). Like Hooper, Dimmesdale
is caught in a conception of Being stringently iso-
lated from action. The “true” Dimmesdale is the hid-
den, inner self, whose falseness deprives his work of
all meaning. Thus, to his thinking, the truth and value
of all action depend upon the inner condition of the
actor. The outer self can be valid only when it ex-
presses the inner; any disjunction between the two
renders the world false.
For Hester, such a strict distinction between the ma-
terial and spiritual or actual and ideal no longer holds
this sort of power. She replies to Dimmesdale’s self-
pity with the worldliness of a late romantic pragma-
tist: “‘You wrong yourself in this,’” said Hester,
gently. ‘You have deeply and sorely repented. Your
sin is left behind you, in the days long past. Your
present life is not less holy, in very truth, than it
seems in people’s eyes’” (CE, 1:191). Hester’s abil-
ity to see the value of action regardless of intent, to
place the practical over the essential, drives her at-
tack on Dimmesdale’s Calvinism. Her radicalism is
thus primarily philosophical rather than political; that
is, she begins by advocating a pragmatic conception
of truth that approximates, though with a tragic tone,
the thought of William James: “Pragmatism, on the
other hand, asks its usual question. ‘Grant an idea or
belief to be true,’ it says, ‘what concrete difference
will its being truth make in anyone’s actual life? How
will the truth be realized?’”26 “Your present life is not
less holy, in very truth, than it seems,” to repeat Hes-
ter’s assertion. The “very truth” of seeming, because
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
of its attentions to the world of others, fractures the
binary dilemmas of hypocrisy; in a Jamesian sense, it
matters not and so has no claim to recognizable truth.
She makes the point again, more dramatically, in the
forest scene: “Begin all anew! Hast thou exhausted
possibility in the failure of this one trial? Not so! The
future is yet full of trial and success. There is happi-
ness to be enjoyed! There is good to be done! Ex-
change this false life of thine for a true one. Be, if
thy spirit summon thee to such a mission, the teacher
and apostle of the red men. . . . Preach! Write! Act!
Do any thing, save lie down and die!” (CE, 1:198).
The primary note of Hester’s plea is for action, work
in the world. The impulse to escape the strictures of
Puritan punishment arises only as a means toward
making action real again. It is, in another sense, a
metaphor for what Dimmesdale must accomplish
mentally, philosophically; he must “leave this wreck
and ruin here,” abandon the pattern of thinking that
has convinced him of the falseness of appearance
and reenter the world. The plea echoes Elizabeth’s
simple request in “The Minister’s Black Veil”:
“First lay aside your black veil: then tell me why you
put it on,” with its faith that speech, conversation,
can bring the self back to the world.
Hester’s approach to Chillingworth is made on much
the same basis, though the “leech” represents an even
harsher version of the idealism that makes Dimmes-
dale his victim. What she objects to most is Chilling-
worth’s privileged position; like Mr. Hooper, the phy-
sician wears a mask that enables special sight into
sin and creates a voyeuristic advantage. “You burrow
and rankle in his heart! Your clutch is on his life, and
you cause him to die daily a living death; and still he
knows you not” (CE, 1:170-71). Hester determines to
expose Chillingworth and thus bring the two onto a
potentially equal basis; she wishes to bring about a
“face to face” of sorts and so disrupt the monologic
power of Chillingworth with the uncertainty of
dialogue. Or, brought closer to Levinasian terms, she
wishes to disable Chillingworth’s idealistic objectifi-
cation of truth (as totality) and create an ethical space
in which Dimmesdale can emerge as a human being
rather than an idea.
It is abundantly clear, both in the text and its critical
responses, that Chillingworth is the “man of knowl-
edge,” an intellectual, in other words, who has cer-
tainly placed “head” over “heart.” But what sort of
knowledge does Chillingworth represent? How does
he conceive of truth and how does that conception
structure his responses to others, his actions? In some
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
respects, his approach recalls the Melville of “Haw-
thorne and His Mosses”: “Never know him! Believe
me, Hester, there are few things,—whether in the
outward world, or, to a certain depth, in the invisible
sphere of thought,—few things hidden from the man,
who devotes himself earnestly and unreservedly to
the solution of a mystery. . . . I shall seek this man,
as I have sought truth in books; as I have sought gold
in alchemy. There is a sympathy that will make me
conscious of him. I shall see him tremble. I shall feel
myself shudder, suddenly and unawares. Sooner or
later, he must needs be mine!” (CE, 1:75). It is not
difficult to hear an uncanny anticipation of Melville’s
language in the “Mosses” essay or, more important
still, his attitude toward reading and the search for
“truth in books.” This is not to suggest that Melville
equates to Chillingworth but that the intimacy
Melville proposes curiously echoes the parasitic bond
of the doctor and the minister. Chillingworth clearly
objectifies his search for truth and envisions total
possession, a union not without its sexual tinge. He
sees the minister as entirely knowable, the “mystery”
of his very self not really a “mystery” at all, but a
puzzle the solution to which has already been posited
and imaginatively seized.
Hester’s response suggests that she understands pre-
cisely the ethical dangers of “burrowing,” “rankling,”
and “clutching” at another self. “You cause him to
die daily a living death,” she argues, noting not only
the physical threat to Dimmesdale’s life but the ethi-
cal threat to his existence as a separate being. Her
language recalls the dynamic of the Gables preface:
the pinning down of a moral onto the elusive sub-
stance of life destroys the life through appropriation.
If we add to the literary moral the notion of a “mor-
alistic” truth, the fixation of Calvinist guilt, we can
begin to see Chillingworth as a somewhat secularized
version of the reductive tendencies of Puritan history,
though, in this case, the Calvinist vision of hidden
sin leads not to redemption but to revenge: “He had
begun an investigation, as he imagined, with the se-
vere and equal integrity of a judge, desirous only of
truth, even as if the question involved no more than
the air-drawn lines and figure of a geometrical prob-
lem, instead of human passions, and wrongs inflicted
on himself. . . . He now dug into the poor clergy-
man’s heart, like a miner searching for gold; or,
rather, like a sexton delving into a grave, possibly in
quest of a jewel that had been buried on the dead
man’s bosom, but likely to find nothing save mortal-
ity and corruption. Alas for his own soul, if these
were what he sought!” (CE, 1:129). The connection
here between Chillingworth’s self-delusion that he is
105
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THE SCARLET LETTER
an objective judge and the “miner’s” quest for “gold”
or “jewel” is the basis of Hawthorne’s conception of
ethical violation. Digging into another’s “heart” is
likened to a sexton robbing a grave; it leads the in-
vestigator to find “nothing save mortality and corrup-
tion,” in other words, not merely death and decay but
the “corruption” of his own soul. The shortcoming
that makes such an attitude possible is Chilling-
worth’s failure to recognize his own implication in
the search for truth. He cannot see his own necessary
blindness, and without a consciousness of his limita-
tions, he fails to recognize the strangeness of others,
risking trespass onto the sacred.27
As in “The Minister’s Black Veil,” Hawthorne
chooses a woman to speak for his skeptical pragma-
tism, though Hester, like Elizabeth, is successful only
to the extent that she suggests a possible, rather than
a probable, revision of human relationships. In this
sense Hawthorne might best be thought of as a tragic
pragmatist, one who lacks confidence in society’s
ability to allow for the sort of ethical distance neces-
sary to protect the “sanctity of the human heart.” In
Hester, however, he creates his most resilient and
powerful representative of the struggle to maintain
both distance and connection, to enact his own artis-
tic “shyness.” Marginalized by her punishment and
the limitations of the letter, Hester “stood apart from
mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost
that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer
make itself seen or felt” (CE, 1:84). This banishment,
painful though it is, gives her a unique perspective
on both herself and her relation to the Puritan
community. At the same time, the letter, like Hoop-
er’s mask, seems to give her special insight, the dark
vision of secret sin: “She felt or fancied, then, that
the scarlet letter had endowed her with a new sense.
She shuddered to believe, yet could not help believ-
ing, that it gave her a knowledge of the hidden sin in
other hearts” (CE, 1:86).
Unlike many of Hawthorne’s male protagonists, how-
ever—Young Goodman Brown, Hooper, Aylmer,
Richard Digby—Hester uniquely rejects this
temptation. She struggles against the letter’s insinua-
tions, no matter how satisfying they may be: “She
was terror-stricken by the revelations that were thus
made. What were they? Could they be other than the
insidious whispers of the bad angel, who would fain
have persuaded the struggling woman, as yet only
half his victim, that the outward guise of purity was
but a lie, and that, if truth were everywhere to be
shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a
bosom besides Hester Prynne’s? Or, must she receive
HAWTHORNE
those intimations—so obscure, yet so distinct—as
truth?” (CE, 1:86). This temptation, the same yielded
to by Hooper and Young Goodman Brown, is the de-
sire to see the surface of the world as false and
thereby grant the self an exclusive vision of its own
goodness. Hester rejects the thought, offering instead
her own limitations, her own vision of knowledge
such as Levinas presents it—as that which founds
knowing on its own self-critique, that which “puts it-
self into question”: “Such loss of faith is ever one of
the saddest results of sin. Be it accepted as a proof
that all was not corrupt in this poor victim of her
own frailty, and man’s hard law, that Hester Prynne
yet struggled to believe that no fellow-mortal was
guilty like herself” (CE, 1:87).
What separates Hester from Hawthorne’s destructive
male protagonists is her attempt to structure her rela-
tionships to others on the basis of her own limitations.
Rejecting the logic of hypocrisy, she works, often
against her own desires, to avoid reductive thinking
and the fantasy of control it brings. The result of
these efforts is a position of distance and sympathy
that reproduces Hawthorne’s authorial stance. Hester
can help others both practically and emotionally be-
cause she recognizes the limits of her own knowl-
edge and places herself in the position of the artisti-
cally veiled listener. The displacement of the self in
deference to the other thus grounds her experience
and sets the terms for her much-discussed return. By
displacing abstract notions of political revolution with
individual interactions, Hester realizes Hawthorne’s
startling revision of the relationship between ethics
and politics: the ethical demand of the specific other,
the sufferer, both founds and upsets all attempts at
idealistic political revolution.
Notes
1. See “The Politics of The Scarlet Letter,” in Ide-
ology and Classic American Literature, ed.
Myra Jehlen and Sacvan Bercovitch (1986), 58.
See also Bercovitch “Hawthorne’s A-morality
of Compromise,” Representations 24 (Fall
1988): 37.
2. A similar point is made by Jean Fagin Yellin:
“The studied ambiguity of these works, gener-
ally understood to be the result of deliberate ar-
tistic decisions, must also be considered as a
strategy of avoidance and denial. Hawthorne, it
appears, could not acknowledge the necessary
engagement of politics and art, of life and let-
ters—the engagement that Emerson demanded
of his generation and of all generations.” “Haw-
thorne and the Slavery Question,” in A Histori-
106
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
cal Guide to Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Larry J.
Reynolds (2001), 157. My contention, as will
be evident in what follows, is that such a read-
ing presumes a fairly simplistic notion of en-
gagement, which Hawthorne’s work both ques-
tions and significantly elaborates.
3. Emily Miller Budick, “Sacvan Bercovitch, Stan-
ley Cavell, and the Romance Theory of Ameri-
can Fiction,” PMLA 107 (1992): 85.
4. Kenneth Dauber, “Hawthorne and the Respon-
sibility of Outsidedness,” in The Idea of Au-
thorship: Democratic Poetics from Franklin to
Melville (1990), 164.
5. Colin Davis, Levinas: An Introduction (1996),
49.
6. For a useful comparison of Levinas’s thought
to that of Hegel and Kant, see Adriann Pep-
erzak, “Some Remarks on Hegel, Kant, and
Levinas,” in Face to Face with Levinas, ed.
Richard A. Cohen (1986), 205-17. It is Levi-
nas’s distrust of totalization that brings him
closer than Hegel to Hawthorne’s epistemologi-
cal resistances: “Whereas Hegel regards the in-
dividual, the moral subject, and the perspective
of morality as mere moments of a concept that
triumphs in the concrete universality of the
state, Levinas interprets the state as an essen-
tially violent system of equality and justice, in-
termediate—and in a sense mediating—between
goodness and war. The difference between their
perspectives explains why Levinas holds that
true peace cannot come from the state and that
the dialectics of violence must be oriented by a
voice that ‘comes from the outside, “through
the door” (thurathen), whereas Hegel—from
his ‘totalitarian’ perspective—must defend the
state as the highest expression and guarantee of
peace, above which no practical reconciliation
is possible” (ibid., 215).
7. See Michael Colacurcio, The Province of Piety:
Moral History in Hawthorne’s Early Tales
(1984), and J. Hillis Miller, Hawthorne and His-
tory: Defacing It (1991). For a partial survey of
the many responses to the story, see Lea Ber-
tani Vozar Newman, “One-Hundred-Fifty Years
of Looking At, Into, Through, Behind, Beyond,
and Around ‘The Minister’s Black Veil,’”
Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 13, no. 2 (1987):
5-12.
8. Colacurcio, Province of Piety, 384-85. Original
emphasis.
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
9. James, Pragmatism, 84. Original emphasis.
10. Miller, Hawthorne and History, 89.
11. For an extension of Miller’s reading, see Dry-
den, who explores Hawthorne’s use of the fig-
ural method of parable to dramatize “a collision
between literal reference and illustrative
significance.” “Through a Glass Darkly: ‘The
Minister’s Black Veil’ as a Parable,” in New Es-
says on Hawthorne’s Major Tales, ed. Millicent
Bell (1933), 138.
12. As Budick puts it, “At the center of Hawthor-
nean romance, and the historical romances that
succeed it, is the basic problem of the skeptical
dilemma, of determining whether or not ele-
ments of the dualism, the self and the world,
exist at all.” Fiction and Historical Conscious-
ness: The American Romance Tradition (1989),
84.
13. As Richard Millington explains, “Hooper ex-
poses as fiction the premise that we can be
known to each other, which is the ground upon
which speech, love, art, community all rest; yet
what he fails to understand is that this fiction
when shared—and when it remains unnamed—
makes possible a provisional but significant
speech, love, and art in the community that ac-
cepts it.” Practicing Romance, 30.
14. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An
Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis
(1969), 34.
15. Davis, Levinas, 135.
16. As John Carlos Rowe argues, for Hegelian ro-
manticism (and for Hawthorne), “ethical fic-
tions and inaccessible divine ‘laws’ must be re-
placed by the willful acts of a ‘conscience’
certain of itself as Spirit manifesting itself in
the world. Such an attitude seems generally
characteristic of the ethics of Romanticism. Ro-
mantic moral truths generally depend on the
manifestation of their universality in and
through the particular acts of human experience
in their temporal environment. Unrecognized
by individual acts of self-consciousness, moral
universals remain unrealized abstractions.” “The
Internal Conflict of Romantic Narrative: He-
gel’s Phenomenology and Hawthorne’s The
Scarlet Letter,” Modern Language Notes 95
(1980): 1213.
17. I address the specifically political implications
of this self-positioning, particularly in light of
Sacvan Bercovitch’s reading of the novel in The
Offıce of Scarlet Letter, in Part Two.
107
(c) 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
THE SCARLET LETTER
18. See Richard Chase, The American Novel and
Its Tradition (1957), 74; Leland S. Person Jr.,
“The Scarlet Letter and the Myth of the Divine
Child,” ATQ 44 (Fall 1979): 303; Darrel Abel,
The Moral Picturesque: Studies in Hawthorne’s
Fiction (1988), 190-93; and Elizabeth Aycock
Hoffman, “Political Power in The Scarlet Let-
ter,” in The Critical Response to Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, ed. Gary
Scharnhorst (1992), 217.
19. Rowe follows a similar line of thinking: “Hes-
ter’s recognition of her alienation from social
law is thus followed by an acknowledgement of
her only real ties to the world: Pearl and Hes-
ter’s responsibility for her education. Pearl is
no longer merely another sign of Hester’s own
external representation of Puritan justice, but
she does remain something of an abstract, gen-
eral ‘child’ to be educated,” “The Internal Con-
flict,” 1213.
20. Mary Rowlandson, “The Sovereignty and
Goodness of God,” in Puritans among the Indi-
ans: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption:
1676-1724, ed. Alden T. Vaughn and Edward
W. Clark (1981), 38.
21. Brook Thomas argues in a similar way that for
Hawthorne “sin is not so much—as it would
have been for Winthrop—a sin against God’s
law as it is a sin against the intersubjective
agreements that human beings make with one
another.” “Citizen Hester: The Scarlet Letter as
Civic Myth,” American Literary History 13.2
(Summer 2001): 181-211.
22. See Sacvan Bercovitch, The Offıce of The Scar-
let Letter (1991), 7.
23. As Levinas states in “Ideology and Idealism,”
“Yet the invincible concern for the other man in
his destitution and his homelessness—in his na-
kedness—in his condition or noncondition of a
proletarian, this concern escapes the suspect fi-
nality of ideologies; the search for the other
man who is still far away is already the rela-
tionship with this other man, a relationship in
all its rectitude—a trope specific to the approach
of the neighbor, which is already proximity.
Here we see something coming that is other
than the complacency in ideas agreeing with
the particularism of a group and its interests.”
“Ideology and Idealism,” in Of God Who Comes
to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (1998), 9.
24. Jill Robbins, Altered Reading: Levinas and Lit-
erature (1999), 49, 50.
HAWTHORNE
25. See T. Walter Herbert, Dearest Beloved: The
Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-
Class Family (1993), 201. Joel Pfister makes
essentially the same point though with a bit
more allowance for intention, arguing that “the
fundamental ideological project of The Scarlet
Letter seems contradictory but self-consciously
so: Hawthorne reinforces and problematizes the
middle-class ideology that domesticity
‘humanizes.’” The Production of Personal Life:
Class, Gender, and the Psychological in Haw-
thorne’s Fiction (1991), 142.
26. James, Pragmatism, 77.
27. Or, as John Carlos Rowe puts it, “Hawthorne’s
‘Unpardonable Sin’ is not merely excessive
pride in one’s knowledge, but a denial of the
charity (or ‘grace’) that springs from one’s rec-
ognition of self in the fallibility of others.” “The
Internal Conflict,” 1219.
Bibliography
Abel, Darrel. The Moral Picturesque: Studies in
Hawthorne’s Fiction. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue
University Press, 1988.
Bercovitch, Sacvan. “Hawthorne’s A-morality of
Compromise.” Representations 24 (Fall 1988): 1-27.
———. The Offıce of “The Scarlet Letter.” Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.
Budick, Emily Miller. “Sacvan Bercovitch, Stanley
Cavell, and the Romance Theory of American
Fiction.” PMLA 107 (1992): 78-91.
Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its
Tradition. New York: Doubleday, 1957.
Cheyfitz, Eric. “The Irresistibleness of Great Litera-
ture: Reconstructing Hawthorne’s Politics.” Ameri-
can Literary History 6, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 539-58.
Colacurcio, Michael. The Province of Piety: Moral
History in Hawthorne’s Early Tales. Cambridge: Har-
vard University Press, 1984.
Dauber, Kenneth. The Idea of Authorship in America:
Democratic Poetics from Franklin to Melville. Madi-
son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.
Davis, Colin. Levinas: An Introduction. South Bend,
IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1996.
Dryden, Edgar A. “Through a Glass Darkly: ‘The
Minister’s Black Veil’ as a Parable.” In New Essays
on Hawthorne’s Major Tales, edited by Millicent
Bell, 133-51. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1933.
108
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
Herbert, T. Walter. Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes
and the Making of the Middle-Class Family. Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1993.
Hoffman, Elizabeth Aycock. “Political Power in The
Scarlet Letter.” In The Critical Response to Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, edited by Gary
Scharnhorst, 202-19. New York: Greenwood Press,
1992.
James, William. Pragmatism. 1907; New York: Do-
ver, 1995.
Jehlen, Myra, and Sacvan Bercovitch, eds. Ideology
and Classic American Literature. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1986.
Levinas, Emmanuel. The Levinas Reader. Ed. Seán
Hand. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
———. Of God Who Comes to Mind. Trans. Bettina
Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
———. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority.
Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne Uni-
versity Press, 1969.
Miller, J. Hillis. Hawthorne and History: Defacing It.
Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1991.
Millington, Richard. Practicing Romance: Narrative
Form and Cultural Engagement in Hawthorne’s
Fiction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1992.
Newman, Lea Bertani Vozar. “One-Hundred-Fifty
Years of Looking At, Into, Through, Behind, Beyond,
and Around ‘The Minister’s Black Veil.’” Nathaniel
Hawthorne Review 13, no. 2 (1987): 5-12.
Peperzak, Adriann. “Some Remarks on Hegel, Kant,
and Levinas.” In Face to Face with Levinas, edited
by Richard A. Cohen, 205-17. Albany: State Univer-
sity of New York Press, 1986.
Person, Leland S., Jr. “The Scarlet Letter and the
Myth of the Divine Child.” American Transcendental
Quarterly 44 (Fall 1979): 295-309.
Pfister, Joel. The Production of Personal Life: Class,
Gender, and the Psychological in Hawthorne’s
Fiction. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.
Reynolds, Larry J. “The Scarlet Letter and Revolu-
tions Abroad.” American Literature 77 (1985): 44-67.
———, ed. A Historical Guide to Nathaniel
Hawthorne. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Robbins, Jill. Altered Reading: Levinas and
Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1999.
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Rowe, John Carlos. “The Internal Conflict of Roman-
tic Narrative: Hegel’s Phenomenology and Haw-
thorne’s The Scarlet Letter.” Modern Language Notes
95 (1980): 1203-31.
Rowlandson, Mary. “The Sovereignty and Goodness
of God.” In Puritans among the Indians: Accounts of
Captivity and Redemption, 1676-1724, edited by Al-
den T. Vaughn and Edward W. Clark, 31-75. Cam-
bridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1981.
Thomas, Brook. “Citizen Hester: The Scarlet Letter
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(Summer 2001): 181-211.
Fred C. Adams (essay date fall 2006)
SOURCE: Adams, Fred C. “Blood Vengeance in The Scar-
let Letter.” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 32, no. 2 (fall
2006): 1-12.
[In the following essay, Adams studies the symbolic role of
blood (and the noticeable lack therein of corporeal blood)
in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.]
“In the spirit of men there is no blood”
Julius Caesar 11.1.168
When blood is drawn, the human tendency leans to-
ward Old Testament “eye-for-an-eye” retribution. But
how may one avenge a wrong committed by a soci-
ety en masse? By withholding what is vital to the
common good, as is the case of Hester Prynne in The
Scarlet Letter. D. H. Lawrence sarcastically qualifies
the novel as a “romance” by stating that “nobody has
muddy boots in The Scarlet Letter” (1:121).
Lawrence could as easily have said that no one has
bloody hands either. Although the word “blood” oc-
curs twelve times in the text, “bloody” three times,
and “bloodthirstiness” once, we see no blood shed.
In fact, the verb “bleed” does not occur in the novel.
One way to interpret this curious absence of shed
blood is to think in terms of Hawthorne’s purposely
repressing the historical record of violence that ac-
companied the emergence of his Puritan forebears. A
historically repressive interpretation could be consid-
ered valid if the romance stood alone as a text. We
see a scaffold equipped with the Puritan machines of
punishment, yet none is used. We see the armor that
governor Bellingham wore in the Pequod War (1:105-
06) but it glistens and sparkles, clean of the shed
blood of the Indians.
We could easily accuse Hawthorne of eliding the vio-
lence that stands behind Puritan progress and achieve-
ment, accuse him of pandering to the cultural sym-
109
(c) 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
THE SCARLET LETTER
bolism of the election-day procession and
Dimmesdale’s sanguine prophecy for New England
in his sermon on that occasion, and accuse him of
covering over blood as “guilt for bloodshed” (OED)
if the romance were not inextricably tied to “The
Custom-House.” In that preface, Hawthorne’s narra-
tor reminds us that it is the nature of America to draw
blood. The American eagle perched atop the Custom
House is capable at any time of turning on those it
has protected “with a scratch of her claw, a dab of
her beak, or a rankling wound from her barbed ar-
rows” (1:5). Even so ubiquitous a symbol as the
American flag hanging over the Custom House en-
trance sports red stripes to symbolize (in the words
of the Continental Congress) “hardiness and valor,”
but even these noble qualities sometimes demand
blood.
Hawthorne’s bloodless tale is no manifestation of
conventional American aesthetic, a keeping of the
violence offstage, as it were. Many of Hawthorne’s
predecessors and contemporaries spattered their
scenes with gore.1 Since Hawthorne graphically pre-
sents blood in “Endicott and the Red Cross,” where
the blood of a wolf’s head, nailed to the meeting
house, is “still plashing on the doorstep” (9:434), in
“Alice Doane’s Appeal,” where appears a “blood-
stained hearth” (11:273), and in The House of the
Seven Gables, where appears the bloody ruff and
beard of Colonel Pyncheon (2:15), one may conclude
that if The Scarlet Letter observes a bloodless aes-
thetic, it is a voluntary one, not Hawthorne’s adher-
ence to protocol.
Neither did Hawthorne shrink from portraying the
gruesome details of Puritan punishments in other
writings, notably “Endicott and the Red Cross.” He
treats the reader to images of visceral horror: “But
among the crowd were several whose punishment
would be life-long; some, whose ears had been
cropped, like those of puppy-dogs; others, whose
cheeks had been branded with the initials of their
misdemeanors; one, with his nostrils slit and seared.”
Also among them is “a young woman, with no mean
share of beauty, whose doom it was to wear the letter
A on the breast of her gown,” thus suggesting that
these punishments were historically coexistent and
that Hester’s penalty represents no refinement of Pu-
ritan charity in a later generation (9:435).
To assume that Hawthorne was simply pandering to
his ancestors’ memory, however, is to minimize his
artistic skill, especially his clever use of blood
imagery. The separation of the romance from “The
HAWTHORNE
Custom-House” allows Hawthorne to isolate two
versions of history in a fairly discrete way and to
treat blood in a strictly figurative fashion. As Hyatt
Waggoner declares about Hawthorne’s use of images
in The Scarlet Letter, “Even in their absence, they
help to tell the tale” (138). By employing blood figu-
ratively rather than substantively, Hawthorne allows
the reader to associate all of the figures of speech
that refer to blood, along with all of its connotations.
In “The Custom-House” sketch, Hawthorne refers
to the dry bones of his ancestor, John Hathorne, who
“inherited the persecuting spirit, and made himself so
conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that
their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain
upon him. So deep a stain, indeed, that his old dry
bones, in the Charter Street burial-ground, must still
retain it, if they have not crumbled utterly to dust!”
(1:9). He also refers to the figurative “dry bones” of
the old Salem society into which he attempts to
breathe life through his telling of the tale of Hester
Prynne: “Poking and burrowing into the heaped-up
rubbish in the corner; . . . glancing at such matters
with the saddened, weary, half-reluctant interest
which we bestow on the corpse of dead activity,—
and exerting my fancy, sluggish with little use, to
raise up from these dry bones an image of the old
town’s brighter aspect” (1:29). The allusion to the
book of Ezekiel, chapter 37, which tells of the resur-
rection of the masses of dry bones is perhaps a key
to understanding Hawthorne’s exsanguination of Pu-
ritan society in the romance.
In this Old Testament vision, Ezekiel is shown a val-
ley of “dry bones” revitalized by God, picturing the
restoration of his chosen people, the Israelites, to His
favor and their redemption from the Babylonian
Captivity. In portraying his progenitors in the old
days of Salem as dry bones, Hawthorne opens the
novel to interpretation of the seventeenth-century Pu-
ritans as being like their typological forebears the Is-
raelites, a collection of “dry bones,” a passionless,
bloodless people who have strayed from God’s favor
and who therefore need redemption. Implicit also in
the absence of blood is the absence of the blood shed
by Christ with all of its redemptive power, a founda-
tion of Christian belief. There is a need for “new
blood” in the colony to revitalize the dry bones as a
generation passes, corresponding with a need for new
blood in Hawthorne’s time to revitalize a Salem that
has become a dessicated husk of its former self, the
legacy of its bloodless Puritan progenitors suggested
by the lifeless old men of the Custom House, neither
hardy nor valorous. This progressive decay, genera-
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
tion by generation, bears out Hawthorne’s prophecy
in “Earth’s Holocaust,” in which he writes, “all the
old stoutness, fervor, nobleness, generosity, and mag-
nanimity of the race would disappear; these qualities,
as they affirmed, requiring blood for their nourish-
ment” (10:389, 390).
Hawthorne suggests in The House of the Seven
Gables that such nourishing blood should be the
blood of new breeding stock when Holgrave says,
“The truth is, that, once in every half-century, at long-
est, a family should be merged into the great, ob-
scure mass of humanity, and forget all about its an-
cestors” (2:185). The Puritans and their New England
descendants are the family writ large.
Hawthorne’s romance Puritans are in fact curiously
bloodless. They shed no blood on the scaffold in pun-
ishment; neither do they bleed. Chillingworth, “the
leech,” as physicians were known in the seventeenth
century, is never shown bleeding anyone, though the
medical practice of bleeding was common during the
period. This omission suggests that the romance Pu-
ritans were generally a dry, bloodless lot. If one in-
terprets blood as passion, then Jonathan Arac’s de-
scription of the Puritans as having “principle without
passion” also applies (290).
The Puritan society is a closed system because of its
intolerance of other religions and interfaith marriage.
New blood must come into the colony in the form of
immigrants like Hester. She is a Puritan of common
lineage (religious if not genealogical) with the Puri-
tan elders, and so her blood differs from that of the
Catholic European immigrants of Hawthorne’s day,
with its potentially mongrelizing influence. As immi-
grants like Hester are absorbed into the colonial Puri-
tan society, they contribute their sweat and blood as
have their forebears to the colony’s development and
toward that progress which the Puritans saw as their
divine mission prior to the Second Coming. When
the laws are broken, progress is threatened, and blood
must be drawn to compensate. Puritan punishments
were indeed violent and bloody, including the crop-
ping of ears, branding, and whipping at the pillory
(Miller and Johnson 386), all of which Hawthorne
mentions in “Endicott and the Red Cross.” In The
Scarlet Letter, however, Hawthorne casts such pun-
ishments aside, assigning Hester the bloodless pun-
ishment of public ignominy on the scaffold and the
wearing of the sign or token of the letter A. The color,
however, suggests symbolic blood, as if the letter had
been incised in her skin and Hester had bled through
her bodice. Since there appears no indication that the
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
Magistrates prescribed the color of the letter, we may
attribute that choice to Hester, the color to be inter-
preted in ways other than simply the scarlet of the
immoral woman.
If taken as blood, the letter A becomes a symbolic
stigma in the tradition of religious saints who bleed
miraculously. Marjorie Pryse, in her study of stigma
in American fiction, credits the Puritan elders with
marking Hester with a physical stigma (15), but if
we assume that Hester chose the bloody hue of the
letter, we are justified in crediting her with investing
in the symbolic letter the blood of her suffering and
the blood of her passion. As Joanne Feit Diehl says,
the hue of the letter “recalls the blood of the torn hy-
men . . . and the color of sexual passion,” and “the
embroidered letter” evokes a “potentially threatening
vision of blood and public hair, the Medusan coils of
active sexuality” (667, 668). In this context, the letter
may further evoke, as Shari Benstock writes, “a rela-
tion between babies and words, between biological
reproduction and symbolic representations” (289).
Thus the letter would suggest the menstrual blood of
the reproductive function, the very blood that, when
manifest, marked women of Biblical times as
“unclean.” Such a reading, considering the Puritans’
habit of likening themselves to the Old Testament Is-
raelites, would entail a broad typological irony. For
what would have once marked Hester as unclean now
becomes the manifestation that prevents her from be-
ing persecuted in a bloody fashion. It is because Hes-
ter does not bleed (due to pregnancy) that she suffers
public scorn. If any blood is drawn from Hester, it is
subcutaneous, like a bruise. The three-dimensional
letter becomes more like a welt inflicted by whipping
or branding as viewed from the outside. From the in-
side, however, it becomes a swelling of anger in Hes-
ter’s bosom that must eventually find expression.
Hester’s refusal to name Pearl’s father may reflect
stoicism that leads her to hold her pain inside, or it
may manifest her love for Dimmesdale, because she
knows that the Puritan punishers would draw his
blood literally rather than in the figurative way they
have drawn hers.
Moreover, if we accept the view of some witnesses,
the revelation by Dimmesdale at the book’s end may
be interpreted as the revelation of a similar stigma
bleeding from his chest, but we never see actual
blood. In the final scaffold scene, Dimmesdale calls
it “his own red stigma” (1:255). Hawthorne’s narra-
tor too refers to the alleged mark on Dimmesdale’s
chest as a “stigma” (1:258). We could argue perhaps
that, since the narrator claims that most of the wit-
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THE SCARLET LETTER
nesses to the revelation report seeing “a SCARLET LET-
TER . . . imprinted in the flesh” (1:258) of Dimmes-
dale’s chest, it cannot be a blood stigma, that it may
have been perhaps a scar or a brand. Yet the closest
the tale actually comes to bloodshed appears in the
reference to Dimmesdale’s “bloody scourge,” but the
sight of his self-flagellation and blood-letting is re-
served strictly for “that ever-wakeful” eye of God
(1:148). For the reader, the actual substance of the
blood remains sub rosa.
We understand that Hester and Dimmesdale have
blood in them, both in a figurative and in a literal
sense. They have passion in common, and Hester’s
subjection to public scorn causes a “burning blush”
to rise in her cheek (1:52), just as the fear of public
exposure contrarily drives the blood from Dimmes-
dale’s (1:67). His paling suggests that participation in
the Puritan justice ritual leaches the blood from him
as it already has from his fellow Puritan elders.
The blood of Hester and Dimmesdale obviously
mingles in Pearl, who shares both of their essences.
As relative newcomers to the colony, Hester and
Dimmesdale are a source of new blood for its
progress. Pearl’s potential is doubled, inasmuch as
the child shares the blood of both. Because she is
sired by Dimmesdale rather than Chillingworth, Pearl
escapes inheriting the leech’s deformity as well as
his evil nature, symbolized in visible manifestations
like the black plant that Dimmesdale sees growing
from a grave, suggesting veiled sinfulness brought to
light. Chillingworth belongs to the generation of the
town elders; Dimmesdale does not. Thus Hawthorne
affords Pearl a genealogical opportunity to escape the
older generation’s indoctrination. He speculates at
the novel’s end that, had Hester not taken Pearl to
someplace in Europe, she could have provided a new
and potentially vital breeding stock not only for Puri-
tan society but also for America’s future: “Had the
mother and child remained here, little Pearl, at a mar-
riageable period of life, might have mingled her wild
blood with the lineage of the devoutest Puritan among
them all” (1:261). Pearl therefore represents a poten-
tial that remains unfulfilled for revitalizing the dry
bones of Puritan Society. Her removal can be seen as
Hester’s revenge on the colony for figuratively draw-
ing her blood.
The danger inherent in new blood is that it may bring
with it new or heretical ideas. Hester’s ideas come to
be associated with Anne Hutchinson, concealed from
the searching gaze of the Puritan fathers, except as
they manifest themselves proudly, luxuriantly, in the
HAWTHORNE
scarlet letter and Pearl’s red dress. Otherwise, her
ideas would have to be controlled, channeled into an
acceptable orthodox religious and social direction, or
done away with entirely. Focusing on the immediate
sin of adultery, the Puritan fathers never realize the
greater danger Hester poses to their established order.
As the narrator says in “Another View of Hester”:
“The world’s law was no law for her mind. It was an
age in which the human intellect, newly emancipated,
had taken a more active and a wider range than for
many centuries before. . . . Hester Prynne imbibed
this spirit. She assumed a freedom of speculation,
then common enough on the other side of the Atlan-
tic, but which our forefathers, had they known of it,
would have held to be a deadlier crime than that stig-
matized by the scarlet letter” (1:164).
Hester is perhaps clever enough to appreciate the
irony inherent in her removal of Pearl; and thus her
return to the colony and resumption of the A may be
construed as a return to observe her vengeance first-
hand as the colony gradually deteriorates.2 Hawthorne
remarks on the observable difference between New
England women of Hester’s day and those of his
time: “Morally, as well as materially, there was a
coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of Old En-
glish birth and breeding than in their fair descen-
dants, separated from them by a series of six or seven
generations; for throughout that chain of ancestry,
every successive mother has transmitted to her child
a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty,
and a slighter physical frame, if not a character of
less force and solidity, than her own” (1:50).
By Hawthorne’s day, the day of the Custom House,
new blood had to come to America in the form of
immigrants from Europe in, according to Sacvan Ber-
covitch, “record waves,” approximately three million
in one decade (74). Accompanying them were ideas
imported from Europe, ideologies both disturbing
and threatening to the American establishment in-
cluding revolutionary and socialistic sentiments that
had erupted in Europe in 1848 (74). Particularly dis-
turbing to an American establishment, based on the
prejudices and intolerance of the Puritan founding fa-
thers was the immigrants’ Catholicism. Of this Ber-
covitch says that the “Puritans figured not only as the
model settlers [for the waves of European immi-
grants] but as the foil to the perceived dangers of Ca-
tholicism (from Irish, German, and Italian immi-
grants)” (50).
That immigrants were on Hawthorne’s mind in the
mid-nineteenth century is made apparent by his refer-
ences to them in his travel sketches of the 1830s.
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
Hawthorne received what Beth Lueck calls “his first
introduction on a large scale to the immigration is-
sue” during his 1832 tour of New England and New
York (1). Hawthorne’s remarks about immigrants in
general and Irish Catholic immigrants in particular
smack of latent bigotry. Hawthorne refers to the Irish
immigrants as a “mob of desperate individuals” and
“poor wanderers.” According to Lueck, “Hawthorne’s
views of immigrants and their situation in America
are generally negative. In the travel sketches and
notebooks immigrants are most often stereotyped as
lazy, drinking, licentious foreigners. . . . occasion-
ally immigrants can figure positively . . . by present-
ing a picturesque view that, at a distance, ignores
their poverty . . .” (6).
To Lueck, a key aspect of Hawthorne’s response to
immigrants involves how they will be integrated into
American society. Hawthorne hopes that “[most im-
migrants] will be saved, at least in part, by ‘the
strength of moral influences, diffused throughout our
land’” (6). The American ideology vaunts a plurality
that can absorb a variety of peoples and backgrounds,
and, according to Lueck, the huge waves of immi-
grants who arrived in Hawthorne’s time would prove
the most severe trial of that principle. She avers that
Hawthorne doubted the ability of America to absorb
them and still experience a common improvement of
lot for America and for the immigrants in a progres-
sive and cumulative fashion: if poverty, combined
with the Atlantic crossing, can undermine a group’s
ability to maintain a sense of community and human
dignity, then the great melting pot of the American
nation might not serve each new wave of immigrants
as successfully as the last (6). In essence, as the pu-
rity of the blood of the founding fathers is diluted
and adulterated by the blood of other cultures, liter-
ally and figuratively, the moral fabric of the nation
will correspondingly weaken to the nation’s detri-
ment, pulling America away from the millennial des-
tiny foreseen by the Puritans. Instead of maintaining
a pure bloodline and a pure cultural and religious
line, America has had, in the name of progress, to
import “new blood” for territorial and economic de-
velopment, and the ethnic purity of the Bay Colony
has been lost to the microcosm of nineteenth-century
Salem and to the macrocosm of nineteenth-century
America.
Byron L. Stay asserts that Hawthorne “recognized
the spiritual, political, and psychological disintegra-
tion [reflected in] the decline that Hawthorne saw in
the character of the mid-century American” (290). A
clue to what Hawthorne saw as the source of this
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
disintegration is provided by Miles Coverdale in The
Blithedale Romance when he tells the tale of
Fauntleroy, who takes up residence in a once-
fashionable quarter of the city of Boston:
He had fled northward, to the New England Me-
tropolis, and had taken up his abode under an-
other name, in a squalid street, or court, of the
older portion of the city. There he dwelt among
poverty-stricken wretches, sinners, and forlorn
good people, Irish, and whomsoever else were
neediest. Many families were clustered in each
house together, above stairs and below, in the little
peaked garrets, and even in the dusky cellars. The
house, where Fauntleroy paid weekly rent for a
chamber and a closet, had been a stately habita-
tion, in its day. An old colonial Governor had built
it, and lived there, long ago, and held his levees
in a great room where now slept twenty Irish
bedfellows. . . . Tattered hangings, a marble
hearth, traversed with many cracks and fissures, a
richly carved oaken mantel-piece, partly hacked
away for kindling-stuff, a stuccoed ceiling, de-
faced with great unsightly patches of the naked
laths,—such was the chamber’s aspect, as if it
were a kind of practical gibe at this poor, ruined
man of show.
(3:183-84)
The details of this deterioration are a fitting symbol
of the dilution of the old Puritan ideology and its re-
placement by the adulterated standards of subsequent
generations mingled with immigrant hordes who
sleep twenty to a room and who cannibalize the trap-
pings of grandeur for kindling wood. The splintered
mantelpiece suggests a gradual, insidious whittling
away at the substance of American society by immi-
grants, rather than a great revolutionary overthrow.
The Custom House of Hawthorne’s day should be
the guardian of America, examining, testing, weigh-
ing what arrives on her shores, and it should have
been all along. The nodding old men Hawthorne de-
scribes in the Custom House are sleeping watchmen,
lulled into idleness by ease and comfort, no longer
tested by hardship, privation, and war. Frederick
Newberry writes that they “relinquish consciousness
owing to their lack of imagination and gumption,
their lethargy paralleling the dwindling business of
Salem’s port” (154). They have failed at their sym-
bolic charge, let in the corrupting influences, and the
result is a society diluted in its moral purity and sense
of purpose. Hawthorne suggests that Pearl may have
forestalled this entropic process, but Hester shrewdly
removes her from it.3
In the closing scene, Pearl finally consents to kiss
Dimmesdale. It is perhaps a kiss of forgiveness and
love, but Hawthorne allows the reader the latitude to
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THE SCARLET LETTER
interpret it in other ways. If Dimmesdale continues to
represent the ideology of the old Puritan society and
its aspirations as he has just preached in the Election
Day Sermon, Pearl’s kiss may be seen as a farewell
to that society to which she has contributed nothing
except an aborted possibility; she has not (as Haw-
thorne has suggested) mixed her blood with the Puri-
tan stock, nor will she. One may also interpret the
kiss as the kiss of death to the unadulterated blood of
the Puritans, an inbred blood that would weaken lit-
erally and figuratively with each passing generation,
until Hawthorne’s day, when the onslaught of immi-
grants would dilute New England purity as a uniquely
American quality past the point of redemption with
each new generation of immigrants and thus weaken
the grip of Puritan mentality on American society.
The Scarlet Letter’s Puritans are bloodless because
their blood has been spent in building their colony
and trying to maintain it through severe, persecuto-
rial means. New blood will not come from the likes
of Pearl, who is rescued from intermarriage with their
exsanguinated stock; new blood will have to come
from lesser peoples, who, by Hawthorne’s day, have
strained the elasticity of the “both-and” ideology of
America to its breaking point. The narrator of “The
Custom-House,” wiser for his learning of Hester’s
experience, decides that his offspring will not per-
petuate the process: “Human nature will not flourish,
any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted,
for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-
out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and,
so far as their fortunes may be within my control,
shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth”
(1:11, 12). Hester’s blood vengeance is sanguinely
sweet.
Notes
1. Charles Brockden Brown leads the pack with
such works as Arthur Mervyn, or Memoirs of
the Year 1793, in which the narrator proclaims,
“a torrent of blood was gushing from my nos-
trils” (329), and “blood gushed in a stream”
(528). James Fenimore Cooper’s characters as-
suredly bleed, for Cooper tells us in The Deer-
slayer about “the blood that trickled from her
bare bosom” (798) and that “the unseemly
blood was wiped” (836). In The Last of the Mo-
hicans, people bleed even more profusely: “as
the blood flowed freely from around the sev-
ered tendons of the wrist” (84), and “The flow
of blood might be likened to the outbreaking of
a torrent” (207). In “Benito Cereno,” Herman
Melville describes “a gash from which blood
HAWTHORNE
flowed” (558), and in Redburn he shows us a
sail “spattered with a torrent of blood from his
lungs” (284). Edgar Allan Poe, in The Narra-
tive of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket regales
the reader with “blood issuing in a stream from
a deep wound in the throat” (118), “a deep
wound in the forehead from which the blood
was flowing in a continued stream” (82), and “a
copious flow of blood ensuing” (92).
2. Notwithstanding Sacvan Bercovitch, who sug-
gests that Hester’s return to America after Pearl
is married in Europe is one of reconciliation
and redemption (107, 43).
3. Frederick Newberry suggests that by removing
Pearl from America, Hester removes with her
the potential for artistic development in the
colony. He writes that when Hester and Pearl
leave, “they take with them the aesthetic conti-
nuity between England and America that they
have represented. They leave America, in other
words, aesthetically barren—with the very ‘gap’
that Hester once filled and that Pearl could one
day fill in her turn” (180).
Works Cited
Arac, Jonathan. “The Politics of The Scarlet Letter.”
In Ideology and Classic American Literature. Ed Sac-
van Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen. New York: Cam-
bridge UP, 1986. 247-66.
Benstock, Shari. “The Scarlet Letter (a)dorée, or the
Female Body Embroidered.” In Ross C. Murfin, ed.
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter. Boston: St.
Martin’s Press, 1991. 288-303.
Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Offıce of The Scarlet Letter.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991.
Brown, Charles Brockden. Arthur Mervyn, or Mem-
oirs of the Year 1793. In Brockden Brown: 3 Gothic
Novels. New York: Library of America, 1998.
Cooper, James Fenimore. The Deerslayer. In Leather-
stocking Tales. Vol. 2. New York: Library of America,
1985.
———. The Last of the Mohicans. New York: Sig-
net, 1962.
Diehl, Joanne Feit. “Re-Reading The Letter: Haw-
thorne, the Fetish, and the (Family) Romance.” New
Literary History 19.3 (1988): 655-73.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Centenary Edition of the
Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ed. William Charvat
et al. 23 vols. Columbus: Ohio State University Press,
1962-1997.
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American
Literature. 1923. Rpt. New York: Viking, 1964.
Lueck, Beth. “Meditating on the Varied Congregation
of Human Life: Immigrants in Hawthorne’s Travel
Sketches.” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 14 (1988):
1-7.
Melville, Herman. “Benito Cereno.” In Works of Her-
man Melville. New York: Avenel Books, 1977.
———Redburn: His First Voyage. New York:
Doubleday, 1957.
Miller, Perry, and Thomas H. Johnson. The Puritans:
A Sourcebook of Their Writings. Vol. 2. Rev. ed. New
York: Harper and Row, 1963.
Newberry, Frederick. Hawthorne’s Divided Loyal-
ties: England and America in His Works. Rutherford,
NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987.
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon
Pym of Nantucket. Ed. Harold Beaver. New York:
Penguin, 1986.
Pryse, Marjorie. The Mark and the Knowledge: So-
cial Stigma in Classic American Fiction. Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 1979.
Stay, Byron L. “Hawthorne’s Fallen Puritans: Eliot’s
Pulpit in The Blithedale Romance.” Studies in the
Novel 18 (1986): 283-90.
Waggoner, Hyatt H. Hawthorne: A Critical Study.
Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1963.
Michael Pringle (essay date 2007)
SOURCE: Pringle, Michael. “The Scarlet Lever: Hester’s
Civil Disobedience.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Re-
naissance 53, no. 1 (2007): 31-55.
[In the following essay, Pringle uses Henry David Tho-
reau’s essay “Resistance to Civil Government” to review
the political implications of Hester’s badge in Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter.]
The A on Hester Prynne’s breast both demands and
defies interpretation. That “SCARLET LETTER, so fantasti-
cally embroidered . . . had the effect of a spell, tak-
ing her out of the ordinary relations with humanity,
and inclosing her in a sphere by herself.”1 Exactly
what her extraordinary “relations” to the community
are, and how the A functions as social symbol, pun-
ishment, and act of rebellion, are questions that grow
more complex as the story progresses. Despite this
complexity, critical commentary on The Scarlet Let-
ter frequently privileges one theoretical position over
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
another. Of particular concern in this discussion, de-
constructionists and semioticians of the 1980s tended
to give short-shrift to political aspects of the power
struggle, while subsequent New Historical readings
have rarely done justice to the intricacies of
signification. The A, however, clearly operates in
more than one arena; the focal point of the novel, it
is—among other things—text and penalty, public
brand and private albatross, obvious symbol and mys-
tic rune, badge of shame and emblem of pride. Both
Derridean possibilities of signification and Foucaul-
dian notions of power relations are certainly useful
for interpreting the struggle over the A; indeed, the
complicated push and pull between the two comes
sharply into focus when we view Hawthorne’s novel
through the lens of Thoreau’s contemporaneous
model of symbolic political action in “Resistance to
Civil Government.”
As many readers have noted, The Scarlet Letter fore-
grounds the signifying process, and while this would
seem to invite deconstructionist glosses, such glosses
raise a problem of circular logic in a text that fore-
grounds indeterminacies in signification. One way
around this problem is to claim Hawthorne as a de-
constructionist—as does Ralph Flores, who sees the
novel as an “allegory of an allegory” in which the A
is endlessly reallegorized and the symbol’s meaning
is endlessly deferred.2 While there is much in the text
to support such a reading, it is not fully adequate to
understanding the function of the A in the novel.
Hawthorne’s Puritans speak through the “godly mag-
istrates” with an unquestioning dependence on moral
authority; they are a people for “whom religion and
law [are] almost identical” (54, 50). Where political
power is linked to God and religion is the center
around which the community is structured, there can-
not be any casual questioning of the official decree
that brands Hester an adulteress. The very core of the
Puritan experiment depends on the ability to fix the
play of interpretation through access to grace, and
hence to God. If the A Hester wears begins to signify
contrary to what the magistrates have publicly deter-
mined, then that shift in meaning constitutes a loss of
control and poses a serious threat to the entire struc-
ture’s grounding.
The beginning of this “ungrounding” is inherent in
Dimmesdale’s private fall from grace and is later
strengthened by Hester’s public actions. While at first
the magistrates seem to have the power to fix the
meaning of the A within narrow boundaries, those
boundaries expand as the narrative unfolds. Admit-
tedly, the nature of the sign as a sign offers Hester an
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THE SCARLET LETTER
inherent instability she can exploit; however, she
must first find the power to act as an individual
against a seemingly monolithic Puritan society if she
is to resist the brand of “Adulteress.” The A isolates
Hester, but hardly equips her with the power to re-
sist; however, its indeterminacy enables her to ex-
ploit a weakness in the punitive, politically imposed
emblem her community uses to discipline her. In-
deed, the strategy she employs to gain political power
parallels Thoreau’s model of civil disobedience,
where action itself becomes symbolic and, con-
versely, the symbol can become a form of action. If
the symbolic A can be used to exert pressure on Hes-
ter, then it can also, to borrow Thoreau’s figure, be
“a counter friction to stop [or slow] the machine.”3
The metaphor of a lever implies a large imbalance in
force at the different ends, which pertains in the
novel: “The unhappy culprit sustained herself as best
a woman might, under the heavy weight of a thou-
sand unrelenting eyes, all fastened upon her, and con-
centred at her bosom. It was almost intolerable to be
borne” (56). Yet, if the symbol is the lever, then sig-
nification is the fulcrum, even though it proves a very
slippery site from which to pry.
As Derrida notes, part of “the structurality of struc-
ture” is that it necessarily posits a center: “The func-
tion of this center [is] not only to orient, balance and
organize the structure—one cannot in fact conceive
of an unorganized structure—but above all to make
sure that the organizing principle of the structure
[will] limit what we might call the freeplay of the
structure.”4 The desire for closure is closely linked to
repression in Derrida’s model of how language func-
tions in Of Grammatology: the closure of semantic
play is of prime concern to those invested in a
system. While Derrida avoids directly discussing the
nature of political power in this text, it is implicated
in the establishment and guardianship of a proposed
center: even as it offers a guarantee of meaning, it is
an instrument of repression. Basic to Derrida’s posi-
tion here is that the very invocation of this “center”
to guarantee meaning (through access to some pro-
posed transcendental signifier for ordering all signi-
fieds) risks putting that seemingly fixed center back
into play and thus raises the possibility of rupture.5
This looming possibility runs through The Scarlet
Letter: when Arthur Dimmesdale attempts to take the
A from Hester in the final scaffold scene, the ephem-
eral nature of the center is ultimately exposed. Rup-
ture can produce a crisis of emptiness, where the cen-
ter is shown to be nonexistent, and therefore must be
refixed, or supplemented (replaced), in some altered
form. The A on Hester’s chest obviously poses a
HAWTHORNE
threat to her (in the form of repression) and, less ob-
viously, to the community (in the risk of rupture). To
stop play and fix a center requires power, even vio-
lence, as the famous opening scene of The Scarlet
Letter clearly shows when the Puritan magistrates
demand that Hester name Pearl’s father.
Michael Gilmore recognizes in Hester a thinker who
resembles Henry David Thoreau and suggests “Tho-
reau may well have been in [Hawthorne’s] mind
when he wrote The Scarlet Letter.”6 G. Thomas
Courser convincingly argues that Thoreau influenced
“The Old Manse” (the prefatory sketch to Mosses
from an Old Manse, 1846) and shows that Haw-
thorne was in close contact with Thoreau and his
ideas in the period leading to the composition of The
Scarlet Letter, as does Buford Jones.7 “Twice, during
the winter of 1848-1849,” for example, Hawthorne
“arranged for Thoreau to lecture, offering to put the
young man up at his Mall Street house.”8 “Resistance
to Civil Government” (or “Civil Disobedience”) was
first published in 1849, one year before The Scarlet
Letter, in “Article X” of Aesthetic Papers; Haw-
thorne’s “Main Street” appeared in “Article VIII” of
the same publication, which was edited by his sister-
in-law, Elizabeth Peabody. Given this suggestive
proximity, Hawthorne’s deepest explorations of the
boundaries of society and the powers of individual-
ism—particularly the portrayal of Hester Prynne’s re-
sistance—need to be read in dialogue with Thoreau’s
essay.
As Thoreau recognizes, to “unground” the center one
questions requires some access to the system itself:
the call to civil disobedience in “Resistance” offers a
model for the entangled individual to exert a form of
power back against the “machinery” of government.
If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of
the machine of government, let it go, let it go:
perchance it will wear smooth,—certainly the ma-
chine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring,
or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for
itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the
remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is
of such a nature that it requires you to be the
agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the
law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the
machine.
(“RCG,” 73-74)
How deliberate was Hester’s decision to break the
law in the first place is left to the reader’s imagina-
tion, but in the marketplace she openly defies author-
ity, her husband, and her lover by refusing to impli-
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
cate Dimmesdale in return for proffered clemency.
Furthermore, she frames the A as beyond their con-
trol: “Never! . . . It is too deeply branded. Ye can-
not take it off. And would that I might endure his
agony, as well as mine!” (68). Dimmesdale interprets
her refusal to name him as the “generosity of a wom-
an’s heart,” and she does seem more generous than
he deserves. Is this honor among thieves, or is it, in
Thoreau’s terms, a refusal to “be the agent of injus-
tice to another”? The portrait of Hester that emerges
from The Scarlet Letter indicates that she finds the
imposition of the A and the pillory wrong and is
strong enough to do what she believes is right. Hes-
ter refuses to implicate Arthur even though he is
proof that the magistrates do not have access to the
font of moral authority—the “thing itself”—implied
by the sentence they impose. She alone among the
listeners knows this, and the knowledge cannot help
but strengthen her sense of being wronged. Arthur
Dimmesdale, whose civil power derives more from
an interpretative than from a formal judicial role, is
also keenly aware of the hollowness at the center, a
perfidy he implores Hester to expose: “Take heed
how thou deniest to him—who, perchance, hath not
the courage to grasp it for himself—the bitter, but
wholesome, cup that is now presented to thy lips!”
(67).
To speak, to accuse, and to share the stigma under
public pressure and scrutiny would, in part, validate
the signification the magistrates put on the A. To
name Arthur would save Hester from wearing the
embroidered A, but it would help secure the title
“Adulteress” as the magistrates define it. Hester
chooses silence. The “godly magistrates” rest their
authority upon the Divine, and Hester makes an im-
portant claim when she denies them the power to re-
move the A or to commute her sentence. Like the
elaborate embroidery she has worked into the letter,
this claim serves to disassociate the symbol from the
magistrates and to link it more directly to herself.
The power imbalance between the magistrates and
the lone “Adulteress” is great, yet the possibility of
rupture in the source of their power is apparent to
both Hester and Arthur. Initially, Hester is shamed
and punished on the pillory, for she has neither suffi-
cient power nor authority to force that rupture or take
sole ownership of the A, and the community meets
not only to fix the symbol upon her breast but to fix
its signification as well. Hester lacks the power to
avoid being branded, but by publicly accepting the
punishment meant for two and personalizing the A
she leaves no doubt that her own hand affixed the
symbol. After being released from prison she takes to
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
the “coarsest materials and the most sombre hue; with
only that one ornament,—the scarlet letter,—which it
was her doom to wear” (83). Hester effaces her
beauty to highlight the A, and she keeps it promi-
nently in the public eye.
The scarlet letter is the lever the community uses to
apply pressure to Hester, but as Thoreau points out,
such machinery works both ways. Hester takes up
the A in earnest and begins to apply pressure back
against the community, yet this struggle costs her
dearly. Thoreau’s rational and moral criteria for dis-
obeying unjust laws implies a critical detachment
from those who govern, a collective entity that “never
intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or
moral, but only his body, his senses”: “It is not armed
with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physi-
cal strength” (“RCG,” 80). Hawthorne’s protagonist
faces a seemingly more formidable “state” in the
form of the “godly magistrates,” for it is precisely
the intellectual and moral senses that they claim as
their source of power. Hester cannot stand aloof and
utter Thoreau’s confident challenge: “Let us see who
is the strongest” (“RCG,” 81). This is where the
model of civil disobedience in The Scarlet Letter
most differs from Thoreau’s, for Hawthorne posits
less potential for individual agency and a greater per-
sonal toll for being “a counter friction to stop the
machine.” Hester is in a grim battle, not of her choos-
ing, from which she cannot emerge unscathed. As
she leaves the prison, she muses on her future: “The
accumulating days, and added years, would pile up
their misery upon the heap of shame. Throughout
them all, giving up her individuality, she would be-
come the general symbol at which the preacher and
moralist might point” (79). This is a stark contrast to
Thoreau’s jail release, where he immediately joins a
huckleberry party, and soon is “on one of our highest
hills, two miles off; and then the State [is] nowhere
to be seen” (“RCG,” 84). Hester learns in the mar-
ketplace both the cost of becoming a symbol and the
high price of resistance, but she will not give the
magistrates the name they want, will not acknowl-
edge their right to impose or remove the letter, and
will not relinquish the symbol.
In a deconstructive, Derridean reading of the novel,
the distribution of power between Hester and her
community implicitly involves how much “play” will
be present when the magistrates impose the signifier
for “Adulteress” upon her. In Flores’s reading, “play”
is never repressed, and signification is endlessly de-
ferred by an infinite number of allegorical
substitutions. Allan Lloyd Smith agrees that the A is
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THE SCARLET LETTER
always in play but argues that Hawthorne provides
moments of “true-speech—as in Hester’s moving de-
fense of her right to keep Pearl, and Dimmesdale’s
final ability to ‘speak out the whole.’”9 Smith’s re-
course to “true-speech” is at root non-Derridean, and
he reads the overall novel in terms of Dimmesdale
saving himself by escaping indeterminacy, by finding
access to “true-speech” and “winning ultimate vic-
tory over the letter” (80). For Smith, play is a dan-
gerous force aligned with the darker aspects of the
novel, but for Monika Elbert slippage in signification
is a positive event, which allows Hester to save
herself. Elbert sees Hester (ultimately) operating from
a position of Amazonian strength: “The emblem that
she wears and invests with her own meaning . . .
makes her untouched, untouchable, and strong.”10
Sacvan Bercovitch agrees that Hester takes up the
struggle against, and in fact represents a radical threat
to, the community, but in his view the “office of the
letter” involves a process of socialization, where
“Hester’s ‘badge of shame’ becomes the ‘mystic’ to-
ken of integration.”11 For Elbert The Scarlet Letter is
an affirmation of the maternal and of Hester’s power,
while for Bercovitch (in his first assessment of the
novel) it is “a subtle and devastating critique of Hes-
ter’s radicalism.”12 Both interpretations presuppose
that the power of the signifier is crucial: in the former
Hester gains control over the signification of the A;
in the latter she is finally defined by the community’s
imposed meaning. But the novel resists the assump-
tion that power lies unilaterally with either Hester or
the Puritan community. Foucault has also observed
that power has no locus, but exists in complex rela-
tional webs: “One impoverishes the question of
power if one poses it solely in terms of legislation
and constitution, in terms solely of state and the state
apparatus.”13 This is to say, not that an institution
cannot wield power, but that power does not flow
from any one source or in only one direction.
The balance of power within the novel at first seems
to weigh overwhelmingly against Hester. If the A is a
lever, she is clearly on the short end of the stick.
Hawthorne’s Puritan Boston is rigidly ordered into a
solid community “as befit[s] a people amongst whom
religion and law [are] almost identical” (50). While
the reader sees some interpretive play in the crowd,
to Hester it appears monolithic, and though the settle-
ment is relatively new, the narrator describes it in
terms that lend it an air of stolid permanence. The
community that gathers to condemn Hester is “som-
ber . . . grave . . . heavy . . . unrelenting . . . sol-
emn . . . leaden”: clearly, they are not to be taken
lightly (56-57). The town’s people present an appar-
HAWTHORNE
ent front of moral certainty around Hester as she
emerges from her jail cell, and they make up the bulk
of the audience as she is displayed on the pillory:
“They were stern enough to look upon her death, had
that been the sentence, without a murmur at its sever-
ity” (56). The clergy and magistrates (with the no-
table exception of the tremulous Arthur) claim to
speak with absolute, transcendent authority: “Woman,
transgress not beyond the limits of Heaven’s mercy!”
(68). Hester is displayed, with the A and Pearl, and a
formidable force arrays itself around her to fix these
conjoint symbols with a single, irrevocable signified.
Hester is separated from the community and exhib-
ited as a criminal to ensure that all know the mean-
ing of the A and to whom it applies. Yet even had
Hester been among that “leaden” crowd, she would
have stood out markedly by dint of her commanding
beauty and assertive individualism: “The young
woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance, on
a large scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so
glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam,
and a face which, besides being beautiful from regu-
larity of feature and richness of complexion, had the
impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep
black eyes” (53). Hester, presumably, is not ignorant
of her own beauty; nor is the community: “Those
who had before known her, and had expected to be-
hold her dimmed . . . were astonished, and even
startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out.” Her
pulchritude, her fatherless child, and her A work to
set Hester apart from the community; yet, from the
outset of this “spectacle of guilt and shame,” she does
some staging of her own, by the only means avail-
able to her (53, 56).
For this occasion Hester wears a rich gown that ac-
centuates her beauty, just as she accentuates the red
A with gold thread and elaborate needlework. “She
hath good skill at her needle, that’s certain,” a female
spectator exclaims; “but did ever a woman, before
this brazen hussy, contrive such a way of showing
it!” The letter, “so fantastically embroidered,” defies
expectation, and Hester’s detailed illumination in-
vites different interpretations (54, 53). The older
women see her action as proud and disrespectful,
while a young woman interprets it as a sign of bur-
den and pain: “Do not let her hear you! Not a stitch
in that embroidered letter, but she has felt it in her
heart” (54). Even at the moment when the magis-
trates bring to bear the full weight of the communi-
ty’s legal, religious, and social power, Hester works
her needle to create a small space for alternate
interpretations. She personalizes the symbol and
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
makes it even more conspicuous on her breast, con-
founding expectation by taking ownership of the let-
ter rather than trying to distance herself from it. Hes-
ter plies her needle in an act of resistance against her
punishment, although her powers of resistance are
limited by the role assigned her in the community’s
drama of discipline.14 “Knowing well her part, she as-
cended a flight of wooden steps, and was thus dis-
played to the surrounding multitude” (55-56).
Thoreau turns his act of civil disobedience into a pub-
lic speech, first delivered at the Concord Lyceum on
26 January 1848, but Hester has no such avenue open
to her. Thoreau’s famous opening line, “I heartily ac-
cept the motto,—‘That government is best which
governs least,’” has its ironic opposite in the edicts
of the Puritan magistrates, who attempt to govern not
only behavior but also individual souls. The only pub-
lic voice allowed Hester is to answer the magistrate’s
question, to which she replies, “Never! . . . I will
not speak!” (68). Elbert—who sees the conflict in
this scene in terms of matriarchy and patriarchy—
claims that “Hester’s silence is victorious over her
male judges.”15 Silence is a part of Hester’s strategy
for resistance, but the long battle is only begun in the
marketplace, and it is difficult to infer victory for her
from this encounter: “After her return to the prison,
Hester Prynne was found to be in a state of nervous
excitement that demanded constant watchfulness, lest
she should perpetrate violence on herself, or do some
half-frenzied mischief to the poor babe” (70). Hes-
ter’s limited power lies in the secret of her lover’s
identity and in her symbolic actions. Her first action
is to make the letter distinctly her own, and her sec-
ond, when she is released from prison, to “besto[w]
all her superfluous means in charity, on wretches less
miserable than herself.” The public plying of her
needle is equally overdetermined and excessive: “By
degrees, nor very slowly, her handiwork became what
would now be termed the fashion” (83, 82).
In numerous critical studies that attend to Hester’s
artistry, the A, as well as Pearl, figure as extensions
of her creativity. Hester uses her needle to draw fur-
ther attention to the A as well as to Pearl through the
latter’s gorgeous clothing: “It was a remarkable at-
tribute of this garb, and, indeed, of the child’s whole
appearance, that it irresistibly and inevitably re-
minded the beholder of the token which Hester
Prynne was doomed to wear upon her bosom. It was
the scarlet letter in another form; the scarlet letter en-
dowed with life!” (102). When the magistrates stand
Hester alone before the community and brand her
with the A, denying her the power to turn away from
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
the public gaze, her first impulse is to cover the sym-
bol by hugging Pearl to her breast; “however, wisely
judging that one token of her shame would but poorly
serve to hide another, she took the baby on her arm,
and, with a burning blush, and yet a haughty smile,
and a glance that would not be abashed, looked
around at her townspeople and neighbours” (52-53).
Hester defiantly returns the gaze and quickly realizes
that cowering or hiding the emblem would tacitly
grant the full signification the community attempts to
attach to her letter (and her Pearl). Rather, she
chooses to do everything in her power to display
these “tokens” as prominently as possible, and
throughout the novel characters attempt to read their
significance.
Thanks in part to Pearl’s visibility, she remains
largely outside of the community, and as a signifier
she becomes increasingly ungrounded, and thus open
to interpretation and appropriation. Until Hester steps
forward to claim her, Governor Wilson initially has
no clue what to make of Pearl when he finds her in
his mansion. Chillingworth, who knows more about
Pearl than most, is also confused by her: “There is
no law, nor reverence for authority, no regard for hu-
man ordinances or opinions, right or wrong, mixed
up with that child’s composition. . . . What, in
Heaven’s name, is she?” (134). Often even Hester
isn’t sure: “Child, what art thou?” (97). Pearl is the A
rampant: cut loose from any “center” or transcendent
signifier, she represents the sort of “play” that threat-
ens to undermine the authority of those who would
fix meaning. While Hester deliberately works to cre-
ate a parallel between Pearl and the A, it proves to be
a dangerous maneuver, for it excites the magistrates’
interest in the child’s “present depravity, and future
destiny.” As a result Hester nearly loses her Pearl,
and only a thinly veiled threat to Dimmesdale saves
her: “Speak thou for me! . . . thou knowest what is
in my heart. . . . Look thou to it! I will not lose the
child! Look to it!” (112, 113). Dimmesdale promptly
looks to it, and Wilson puts Pearl’s soul into his care.
Although Elbert claims that “Hester’s maternity is ul-
timately her weapon against patriarchy,” Hester actu-
ally miscalculates here and nearly loses her daughter.16
She is too sure of her own power, “so conscious of
her own right, that it seem[s] scarcely an unequal
match between the public, on the one side, and a
lonely woman, backed by the sympathies of nature,
on the other” (101). The “public,” however, still has
the power to determine what is “right,” and her voice
falls on deaf ears. Through her leverage on Dimmes-
dale she is able to keep Pearl, but Hester’s relative
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THE SCARLET LETTER
powerlessness before the magistrates is once again
forcibly impressed on her. They will not hear of any
“right” but what they decree, and to resist them she
must return to her silent strategy of ungrounding the
letter. Even Pearl cannot draw glosses on the letter
from her, for Hester does not have the power of voice
to change its signification, and she would not have
Pearl know of its “meaning.” When Pearl creates an
imitation A of grasses and places it on her chest, she
wonders “if mother will ask [her] what it means!”
Pearl, herself an unreadable rune of both innocence
and sin, comes before her mother “dancing, laughing,
and pointing her finger to the ornament upon her
bosom.” “‘My little Pearl,’” Hester says, “after a mo-
ment’s silence, ‘the green letter, and on thy childish
bosom, has no purport. But dost thou know, my child,
what this letter means which thy mother is doomed
to wear?’” (178). Hester is unable here to determine
how much the child actually understands about why
she must wear the letter, but Pearl does accurately
link it to a concealed cause: “It is for the same rea-
son that the minister keeps his hand over his heart!”
(179). Pearl’s response is typically both naïve and
perceptive, but it reinforces the novel’s exploration
of links between social action and meaning. Hester
opposes the magistrates through limited action com-
bined with passive resistance, and she uses both the
letter and Pearl to create alternate possibilities for
signification.
Hester creates friction, keeping her fantastical A in
the public gaze, year after year, constantly forcing it
back upon the community, forcing interpretation and
reinterpretation. She acts, in the limited space al-
lowed her, slowly building a public identity as an
agent of mercy and kindness: “Such helpfulness was
found in her,—so much power to do, and power to
sympathize,—that many people refused to interpret
the scarlet A by its original signification. They said
that it meant Able; so strong was Hester Prynne with
a woman’s strength” (161). The town begins to call
her “our Hester,” but she is not their Hester; she is
working to become her own Hester—and becomes
less theirs with every reinterpretation of the A. In
spite of these reinterpretations, the A never com-
pletely loses its original stigma, for those who praise
her also remember the scene in the marketplace:
“Then, it is true, the propensity of human nature to
tell the very worst of itself, when embodied in the
person of another, would constrain them to whisper
the black scandal of bygone years” (162-63). None-
theless, Hester succeeds in opening up some play,
and the signifier begins to invoke different signifieds:
Adulteress, Able, Affection, Apostle, Angel, and so
HAWTHORNE
on. This ungrounding of the signifier represents a
threat to the Puritan community—which has invoked
a transcendent, divine center to fix the letter’s ten-
dency toward play—but it also represents a threat to
Hester.
If we accept the premise that signification depends
on limiting play—on protecting a “center” linked to
power structures within a given society—then Hes-
ter’s project threatens to cut her loose from the very
powers that hold society together. When, after seven
years, Chillingworth mentions that the magistrates
are considering removing the letter, Hester again de-
nies the community’s power to apply or reclaim the
A. “It lies not in the pleasure of the magistrates to
take off this badge. . . . Were I worthy to be quit of
it, it would fall away of its own nature, or be trans-
formed into something that should speak a different
purport” (169). Her distance from the community is
metaphorically represented in chapter 16, “A Forest
Walk.” Like Young Goodman Brown’s before her,
Hester’s journey into the woods offers an ambiguous
mix of freedom and danger. The narrator is alert to
the gender issues raised: “The scarlet letter was her
passport into regions where other women dared not
tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her
teachers,—stern and wild ones,—and they had made
her strong, but taught her much amiss” (199-200). In
The Politics Aristotle claims: “The man who is iso-
lated . . . is no part of the polis, and must therefore
be either a beast or a god.”17 The portrait of isolation
that Hawthorne paints in The Scarlet Letter is con-
gruent with Aristotle’s dictum, for as Hester wanders
further (in thought and belief) from her community,
she becomes more “wild.” Ultimately, all that binds
her to it is the letter and Dimmesdale, and when Dim-
mesdale agrees to escape with her, she decides to
sever the final tie and throws the A into the brook.
The decision to leave, take Arthur with her, and cast
off the symbol shows Hester’s remaining strength
and her heroic qualities; beside her, Arthur seems
like a tremulous wisp of a human being. However,
for all her strength, Hester is neither a beast nor a
god, and she cannot safely sever the ties to
community. Years of resistance have worn her down,
and her life at the periphery of society has plunged
her into a “dark labyrinth of mind,” with “wild and
ghastly scenery all around her, and a home and com-
fort nowhere” (166). In this novel there is no solid
place to stand outside of society to criticize it, no
condition of “sainted individualism,” and when Hes-
ter casts off the last vestige of her community (even
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
one she is deliberately undercutting), she is adrift.
For Hawthorne, stepping outside of society is akin to
decentering the self.
If we view Hester’s resistance as civil disobedience,
using the office of the A as a lever to exert “a counter
friction to stop the machine,” then we find in The
Scarlet Letter an implicit criticism of Thoreau’s po-
sitioning of the individual in relation to the slave-
holding society of the era. Thoreau posits the state as
a collection of autonomous individuals who must de-
cide for themselves what is just and unjust, and he
assumes a solid margin where a citizen dissenting
from the dominant slavery-tolerating society may op-
erate as a “free agent.” While the model of dissent in
The Scarlet Letter critiques such a concept of radical
individualism, it does not necessarily critique radical-
ism or individualism per se. The view that people
cannot separate themselves from their culture does
not inevitably lead to the conclusion that they cannot
resist societal pressures. It is also important to note
that despite Hester’s humbled and seemingly power-
less position, it is not the most humble or powerless
position imaginable to Hawthorne’s or Thoreau’s
readers. The specter of slavery haunts The Scarlet
Letter, most obviously in the figure of Hester on the
scaffold in the marketplace, and in what Jean Fagan
Yellin terms the novel’s “obsessive concern with
blacks and blackness.”18
Teresa Goddu situates Hawthorne in a market
economy permeated by the slave trade and links his
customhouse duties to a commerce dependent on sla-
very: “Realigning Hawthorne’s career through his
edited works and situating him within a circum-
Atlantic maritime/mercantile culture makes intelli-
gible how the slave trade structures Hawthorne’s au-
thorship, as well as his art.” Goddu convincingly
argues the pervasiveness of slavery in the New Eng-
land market economy; however, her claim that “Pearl
is not only figured as a commodity but also associ-
ated with the Caribbean” and that she “signifies slave
as property” is less compelling.19 The slave occupies
the most helpless and alienated place in society, and
even as Hester and Pearl bring slavery to mind we
must recognize the racial advantages that privilege
them above African slaves in North America. Leland
S. Person clearly maps the distinction:
Refusing to name her child’s father, resisting the
efforts of the good masters to take her child away,
planning an escape to freedom—Hester resembles
the slave mothers like Harriet Jacobs even as her
actions signify and thereby underline the politics
of racial difference. Situating Hester in a complex
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
and objective position in which slave motherhood
and anti-slavery feminism come together, [Haw-
thorne] represents the presumption—the identifi-
cation of black and white women’s experiences
and politics—that cuts as sharply today as it
would have in the nineteenth century. Hester’s
abject dependence upon patriarchal sufferance for
her mothering rights links her to her slave sisters,
but her ability to mother at all marks her feminist
difference from slave mothers like Harriet
Jacobs.20
The echoes of the slavery debates of the mid—nine-
teenth century that occur in The Scarlet Letter do in-
directly correlate with the characters of Hester and
Pearl, but Hawthorne does not take on the issue of
abolition directly in the novel. Despite Hester’s
“blackness,” she retains racial privileges that allow
her to resist in ways that slave women could not.21
Hawthorne’s protagonist is invested in her commu-
nity, and vice versa, in ways never open to antebel-
lum slaves but often afforded to white reformers and
radicals. Hester, with all of her heroic qualities, risks
becoming lost when cut off from her community—
even to the point of considering infanticide and sui-
cide—but Arthur Dimmesdale also contemplates
shocking forms of antisocial behavior. Arthur is a
community-minded creature: “his native gifts, his
culture, and his entire development would secure him
a home only in the midst of civilization and refine-
ment” (215). Once he accepts Hester’s plan to aban-
don the community, he is completely ungrounded; he
becomes the “Black Man” who haunts the forest, the
devilish deconstructionist who wants to wreak
mischief. Hester makes this connection when Pearl
asks if she has ever met the Black Man: “Once in my
life I met the Black Man! . . . This scarlet letter is
his mark!” (185). Disrespect, lechery, blasphemy, and
absurdity all boil over in the minister as he walks
from the woods, and in several impetuous moments
he longs to undo what he has spent a lifetime helping
to build. Hester becomes self-destructive, but Arthur
becomes a menace to the Puritan strategy of repres-
sive order, wishing to uncover all that has been sup-
pressed and disciplined: “Scorn, bitterness, unpro-
voked malignity, gratuitous desire of ill, ridicule of
whatever was good and holy, all awoke, to tempt,
even while they frightened him” (222). Hawthorne
vividly portrays the danger of cutting loose the bonds
of society in the decentered Arthur Dimmesdale, but
he also shows that Hester fares better. In Hester’s
strong and intuitive individualism, her ability to walk
the margins of society, and her desire to change the
status quo, we can see strong parallels to Thoreau.
Conversely, in Dimmesdale’s reaffirmation of the cen-
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THE SCARLET LETTER
ter, and his implicit defense of the status quo, we can
find echoes of Hawthorne’s conservatism: the sup-
port of Franklin Pierce, the defense of inaction, and
the failure to support abolition.22 It is, then, not too
large a leap to suggest that the unusual and trouble-
some union between Hester and Arthur may have
some of its genesis in the unlikely friendship between
Thoreau and Hawthorne.
Arthur cannot live, even briefly, outside of his society.
He has neither Hester’s long-suffering practice nor
her strength, and he spins out of control in the first
hour after he cuts himself free. Dimmesdale must re-
center himself, and he does so at his peak, in his fi-
nal election sermon, at Hester’s expense. “He stood,
at this moment, on the very proudest eminence of su-
periority, to which the gifts of intellect, rich lore,
prevailing eloquence, and a reputation of whitest
sanctity, could exalt a clergyman in New England’s
earliest days, when the professional character was of
itself a lofty pedestal” (249-50). In a stunning final
act of betrayal, Arthur attempts to take from Hester
the symbol she has worked seven long years to make
her own, and over which she has repeatedly denied
the magistrates power. “People of New England! . . .
[B]ehold me here, the one sinner of the world!”
(254): Arthur belatedly imposes the letter on himself
in the very spot where Hester withstood her trial and
attempts to reinvest it, using all of his power and
prestige, with the magistrates’ original meaning. In
this act, while Hester physically supports him, he un-
dermines her long battle with the symbol by opting
to “save” himself: “‘Is not this better,’ murmured he,
‘than what we dreamed of in the forest?’” Arthur, de-
termined to die pure, goes out preaching to the
woman he never claimed as his wife. However, Hes-
ter is unwilling to accept his moral dictum, the one
she has fought throughout the novel; she is still meta-
phorically in the woods, harboring the destructive
thoughts brought on by the rupture with her commu-
nity: “‘I know not! I know not!’ she hurriedly replied.
‘Better? Yea; so we may both die, and little Pearl die
with us!’” (254). In belatedly claiming his shame,
Arthur reinvokes the stigma on Hester with nearly its
original fixity and then leaves her to bear it alone.
Worn down, humiliated, betrayed, and deserted, Hes-
ter finally breaks.
Unable to live any longer with the Puritans, or apart
from community, Hester ends her resistance and flees
to Europe with Pearl. Dimmesdale’s final act, where
he literally bares his breast to display “the ghastly
miracle” of his hysterical A, confuses his parishio-
ners as much as it reinscribes the symbol (255). De-
HAWTHORNE
bate ensues as to whether the A actually appeared,
what it means, and how he acquired it. Inadvertently,
Arthur’s action further puts the signification of the
symbol into play, and even the narrator cavils: “The
reader may choose among these theories” (259).
Arthur attempts to reenact the original scaffold scene
and expunge his moral cowardice by taking the letter
on himself; however, his confession casts serious
doubt on the magistrates’ access to an inviolable font
of moral authority, which allowed them to fix the
signifier with only one meaning. At his zenith as a
minister, Arthur Dimmesdale confesses before the
whole community that he was never any better than
Hester. By seizing and elaborating the A with which
she was branded, Hester had wrested alternative pos-
sible meanings of the talisman from the “fixed” origi-
nal, and Arthur’s confession (though far from his in-
tent) further decenters the signifier. Hester had
melded with the letter: “giving up her individuality,
she [became] the general symbol at which the
preacher and moralist might point, and in which they
might vivify and embody their images of women’s
frailty and sinful passion” (79). After Arthur’s con-
fession “their images” lose a great deal of authority.
With Arthur dead and Hester (along with her scarlet
letter) gone, the signifier becomes a mystical symbol
in the imaginations of the interpretative community:
“The story of the scarlet letter grew into a legend. Its
spell, however, was still potent, and kept the scaffold
awful where the poor minister had died, and likewise
the cottage by the sea-shore, where Hester Prynne
had dwelt” (261). The revivified, embodied signifier
disappears, but the conflict over signification gains a
life of its own, ambiguously divided between the
symbols of the scaffold and Hester’s empty hut. The
potent spell of Hester’s story not only holds sway
over the Puritan community but pins her firmly in
New England despite her years of absence after
Arthur’s death. Hawthorne likens the social bond,
reified in the scarlet letter, to an iron chain that “never
could be broken” (80). Hester never allowed those
bonds to form on Pearl, and what initially appears to
be an escape from the repressive community of Puri-
tans is merely a trip to transplant the “little elf” (92)
into a more hospitable environment. We are not to
imagine that Pearl remains free of societal bonds,
only that they form elsewhere, without her mother’s
stigma. Pearl makes a clean break and lives, presum-
ably happily, married and wealthy, somewhere in
Europe. Hester comes back: “There was a more real
life for Hester Prynne, here, in New England, than in
that unknown region where Pearl had found a
home. . . . She had returned, therefore, and re-
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
sumed,—of her own free will, for not the sternest
magistrate of that iron period would have imposed
it,—resumed the symbol of which we have related so
dark a tale” (262).
Why Hester takes up the symbol again is important to
understanding The Scarlet Letter. Although Berco-
vitch once saw the novel as a “subtle and devastating
critique of Hester’s radicalism,” in his fuller treat-
ment of The Scarlet Letter he modifies that view to
one that credits both socialization and resistance: “the
scarlet letter is an adversarial representation of cul-
tural process, whose radical office lies in its capacity
to be nourished by the structures it resists.” Berco-
vitch acknowledges Hester’s individualism and defi-
ance, yet still sees the resumption of the letter as
“her final acquiescence.”23 Bercovitch’s argument has
largely defined the critical debate surrounding The
Scarlet Letter in the last decade, and one of the most
thoughtful responses is Robert Milder’s nuanced ac-
count of Hawthorne’s uneasy acceptance of “the re-
quirements of social and moral order that make sup-
pression, repression, and human deformity a condition
of society as it has always existed.”24 While any dis-
cussion of Hester’s return necessarily enters into the
extended discussion of the A and its disciplining of-
fice, the primary purpose here is to tease out the
model of Hester’s civil disobedience in conjunction
with Thoreau’s ideas.25 When we view Hester’s ac-
tions through the lens of civil disobedience, it is not
her return, but rather her departure that signals ca-
pitulation to societal forces.
Hawthorne opens the novel with the epitome of pow-
erlessness: a disenfranchised, unwed, defiant mother
standing before the authority of the Puritan magis-
trates and her community, branded with the cruel and
unusual symbol of the A. Considering that at least
half of the culpability for the “crime” lies in the very
bosom of the magistrates, this is clearly an example
of Thoreau’s notion of an “injustice [which] has a
spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank exclusively
for itself.” Thoreau warns that the remedy (resistance)
may be worse than such an evil, and sets the addi-
tional criteria that “it requires you to be the agent of
injustice to another” before advocating civil disobe-
dience (“RCG,” 73). The parallels between Thoreau’s
model and Hester Prynne’s resistance are more than
coincidence—Hester refuses to speak the father’s
name and takes the penalty, literally, onto herself,
meeting all of Thoreau’s criteria for becoming a
“counter friction to stop the machine” (“RCG,” 74).
After Arthur’s attempt to recenter and reclaim the A,
Hester surrenders her long struggle for a time, but
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
her return is not an acquiescence; rather, it is a re-
sumption of her resistance.
Hester is tied to her community, but so too is it bound
to her. The narrator tells us that not the “sternest mag-
istrate of that iron period” would re-impose the sym-
bol on Hester when she returns, but her resumption
of the A shows that it no longer belongs to the
magistrates. Hester’s return opens old wounds, forces
back on the interpretative community a symbol it
would rather forget, and reinitiates the long struggle
over signification. It is too triumphant a reading of
Hester’s return to suggest that she has succeeded in
making the A completely indeterminate (as Flores
suggests), or that she has managed to affix her own
signified (as Elbert claims). The special properties of
the signifier aid Hester in her resistance, and she suc-
ceeds in opening some play within the structure—a
Herculean task considering the forces set against her.
She cannot deconstruct the Puritan patriarchy, nor
gain access to any transcendental signifier on her
own; however, she does unground the A enough that
it “cease[s] to be a stigma which attract[s] the world’s
scorn and bitterness,” a relatively small but important
victory for friction against the Puritan order (263).
The Scarlet Letter is a fictional arena where Haw-
thorne pits an apparently powerless individual against
a repressive social order and shows the high cost of
resisting civil government. Those who see Hester as
the “winner” of this elemental struggle, a model of
individualism triumphant, miss the important fact
that Hester never escapes the pressures of her com-
munity and that she incurs grave risks in living too
close to the outer boundaries of her society. Con-
versely, the view of Hester as a soul crushed into
conformity by socialization—a proto-Winston Smith
who finally loves Big Brother—ignores the pressures
that she applies back onto her community as well as
the space for dissent she opens within the Puritan
order. While Hawthorne does not agree with Thoreau
that the “individual [is] a higher and independent
power, from which all [the state’s] own power and
authority are derived,” The Scarlet Letter is dynamic
evidence that he believes in the power of individual
action to change the social order (“RCG,” 89). Hes-
ter Prynne never stands above or beyond her commu-
nity, and when she escapes to give Pearl a fresh start
in Europe, she leaves behind an “awful,” empty space
where she had worn a niche for herself. The scarlet
letter is not only Hester’s life sentence; it is her life’s
work. When she returns to take it up again, it is not
with enthusiasm but with a grim, weary determina-
tion, and the community immediately feels the heat.
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THE SCARLET LETTER
She who had once been “the general symbol at which
the preacher and moralist might point” becomes a
kind of authority herself. The aggrieved, the sorrow-
ful, the confused and the discontented all “c[o]me to
Hester’s cottage, demanding why they [are] so
wretched, and what the remedy!” (263). Hester has
no better answer than that she believes things will
eventually change, but her own transformation en-
courages them to hope and to question their social
conditions in a manner markedly different from the
“monolithic” crowd at the novel’s beginning.
Hawthorne’s model of resistance to civil government
differs from Thoreau’s insofar as the individual must
work from within a community rather than from a
proposed neutral margin, but he ultimately agrees
that an individual can create friction to wear against
the machine, and that such friction can eventually
smooth out some injustices. Hester is not a heroic
figure with a lever searching for some imagined
archimedean site from which to move her world;
rather, the conflict between the magistrates and Hes-
ter can be visualized as a Venn diagram, where Hes-
ter’s “counter friction” creates a gap—a “magic circle
of ignominy”—from within the magistrates’ sphere
of influence (246). The cost of resistance is high be-
cause the friction wears both ways, but Hester suc-
ceeds in exploiting the instability of the symbol and
altering the status of the A through stamina and
courage. The combined weight of the magistrates’
power, the condemning communal gaze, and the so-
cietal chains that bind Hester to New England all
mount up to a more formidable civil opponent than
Thoreau posits in “Resistance”; however, and per-
haps surprisingly, The Scarlet Letter supports Tho-
reau’s position that effective individual resistance is
possible against, and healthy for, the civic body. The
dark, gloomy aspect of the novel shows that Haw-
thorne believes that such resistance will be long and
difficult—in stark contrast to Thoreau’s caustic ef-
forts to wake (and shame) his neighbors into action—
and that the results may be somewhat ambiguous.
Hester, after all, ends up next to Arthur beneath a
“simple slab of slate” with the A rendered in “the
semblance of an engraved escutcheon.” The armorial
A, both as blazon and shield, signifies for both com-
batants in the fray, and the struggle for control over
the signifier literally follows Hester to her grave,
leaving the reader to “perplex himself with the pur-
port” (264). Dimly, an “ever-glowing point of light
gloomier than the shadow” retains the lambency of
friction and counter friction, and continues to pro-
duce some critical heat.
HAWTHORNE
Notes
1. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, ed.
William Charvat et al., vol. 1 of The Centenary
Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne
(Ohio State Univ. Press, 1962), 53-54. All fur-
ther references are to this edition of The Scarlet
Letter and are cited parenthetically by page
number.
2. Ralph Flores, “Underground Allegory: The
Deadly Living Letter in Hawthorne’s The Scar-
let Letter,” Criticism 29 (1987): 338.
3. Henry D. Thoreau, “Resistance to Civil Gov-
ernment,” in Reform Papers, ed. Wendell Glick,
in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau
(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1988), 73-74.
All further references are to this edition and are
cited parenthetically as “RCG.”
4. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in
the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writ-
ing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago:
Chicago Univ. Press, 1978), 278.
5. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997).
6. Michael Gilmore, American Romanticism and
the Marketplace (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press,
1985), 85.
7. G. Thomas Courser, “‘The Old Manse,’ Walden,
and the Hawthorne-Thoreau Relationship,”
ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance
21 (1975): 11-20; Buford Jones, “‘The Hall of
Fantasy’ and the Early Hawthorne-Thoreau Re-
lationship,” PMLA 83 (1968): 1429-38, esp.
1434.
8. James R. Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne in His
Times (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press,
1998), 289.
9. Allan Lloyd Smith, “The Elaborated Sign of the
Scarlet Letter,” ATQ 1 (1987): 69-82.
10. Monika M. Elbert, “Hester’s Maternity: Stigma
or Weapon?,” ESQ: A Journal of the American
Renaissance 36 (1990): 198.
11. Sacvan Bercovitch, The Offıce of “The Scarlet
Letter” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press,
1991), xii.
12. Sacvan Bercovitch, “Hawthorne’s A-Morality
of Compromise,” Representations 24 (1988): 1.
13. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected
Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977,
trans. Colin Gordon, et al. (New York: Pan-
theon, 1980), 158.
124
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
14. For further discussion of Hester’s needlework
as an act of resistance, see Gilmore, American
Romanticism, 85; Rita K. Gollin, “‘Again a Lit-
erary Man’: Vocation and the Scarlet Letter,” in
Critical Essays on Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet
Letter” (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988); Leland S.
Person Jr., Aesthetic Headaches: Women and a
Masculine Poetics in Poe, Melville, & Haw-
thorne (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1988);
and Jon B. Reed, “‘A Letter,—The Letter A’: A
Portrait of the Artist as Hester Prynne,” ESQ: A
Journal of the American Renaissance 36 (1990):
79-108.
15. Elbert, “Hester’s Maternity,” 179.
16. Elbert, “Hester’s Maternity,” 198.
17. Aristotle, The Politics. trans. Benjamin Jowett
(New York: Modern Library, 1943), 6.
18. Jean Fagan Yellin, Women & Sisters: The Anti-
slavery Feminists in American Culture (New
Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989), 138.
19. Teresa A. Goddu, “Letters Turned to Gold:
Hawthorne, Authorship, and Slavery,” Studies
in American Fiction 29 (Spring 2001): 49-76,
65.
20. Leland S. Person, “The Dark Labyrinth of the
Mind: Hawthorne, Hester, and the Ironies of
Racial Mothering,” Studies in American Fiction
29 (Spring 2001): 49-76.
21. In addition to the studies cited above, see the
following for a more complete discussion of
slavery in The Scarlet Letter: Deborah L. Mad-
sen, “‘“A” for Abolition’: Hawthorne’s Bond-
Servant and the Shadow of Slavery,” Journal of
American Studies 25 (1991): 255-59; Jean Fa-
gan Yellin, “Hawthorne and the American Na-
tional Sin,” in The Green American Tradition:
Essays and Poems for Sherman Paul, ed. H.
Daniel Peck (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
Univ. Press, 1989), 75-97; Jay Grossman, “‘A’
is for Abolition?: Race, Authorship, The Scarlet
Letter,” Textual Practice 7 (Spring 1993): 13-
30.
22. In her biography of Hawthorne, Brenda Wine-
apple comments on the roots of Hawthorne’s
conservatism: “To one who never felt quite at
home, the symbolic loss of one—the dissolu-
tion of the Union—was intolerable”; see Haw-
thorne: A Life (New York: Alfred A Knopf,
2003), 262.
23. Bercovitch, Offıce of “The Scarlet Letter,” 154,
116.
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
24. Robert Milder, “The Scarlet Letter and Its Dis-
contents,” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 22
(Spring 1996): 23. This issue of NHR carries a
series of responses to Bercovitch.
25. Bercovitch published a subsequent article, with
some response to the criticism in NHR 22, in
the following fall edition: “The Scarlet Letter:
A Twice-Told Tale,” Nathaniel Hawthorne Re-
view 22 (Fall 1996): 1-20. These two issues, in
conjunction with The Offıce of “The Scarlet Let-
ter,” offer an excellent entry point into this com-
plex discussion of The Scarlet Letter.
Constance C. T. Hunt (essay date winter 2009)
SOURCE: Hunt, Constance C. T. “The Persistence of The-
ocracy: Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.” Perspectives on
Political Science 38, no. 1 (winter 2009): 25-32.
[In the following essay, Hunt argues that Hawthorne’s The
Scarlet Letter may be used as a means of exploring the
apparent broad appeal of theocratic institutions to mass
audiences while identifying the potential dangers of ignor-
ing these impulses by secularists.]
In his recent book The Stillborn God: Religion, Poli-
tics, and the Modern West, Mark Lilla argues that
contemporary secular thinkers have overlooked the
continuing appeal and tenacious persistence of politi-
cal theology in the modern world. In Lilla’s view, the
contemporary appeal of political theology exposes
the limited and fragile character of the modern politi-
cal experiment of separating church and state, revela-
tion and secular law.1 Indeed, one need not look far
to find examples of the striking incongruity between
the secular principles that inform liberal democracies
and the moral horizon that characterizes significant
parts of the rest of the world. In a recent New York
Times article, “Executions Are Under Way in Iran for
Adultery and Other Violations,” Nazila Fathi reports
the public stoning of an adulterer in Iran, with twenty
more executions planned for adultery and other
crimes against morality.2 One may be tempted to dis-
miss the theocratic morality that supports such harsh
punishment as an aberrant remnant of premodern
attitudes. However, such a cavalier dismissal ignores
a paradox: these revolutionary theocratic political
movements developed at the same time as some were
arguing that modern secular political principles had
eclipsed all other political alternatives.3
The resurgence of theocratic regimes in the contem-
porary world defies the logic of the modernization
and secularization arguments that dominated social
125
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THE SCARLET LETTER
science discourse in the mid-twentieth century. These
arguments suggest that the emergence of contempo-
rary theocratic regimes must be seen in the context
of economic and cultural conditions where modernity
never really took hold in the first place. In this view,
the turn to theocracy should be understood as a back-
lash against the threat that liberal modernity’s ratio-
nalism and moral relativism pose to such premodern
societies.4 This analysis of the return of theocracy as-
sumes that economic and social conditions account
for the persistent appeal of theocratic regimes. This
assumption in turn reflects our own rarely examined
secular biases.
In order to remind us of the theocratic position’s in-
trinsic force, Lilla reexamines the arguments of early
modern political philosophers who explicitly engaged
with revelation as a powerful and persistent source of
moral and political authority. In his view, these early
modern thinkers had a better understanding of the
strength of theocracy and the challenge it poses to
liberal democratic principles and practices than we
do today. Just as Lilla argues that reexamining the
views of early modern political philosophers can re-
mind contemporary readers of the roots of the
struggle between theocracy and liberal democracy, I
argue in this article that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The
Scarlet Letter can provide us with insight into the
persistent force of the moral and political certitudes
that theocracy offers. An examination of The Scarlet
Letter in the light of this theme can serve as a cor-
rective to liberal secularism’s myopic tendency to
downplay the continuing moral and political appeal
of religious belief and authority. In The Scarlet Let-
ter, Hawthorne portrays the seventeenth-century Puri-
tan settlers of New England as seeking liberation
from religious persecution in Europe only in order to
establish their own rigorous moral and religious stric-
tures in the New World. Hawthorne suggests that the
Puritans’ understanding of liberation cannot be sepa-
rated from strict adherence to their own dogmatically
certain moral code.
Hawthorne’s consideration of the persistence of the-
ocracy in The Scarlet Letter focuses in particular on
the Puritan theocratic state’s attempt to regulate erotic
behavior. In their article “The True Clash of Civiliza-
tions,”5 Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris respond to
Samuel P. Huntington’s clash of civilizations thesis6
and cast a contemporary light on the theme of regu-
lating sexual mores. On the basis of data from the
World Values Surveys,7 they argue that Huntington
was wrong about the “clash of civilizations.” The
clash is less about democracy or political values than
HAWTHORNE
the social and political status of women, sexual lib-
eration, and state regulation of sexual behavior.
A comparison of the data yielded by these sur-
veys [World Values Surveys, 1995-96 and 1999-
2001] in Muslim and non-Muslim societies
around the globe confirm[s] the first claim in Hun-
tington’s thesis: Culture does matter—indeed, it
matters a lot. Historical religious traditions have
left an enduring imprint on contemporary values.
However, Huntington is mistaken in assuming that
the core clash between the West and Islam is over
political values. At this point in history, societies
throughout the world (Muslim and Judeo-
Christian alike) see democracy as the best form
of government. Instead, the real fault line between
the West and Islam, which Huntington’s theory
completely overlooks, concerns gender equality
and sexual liberalization. In other words, the val-
ues separating the two cultures have much more
to do with eros than demos.8
Strikingly, these same issues of the clash of cultures
and the role of gender are central themes for Haw-
thorne in his early nineteenth-century novels and
short stories. For Hawthorne, the legacy of the past,
particularly America’s Puritan theocratic past, per-
sists in his present. In his fiction, Hawthorne fre-
quently looks back on earlier generations of English
settlement in America as a mirror that reflects the di-
lemmas facing post-Jacksonian America. Among the
dilemmas that most preoccupy Hawthorne is the elu-
sive promise of human perfection inherent in Ameri-
can culture. He sees this perfectionism expressed in
his own time, both in Americans’ embrace of modern
natural science’s promise of technological progress
and in utopian political projects sustained by this
promise. He does not, however, see the promise of
human perfectibility as unique to his contemporary
situation or solely as a response to the idea of scien-
tific progress. In his writings, Hawthorne calls atten-
tion to the perfectionism inherent in the earlier Puri-
tan experiment of creating a closed, dogmatically
certain, moral community. The Scarlet Letter ad-
dresses both the moral ambiguity of this Puritan
legacy and its persistence in his present.
Given the prominence of Hawthorne’s work in
American letters, as well as the critical controversy it
has generated, his writings have been the subject of
extensive study and critical commentary. Such au-
thors as Herman Melville, Henry James, William
Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and John Updike, to
name only a few, have acknowledged Hawthorne as
an inspiration and literary source. Literary theorists
have also produced a wide range of critical respones
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
to his work. However, only a few political theorists
have seriously examined Hawthorne’s works. The
more notable of these theorists, Wilson Carey McWil-
liams,9 Catherine Zuckert,10 and Judith Shklar,11 agree
that Hawthorne’s novels and short stories address po-
litical dilemmas at the core of American public life
and that an examination of his work from the stand-
point of political theory is both justified and
necessary.
McWilliams focuses on Hawthorne’s nuanced under-
standing of the nature and limits of fraternity as part
of a broader study of the idea of fraternity in Ameri-
can life. McWilliams argues against the view that the
development of the American republic can be under-
stood solely in terms of the secular ideal of liberal
individualism. He finds evidence in American reli-
gious and social movements—and in the work of
writers such as Hawthorne—of a distinctively Ameri-
can tradition of fraternalism, which both complement
and remedy what McWilliams regards as the excesses
of liberal individualism. Whereas McWilliams situ-
ates Hawthorne’s work in a countertradition within
American letters, Zuckert places greater weight on
the evidence in his work of the liberal, natural right
tradition. Zuckert turns to Hawthorne as part of a
larger project exploring the role of the idea of natural
right in American literature. She summarizes the po-
litical implications of his account of human nature in
the following passage:
Hawthorne’s own romances have a clearly psy-
chological focus. But there is a generally ne-
glected political thrust as well. If human beings
are selfish and contentious by nature, the question
arises: How can they best organize civil society
to overcome their natural faults?12
Like McWilliams and Zuckert, Shklar is impressed
by Hawthorne’s nuanced political judgment. Shklar’s
essay on Hawthorne is connected to both her critical
examination of modern utopian movements and her
aspiration to articulate a new basis for American po-
litical thought. She finds Hawthorne’s profound skep-
ticism about all forms of extreme social and political
arrangements admirable. In her words, “[Hawthorne]
illuminated both the ambiguity of utopia and the fault
of its foes.”13 In Shklar’s view, although Hawthorne
does not regard the Puritan colonial era as a utopia,
he portrays it as an in many respects admirable, if
rather grim, society of piety, resolve, and dignity.
This article builds on the pioneering work of these
political theorists. However the main focus of this ar-
ticle concentrates on a theme—the persistence of the-
ocracy—that has not been explicitly examined in their
writings.
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
THE SCARLET LETTER
The publication of The Scarlet Letter in 1850 imme-
diately provoked considerable controversy. On one
hand, its autobiographical introduction gave rise to
charges of political partisanship. On the other hand,
its central narrative provoked moral outrage. The
book’s title has become synonymous with the stigma
of public disgrace. For readers today, however, new
obstacles stand in the way of understanding the nov-
el’s controversial character. For the most part, the
novel has been relegated to high school curricula,
where it is taught as both a heavy-handed morality
tale and a dated history lesson. Neither the morality
nor the history is particularly appealing to students,
nor does either reflect an especially accurate reading
of the novel. Such formulaic and one-dimensional in-
terpretations, which gloss over the novel’s profound
moral and political ambiguities, put off reflective
readers. However, if one can overcome the prejudice
and over-familiar interpretation that the novel is a
one-dimensional morality tale, one will find that
Hawthorne neither reduces the novel’s dilemmas to a
simple moral dichotomy nor forces his readers into a
hasty, simplistic interpretation of its intentions.
Rather, The Scarlet Letter poses fundamental ques-
tions that encourage readers to reach their own
conclusions. To explore Hawthorne’s understanding
of the persistence of theocracy, this article examines
three significant puzzles in the text: first, the relation-
ship between the introduction, “The Custom-
House,” and the main narrative of the novel; second,
the puzzle of Dimmesdale’s behavior; and third, the
question of why Hester Prynne returns to Puritan
Boston at the conclusion of the novel, rather than re-
maining in Europe with her daughter, Pearl.
“THE CUSTOM-HOUSE”
Hawthorne begins The Scarlet Letter with an intro-
ductory section, “The Custom-House.” This intro-
duction is chronologically out of place in the context
of the work as a whole. There are indications in the
main narrative of The Scarlet Letter that suggest the
events in the novel take place in Boston during the
early years of the Puritan settlement, around 1642-
49.14 “The Custom-House,” however, is set during
the author’s lifetime in the late 1840s. Hawthorne
presents “The Custom-House” as an autobiographi-
cal reflection on his unhappy three-year sojourn in
public life prior to his return to full-time professional
writing. The two parts of the book seem at first glance
to have little to do with each other. The introduction
is set in the present and appears factual. The main
narrative is fictional, although presented as historical
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THE SCARLET LETTER
fact, and set two centuries prior to the period of the
introduction. The juxtaposition of these two parts
does, however, draw attention to the contrast between
Hawthorne’s contemporary world and the Puritan
past, in which the main narrative takes place. The in-
troduction depicts a world in which preoccupation
with commerce and materialism has diminished the
scope of human aspiration and the variety of human
character. Its critical tone suggests that it would be a
mistake to read Hawthorne’s portrayal of Puritan
New England as simply negative. Although he ac-
knowledges the harshness of the Puritan past, Haw-
thorne does not regard his contemporary world as
self-evidently superior.
That the introduction was not merely added haphaz-
ardly to the main text is made clear by the fact that
Hawthorne retained “The Custom-House” in later
editions of the work, although he had a strong incen-
tive not to do so. The author was sharply criticized
for his critical sketches of certain political appointees
in the real Custom House after the publication of the
first edition of The Scarlet Letter. He added a brief
but pointed “Preface to the Second Edition,” in
which he responds to suggestions that he temper, or
even omit, these depictions of contemporary figures.
In this preface, which he retained in subsequent edi-
tions, Hawthorne writes:
Much to the author’s surprise, and (if he may say
so without additional offence) considerably to his
amusement, he finds that his sketch of official life,
introductory to The Scarlet Letter, has created an
unprecedented excitement in the respectable com-
munity immediately around him. It could hardly
have been more violent, indeed, had he burned
down the Custom House, and quenched its last
smoking ember in the blood of a certain vener-
able personage, against whom he is supposed to
cherish a peculiar malevolence. As the public dis-
approbation would weigh very heavily on him,
were he to deserve it, the author begs leave to say
that he carefully read over the introductory pages,
with the purpose to expunge whatever might be
found amiss, and to make the best reparation in
his power for the atrocities of which he has been
adjudged guilty. But it appears to him, that the
only remarkable features of the sketch are its
frank and genuine good-humor, and the general
accuracy with which he has conveyed his sincere
impressions of the characters therein
described. . . .
The author is constrained, therefore, to republish
his introductory sketch without the change of a
word.15
In this passage, Hawthorne adamantly defends retain-
ing “The Custom-House” as an integral part of The
HAWTHORNE
Scarlet Letter, in spite of its apparent incongruity
with the main body of the text and the public criti-
cism to which its publication exposed him. Haw-
thorne’s decision to retain the introduction raises the
question, to which I have already alluded, of how to
understand the relationship between the two parts of
the book. Hawthorne deliberately mixes past and
present throughout the introduction. He juxtaposes
reflections on his ancestral Salem family with charac-
ter sketches of his contemporaries in the Salem Cus-
tom House.
Beginning in 1846, Hawthorne, a beneficiary of the
political spoils system, served for three years as the
Surveyor of the Revenue in the Salem Custom
House.16 Hawthorne begins his autobiographical re-
flections with a genealogy of his ancestral ties to
Salem. According to Hawthorne, his first American
ancestor arrived in America with the Puritan settle-
ment in 1630. He “came so early, with his Bible and
his sword. . . . He was a soldier, legislator, judge;
he was a ruler in the Church.”17 Although Hawthorne
depicts him as dignified and stately, this ancestor per-
secuted the Quakers. That ancestor’s son then served
as one of three judges in the Salem witch trials, guar-
anteeing Hawthorne’s early ancestors a certain de-
gree of fame, or notoriety. For Hawthorne, however,
what most characterized his Salem ancestors was
their “persecuting spirit.”18
In the introduction, Hawthorne describes an imag-
ined dialogue in which his ancestors dismiss his liter-
ary profession as sheer idleness and “disgraceful.”19
Nonetheless, Hawthorne claims that he was drawn to
the position in the Custom House precisely because
of its location in his ancestral home, Salem, to which
he has, in his words, an “unjoyous attachment.”20 He
is drawn back to Salem in order better to understand
himself by making sense of his own past. Both drawn
to and ashamed of his ancestry, Hawthorne’s reflec-
tions on these years in Salem are an attempt to con-
front the legacy of the past and the moral contradic-
tions in his heritage. Hawthorne is preoccupied with
understanding the relationship between his Puritan
ancestors’ moral seriousness and their persecuting
spirit. On one hand, their serious moral purpose em-
boldened the Puritans to seek a New World where
they would be able to practice their religion freely.
On the other hand, the zeal inherent in their moral
seriousness led them to persecute non-Puritans. With
this tension in mind, Hawthorne refers to “the Puri-
tanic traits, both good and evil.”21 As the offspring of
such morally ambiguous founders, Hawthorne must
wrestle with the contradictory legacy of Salem and
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
Puritan New England as a whole in his autobiographi-
cal reflections.22
In the introduction to The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne
contrasts the moral seriousness of his Puritan forefa-
thers with the crass materialism of his contemporar-
ies in the Custom House.23 Whereas the moral pur-
pose of his Puritan forefathers had a fierce
determination, his contemporaries lack moral
strength. Hawthorne describes one of the characters
in the Custom House as so completely desensitized
by his environment that he cannot even respond emo-
tionally to the tragic loss of his children and wives.
He ironically portrays another character in the Cus-
tom House as a “man of business”; when he encoun-
ters someone confused by a business transaction,
[w]ith an easy condescension, and kind forbear-
ance towards our stupidity,—which to his order
of mind, must have seemed little short of crime,—
would he forthwith, by the merest touch of his
finger, make the incomprehensible as clear as
daylight.24
The man of business thrives within the confines of
the Custom House, but he appears to have neither a
personal history nor any connection to his community.
Hawthorne portrays him as a purely anonymous
being. The man of business lives in a perpetual
present. He possesses business acumen and has no
patience for those who lack it.25 Compared with the
earnestness and energy of Hawthorne’s ancestors, the
character of his contemporaries appears frivolous and
enervated.
Hawthorne’s fictive discovery of the “Scarlet Letter”
and his very real ouster from office with the victory
of the Whig presidential candidate, Zachary Taylor,
save his character from the destructive effects of the
Custom House. He describes his dismissal from of-
fice as being politically “guillotined.”26 However, only
when he is cut off from the demoralizing effect of
dependency on political patronage can Hawthorne’s
sense of inquiry and powers of perception finally
reawaken. The purported discovery of the scarlet let-
ter both compels and allows Hawthorne to reimmerse
himself in the Puritan theocratic past.
In the introduction, Hawthorne claims to find the ac-
tual remnant of the scarlet letter in a neglected corner
of the Custom House, along with an account of the
events depicted in the manuscript pieced together a
century later by a previous occupant of the Custom
House, Surveyor Pue. Hawthorne imagines the char-
acter of Pue as a ghost exhorting him to take up the
story of Hester Prynne.
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
With his own ghostly voice he had exhorted
me. . . . —who might reasonably regard himself
as my official ancestor,—to bring his mouldy and
moth-eaten lucubrations before the public. “Do
this,” said the ghost of Surveyor Pue, emphati-
cally nodding the head that looked so imposing
within its memorable wig,—“do this, and the
profit shall be all your own!” . . . And I said to
the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue, “I will.”27
Through this autobiographical fiction, Hawthorne not
only finds the inspiration for his novel but also dis-
covers his true intellectual ancestor. He identifies this
true ancestor on the basis not of blood ties but of a
shared intellectual temperament and desire to under-
stand the Puritan theocratic past. This ancestor, Haw-
thorne imagines, commands him to return to writing.
Paradoxically, his “unjoyous attachment” to Salem
yields an unexpected source of inspiration.
In “The Custom-House,” Hawthorne is drawn to the
moral seriousness of his ancestors’ Puritan theocracy,
but he is also acutely aware of the harsh vindictive-
ness inherent in their moral absolutism. At the same
time, Hawthorne recognizes that the materialistic life
of the Custom House corrupts the weaker characters
who work there and fails to sustain even the stronger
ones. The focus on commercial affairs fosters the de-
velopment of an anonymous and impatient type of
human being. Similar concerns that the focus on com-
mercial affairs would foster the development of an
anonymous and impatient type of human being had
also been raised by Tocqueville and others in the
early nineteenth century.28 Hawthorne’s discovery of
the scarlet letter allows him to focus his contempo-
rary imagination on the much more compelling theo-
cratic past. Hawthorne’s insistence on retaining “The
Custom-House” as an introduction to The Scarlet
Letter sharpens the contrast between the superficial-
ity of commercial life and the dignified, if harsh, so-
ciety of believers. In this way, Hawthorne alerts any
reader who reflects seriously about society and hu-
man potential to consider the persistence of theoc-
racy in the story of Hester Prynne.
DIMMESDALE’S SILENCE AND REVELATION
Reverend Dimmesdale’s public silence about his re-
lationship to Hester Prynne, which reaches its para-
doxical culmination when he finally reveals his pater-
nity just before his death, poses a dilemma similar to
that of the relationship between “The Custom-
House” and the novel as a whole. Hawthorne sup-
plies clues throughout the course of the novel before
revealing explicitly at the conclusion that the elo-
quent, Oxford-educated minister Arthur Dimmesdale
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THE SCARLET LETTER
is the father of Hester’s daughter, Pearl. Unlike read-
ers of the novel, the citizens of Boston are completely
unaware until the conclusion that Dimmesdale is the
father of Hester’s child. Even after this revelation,
some members of the community still cannot believe
that their beloved and esteemed minister was guilty
of adultery—even though Dimmesdale has obliquely
suggested as much throughout the course of the
novel. In his sermons, Dimmesdale repeatedly em-
phasizes his sinfulness and unworthiness to serve as
minister to his flock. However, he never openly ad-
mits or takes explicit responsibility for his illicit af-
fair with Hester. He hides his specific sin behind a
rhetorical invocation of the intrinsic sinfulness that
the Puritans ascribed to all mankind.29 The first men-
tion of Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter plays on
this fusion of the individual’s particular sinfulness
with a conception of the fallen state of human nature
as such. When Hester first appears on the scaffold as
part of her public penance, one of the women in the
crowd remarks: “People say . . . that the Reverend
Master Dimmesdale, her godly pastor, takes it very
grievously to heart that such a scandal should have
come upon his congregation.”30 Hawthorne here indi-
cates that Dimmesdale’s situation should be inter-
preted in this double sense: the intertwining of the
particular and the universal, the private and the pub-
lic, within a community of believers.
This fusion, or confusion, required by the Puritan
theocracy, is at the heart of Dimmesdale’s tragedy.
He cannot openly acknowledge his private guilt with-
out undermining his public position in the community.
Initially, it seems as if he has deluded himself into
thinking that his heartfelt public sermons can serve
as a kind of private penance. However, the reader
discovers midway through the novel that Dimmes-
dale has been privately punishing himself by engag-
ing in self-flagellation, mutilation, fasting, and sleep
deprivation. His public reticence is a mask conceal-
ing his self-inflicted torture and extreme asceticism.
Ignorant of these private mortifications, the commu-
nity members perceive Dimmesdale’s increasing
physical weakness merely as a sign of failing health.
They encourage Roger Chillingworth to provide
medical care. Their care and affection grow as Dim-
mesdale’s physical state weakens and his sermons
become ever more elevated in their rhetorical invoca-
tion of human sinfulness and the righteousness of di-
vine punishment. Dimmesdale’s guilty conscience in-
directly, by inspiring his public display of suffering,
enhances his standing in the community. He knows,
however, that revealing the true cause of his display
of guilt would destroy his public authority.
HAWTHORNE
More than once, he had cleared his throat, and
drawn in the long, deep, and tremulous breath,
which when sent forth again would come bur-
dened with the black secret of his soul. . . . But
how? He had told his hearers that he was vile, the
worst of sinners, an abomination, a thing of un-
imaginable iniquity. . . . They little guessed what
deadly purport lurked in those self-condemning
words. . . . The minister well knew—subtle, but
remorseful hypocrite that he was!—the light in
which his vague confession would be viewed.31
Dimmesdale’s hypocrisy goes to the very heart of the
inner tension within the Puritan theocracy between
belief in original sin, its corollary that the individual
can only be saved by God’s grace, and a social and
political order intolerant of human beings’ imperfect
and fallen nature.32 Consequently, the pursuit of moral
perfectionism at the political and social level requires
that individuals conceal their private imperfections.
What appears to be Dimmesdale’s personal hypoc-
risy is, in fact, consonant with the tenets of his faith
and the moral norms of his community. Given the te-
nets of Puritan faith, the moral perfection sought in
this life can only be hoped for in the next.
Dimmesdale finally reveals his paternity of Hester’s
child on the scaffold in the marketplace before the
crowd gathered for the Election Day celebration.33
Before his revelation, Dimmesdale delivers an espe-
cially elevated and otherworldly sermon. Pale and
exhausted after the sermon, he summons Hester and
Pearl to join him on the scaffold. He tells the crowd
that he should have stood with Hester seven years
earlier. Speaking of himself, Dimmesdale cries out,
“He bids you look at Hester’s scarlet letter! He
tells you that with all its mysterious horror, it is
but the shadow of what he bears on his own
breast, and even this, his own red stigma, is no
more than the type of what has seared his inmost
heart! Stand any here that question God’s judg-
ment on a sinner! Behold! Behold a dreadful wit-
ness of it.”
With a convulsive motion he tore away the minis-
terial band from his breast. It was revealed!34
Hawthorne never precisely describes what appeared
on Dimmesdale’s breast but suggests that an “A” has
been inscribed in Dimmesdale’s flesh. In the final
moment before his death on the scaffold, Dimmes-
dale says,
God knows; and He is merciful! He hath proved
his mercy most of all by my affliction. By giving
me this burning torture to bear upon my
breast! . . . By bringing me hither, to die this
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
death of triumphant ignominy before the people!
Had either of these agonies been wanting, I had
been lost for ever! Praised be his name! His will
be done! Farewell!35
Is there a stigma on Dimmesdale’s breast? Hawthorne
neither confirms nor denies the presence of a genuine
stigma. Rather, he suggests a range of interpretations
based on the crowd’s reactions to Dimmesdale’s
revelation. The narrator depicts four different ac-
counts of what was seen on Dimmesdale’s breast.
The first account is that there is indeed a scarlet let-
ter etched into the minister’s breast by his own hand.
The second ascribes the stigma to “magic and poi-
sonous drugs,” which a vengeful Chillingworth had
administered to Dimmesdale. A third account ascribes
the mark to the influence of “Heaven” and the “ever
active tooth of remorse.” In the final account, there is
nothing on his breast. Rather, Dimmesdale intends
his death to be a parable for the fallen nature of hu-
man beings, evidence that “we are all sinners alike.”36
Hawthorne suggests that all four explanations convey
different aspects of the truth. Dimmesdale did harm
himself, Chillingworth did procure life-threatening
ministrations, Dimmesdale did suffer from an excru-
ciating sense of guilt, and his faithful parishioners
could take his flawed life as a parable for the fallen
state of mankind. For Dimmesdale, there is no earthly
escape from the troubled condition of his body and
soul. His sin and guilt cannot be absolved in this life.
His faith requires submission to the ultimate conse-
quences of his belief.
In Dimmesdale, one finds a powerful example of
Hawthorne’s reflection on the seriousness of the per-
sistence of theocracy. From the point of view of the
believer, which Dimmesdale clearly is, belief requires
subordinating the self to the strictures of faith in the
divine order. What I earlier labeled Dimmesdale’s
tragedy is only a tragedy from the point of view of
those outside his faith. From the point of view of
Dimmesdale and those who share his faith, his tor-
tured ordeal, which brings together his private suffer-
ing and his public pronouncement, is not a tragic tale
but, rather, an example of redemption. From the mod-
ern, secular perspective, Dimmesdale’s “triumphant
ignominy” is the epitome of irrational hypocrisy.
From the point of view of the believer in Christian
redemption, Dimmesdale’s private suffering and pub-
lic confession are consonant with the fallen character
of humanity that only God’s mercy can relieve.
Hawthorne’s portrayal of Dimmesdale’s character
sharpens the contrast between the untroubled, muted
spirits of the occupants of the Custom House and the
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
moral seriousness of Puritan Boston and reminds us
of the frailty of human nature. The Puritan theocracy
concerns itself deeply with this frailty, whereas the
commercial regime tends to flatten and dull concern
about it. Although Hawthorne did not regard a return
to the harshness of the Puritan regime as either pos-
sible or desirable, he nevertheless acknowledges the
depth of its understanding of human weakness.
HESTER’S RETURN
In the final chapter of the novel, which follows Dim-
mesdale’s revelation, the narrator reports that Chill-
ingworth dies less than a year after Dimmesdale’s
death, leaving his considerable fortune to Pearl. This
inheritance gives Pearl both paternal legitimacy and
wealth. She and Hester then leave Boston for Europe.
Hawthorne suggests that Pearl eventually marries into
an aristocratic family and has children of her own.
Yet shortly after Pearl’s marriage, Hester returns to
Boston. She reoccupies her isolated cottage and vol-
untarily replaces the embroidered letter “A” on her
breast. Hawthorne suggests a motive for this perplex-
ing behavior in the following passage:
But there was more real life for Hester Prynne,
here, in New England, than in that unknown re-
gion where Pearl had found a home. Here had
been her sin; her sorrow; and here was yet to be
her penitence . . . the scarlet letter ceased to be a
stigma which attracted the world’s scorn and bit-
terness, and became a type of something to be
sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, yet
with reverence, too . . . people . . . besought her
counsel.37
What does Hawthorne mean when he writes that there
is “more real life” for Hester in Boston? Why does
she not remain with her daughter, for whose sake she
endured public shame and humiliation? Suggestions
about this puzzle can be found earlier in the novel.
In the middle of the novel, in the chapter “Another
View of Hester,” Hawthorne pauses to consider the
effect of seven long years of ostracism on Hester.
The narrator comments that Hester seems to have ac-
cepted her punishment dutifully and with humility.
She remains nearly invisible within the community,
never drawing attention to herself and devoting her-
self to the care of the sick and poor. She appears to
have accepted her penance with such grace that many
in the community change their view of her. She no
longer seems the epitome of sinfulness and erotic
transgression but, rather, a humble servant of the
community. They no longer see the “A” on her breast
as a symbol of adultery but as signifying “Able.”38
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THE SCARLET LETTER
Even Hester’s physical appearance has changed. She
conceals her beauty beneath austere clothing that she
assumes with the wearing of the scarlet letter. Haw-
thorne indicates, however, that the public perception
of Hester’s transformation does not capture the truth
about her inner life. Although by all external mea-
sures Hester has fully accepted her punishment, she
remains inwardly unrepentant. As Hawthorne puts it,
“The scarlet letter had not done its office.”39
Hawthorne suggests that the reason for Hester’s ex-
ternal conformity to the moral conventions of her
community is her attachment to her daughter and the
fear that she might be taken from her. Hidden be-
neath her solemn exterior, Hester’s mind remained
free:
The world’s law was no law for her mind. It was
an age in which the human intellect, newly eman-
cipated, had taken a more active and wider range
than for many centuries before. Men of the sword
had overthrown nobles and kings. Men bolder
than these had overthrown and rearranged—not
actually but within the sphere of theory, which
was their most real abode—the whole system of
ancient prejudice, wherewith was linked much of
the ancient principle. Hester Prynne imbibed this
spirit. She assumed a freedom of speculation, then
common enough on the other side of the Atlantic,
but which our forefathers, had they known of it,
would have held to be a deadlier crime than that
stigmatized by the scarlet letter.40
The chapter title points to the double sense of an-
other view of Hester. From the public point of view,
she is penitent and reformed. From the point of view
of her inner life, however, she is more independent
and rebellious than at the start of her punishment.
This other view of Hester makes her return to Boston
at the end of the novel even more puzzling. When
she no longer has the responsibility of parenting and
has the freedom to live wherever she wills, she
chooses to return to Boston and replace the scarlet
letter on her chest. Why doesn’t her sense of inquiry
and freedom of thought keep her in what Hawthorne
describes as the more liberal social and political en-
vironment of Europe? Hawthorne suggests three pos-
sible interpretations of Hester’s return. The first em-
phasizes the moral and political motives for her
return, the second the romantic ones, and the third
her sense of penitence.
According to the first interpretation, Hester returns to
Boston to continue caring for the dispossessed in the
community. She regards it as her moral obligation
HAWTHORNE
and duty to provide shelter, comfort, and counsel for
those who have suffered under the Puritan communi-
ty’s harsh moral strictures, particularly its strictures
on the erotic. In particular, women seek Hester out
because they find her a reliable advisor regarding the
burdens that fall on women in the Puritan community.
The public persecution that she suffered and the cour-
age she shows in returning give her the authority to
help these women. She attempts to comfort them with
her belief that the relation between men and women
will ultimately move toward a greater degree of
complementarity and equality between the sexes. As
Hawthorne writes,
[A]t some brighter period, when the world should
have grown ripe for it, in Heaven’s own time, a
new truth would be revealed, in order to establish
the whole relation between man and woman on a
surer ground of mutual happiness.41
Hester seems to base this hope on her judgment that
someone who, like herself, takes seriously the habits
of the heart and the longing for genuine erotic
completion, will lead a political reform that trans-
forms domestic relations in the community and al-
lows for the possibility of a common purpose be-
tween men and women.
Some analysts of this section view Hawthorne’s sug-
gestive remarks on the equality of the sexes as antici-
pating later liberal democratic reforms based on an
extension of the idea of natural right to both sexes.
Hawthorne suggests that greater equality between the
sexes and women’s freedom to choose their own
spouses may provide “the surer ground of mutual
happiness” he speaks of. These remarks also evoke
Tocqueville’s discussion of the centrality of the edu-
cation of girls and of women to the health and well-
being of a liberal democracy.42 However, these hope-
ful remarks are wishes, not certainties. Hawthorne’s
skepticism leaves open the question of whether this
hopeful prognosis will ever be fulfilled.
The second interpretation of Hester’s return to Bos-
ton emphasizes its romantic component. She returns
to be united with Dimmesdale, if only in death. Haw-
thorne suggests this motive very obliquely. When
Hester dies, she is buried near an older grave, and
one tombstone serves for both graves. Hawthorne
implies that the older grave is Dimmesdale’s. If this
interpretation is correct, Hester’s motive in returning
to Boston is to find the communion with her lover in
death that she could not find in life.
The third interpretation of Hester’s return is that she
understands that her penitence is unfinished. The
community no longer imposes this penitence; she
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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
chooses it for herself. Her decision suggests that her
self-understanding is deeply connected with Puritan
Boston. The anonymity of exile does not provide her
with the conditions in which to live the purposeful
life she intended for herself. Her spiritedness and in-
dependence of mind, which contributed to her erotic
rebellion, are displaced, and in many respects irrel-
evant, away from this specific moral community of
faith. She returns older and, it seems, less ambitious
about radical reform of the community. Yet her re-
turn is an exceptional act of independence. Her peni-
tence is unfinished because her sin and its punish-
ment were never a matter of the actions of an isolated
individual. Her return signals her recognition of the
deep interdependence between her self-understanding
and Puritan Boston.
When these three interpretations of Hester’s return to
Boston are considered together, one finds both hope
and skepticism about resolving the moral and politi-
cal dilemmas posed by erotic longing. Some have
read the conclusion as fundamentally hopeful about
the ways liberal democratic reforms may reduce in-
equalities between the sexes and secure a greater
realm of privacy and freedom. I suggest, however,
that Hawthorne indicates as well the more problem-
atic aspects of this liberal democratic resolution. The
harsh Puritan theocracy under which Hester lives,
and to which she returns at the end of the novel, cer-
tainly heightens but does not itself cause Hester’s
erotic dilemma. As the third interpretation of her re-
turn suggests, Hester’s erotic longing springs from
her independence of mind, which only makes sense
within a particular context. For the serious-minded,
reflective Hester Prynne, the moral rigor of the Puri-
tan New World settlement is her only true home. In
her, Hawthorne examines the persistence of theoc-
racy from the point of view not of the believer but of
the morally serious and reflective human being. As
the conclusion will suggest, this position points to
Hawthorne’s own reasons for returning to a study of
theocracy.
CONCLUSION
In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne examines the ways
in which the moral claims of theocracy continue to
hold appeal in the modern world. In “The Custom-
House,” he contrasts the enervating and flattening ef-
fect of a narrow focus on commerce on the inner life
of his fellow officers in the Custom House with the
greater moral seriousness of the Puritan past. Despite
his criticism of the harsh and often unjust character
of Puritan life, Hawthorne does not clearly reject it
in favor of liberal commercial modernity. This con-
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
trast between past and present is echoed in the main
narrative of the novel in a passage where Hawthorne
describes an elderly man and woman similar in age
and circumstance to some of his fellow officers in the
Custom House. Of the older man, Hawthorne writes,
“[N]ever was there a more beautiful example of how
the majesty of age and wisdom may comport with
obeisance and respect enjoined upon it.”43 This de-
scription contrasts markedly with Hawthorne’s ac-
count of the enfeebled and lethargic old General in
the Custom House. Of the older woman, Hawthorne
writes that her “heart [was] full of reminiscences of
her dead husband and children. . . . Yet with all this,
which would have been such a heavy sorrow, was
made almost a solemn joy to her devout old soul by
religious consolations and the truths of the
Scripture.”44 This portrait of dignified grief contrasts
strikingly with Hawthorne’s portrayal of the charac-
ter in the Custom House who was incapable feeling
any grief for his dead children and wives. In Haw-
thorne’s presentation the Puritan theocracy, despite
its harsh intolerance, does not dehumanize those who
live under it. Rather, the Puritan regime encourages
moral purpose and dignity. It does not slight the old
or discount the sentiments of attachment and grief.
Illustrating this contrast—not merely denouncing the
Puritan regime for its hypocrisy—is surely part of
the author’s intention in choosing to write about the
Puritan past.
However, Hawthorne’s presentation of Dimmesdale’s
character emphasizes another, less attractive aspect
of a theocratic society based on the acceptance of re-
vealed truth. Dimmesdale’s moral and intellectual
self-understanding cannot be detached from his Puri-
tan faith. His ecclesiastical status in the community,
as well as his sex, which allows him to conceal his
paternity of Pearl, compel him to pursue a path of
hypocrisy and self-contradiction. As I have argued in
this article, Dimmesdale’s behavior as an individual
is consistent with the ideology of Puritan theocracy.
The premise that human beings are born with origi-
nal sin conflicts with the pursuit of moral perfection
in this life, creating tension. Dimmesdale’s inner con-
flict mirrors the internal contradiction in Puritan
theocracy. His struggle is that of a believer who, af-
flicted with all the weaknesses of an ordinary mortal,
attempts the impossible task of living up to his com-
munity’s extreme moral demands. From the believ-
er’s point of view, Dimmesdale appears less a hypo-
crite than an exemplary case of man’s fallen nature
and hope for redemption.
Hawthorne’s presentation of Hester’s character un-
derscores a much more unsettling aspect of theocracy.
133
(c) 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
THE SCARLET LETTER
Unlike Dimmesdale’s subservience to the norms of
his community, Hester’s understanding of herself is
not dominated by faith in revealed religion. More-
over, her inability as a woman to hide her maternity
forces Hester, unlike Dimmesdale, to engage the con-
flict between moral perfectionism and individual fal-
libility in an immediate and public way. In doing so,
she develops a far greater independence of mind and
moral autonomy than Dimmesdale. Despite her inde-
pendence, however, Hester chooses in the end to re-
turn to Boston and the strictures of living in a com-
munity of faith and moral seriousness. Her return
indicates both a sense of moral duty and a desire for
erotic completion. Hawthorne’s choice of setting for
his novel suggests that both of these motives can be
more clearly understood within the constraints of a
morally rigorous community.
Hawthorne’s view of the persistent appeal of theoc-
racy appears similar to Hester’s motives for returning
to Boston. In his words, there is “more real life” in
Puritan Boston than in the modern commercial world
of the Custom House. At the very least, Hawthorne
takes theocracy seriously as an object of reflection
and inquiry. Serious inquiry requires serious subject
matter, and the Puritan theocracy, despite its manifest
shortcomings, is worthy of such inquiry. Hawthorne’s
account in The Scarlet Letter of the complex relation
between the Puritan past and the commercial present
is consonant with Lilla’s suggestion:
The argument over religion and politics did not
end with the dawn of the modern age, or the En-
lightenment, or the American and French revolu-
tions, or the birth of modern science, or any other
crypto-messianic moment. It did not end because
it could not, because it concerns an enduring ques-
tion that all societies implicitly face: whether to
order their political affairs in light of divine rev-
elation, or to make their way alone.45
Notes
1. Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Poli-
tics, and the Modern West (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 2007).
2. Nazila Fathi, “Executions Are Under Way in
Iran for Adultery and Other Violations,” New
York Times, July 11, 2007.
3. Francis Fukuyarna, The End of History and the
Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
4. Daniel Chirot, “A Clash of Civilizations or of
Paradigms? Theorizing Progress and Social
Change,” International Sociology 16, no. 3
(2001): 341-60.
HAWTHORNE
5. Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, “The True
Clash of Civilizations,” Foreign Policy, no. 135
(2003): 62-70.
6. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civiliza-
tions and the Remaking of the World Order
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). Hun-
tington argues that cultural and religious identi-
ties, which at the broadest level are civilization
identities, will shape the patterns of cohesion
and conflict in the post-Cold War, multipolar
world. Sources of conflict in this multipolar
world will not be primarily ideological or eco-
nomic; rather, the clash of civilizations will
dominate global politics.
7. The World Values Survey, conducted by a net-
work of social scientists, is a worldwide survey
of attitudes regarding socio-cultural and politi-
cal change. The four waves of the Values Sur-
veys were carried out in 1981, 1990-91, 1995-
96, and 1999-2001.
8. Inglehart and Norris, “The True Clash of Civili-
zations,” 64-65.
9. Wilson Carey McWilliams, The Idea of Frater-
nity in America (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1973). See especially chapter
12, “Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Citizen,” 301-
27.
10. Catherine H. Zuckert, Natural Right and the
American Imagination: Political Philosophy in
Novel Form (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Little-
field, 1990). See especially chapter 4, “Haw-
thorne’s Politics of Passion,” 63-98.
11. Judith N. Shklar, Redeeming American Political
Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1998). See especially chapter 3, “Hawthorne in
Utopia,” 28-48.
12. Zuckert, Natural Right and the American Imagi-
nation, 64.
13. Shklar, Redeeming American Political Thought,
28.
14. Nina Baym, The Scarlet Letter: A Reading
(Boston: Twayne, 1986). Baym discusses Haw-
thorne’s ambiguous clues for “dating” his novel.
See especially 30-36. Matthew Holland also in-
terprets this problematic dating as a clue to
Hawthorne’s positive view of Winthrop’s
statesmanship. Matthew S. Holland, Bonds of
Affection: Civic Charity and the Making of
American—Winthrop, Jefferson, and Lincoln
(Washington, DC: Georgetown University
Press, 2007).
134
(c) 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163
15. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Preface to the Second
Edition,” The Scarlet Letter (1850; New York:
Library of America, 1983), 119. All citations
are to this edition.
16. Hawthorne had previously served an appoint-
ment in the Boston Custom House from 1839
to 1840.
17. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 126.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., 127.
20. Ibid., 128.
21. Ibid., 126.
22. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Sev-
enteenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1939).
23. “Hawthorne reports in his ironic introduction
that associating with people who were devoted
primarily to sating their animal desires was kill-
ing his own imagination.” Zuckert, Natural
Right and the American Imagination, 66.
24. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 139.
25. “The Customs House is a relic of the American
Revolution. . . . These were the spiritual left-
overs from the Revolutionary, republican sol-
diers gone to seed. . . . Its [America’s] house
of customs, its habits and aspirations, were petty
and commercial now, and likely to remain so.”
Shklar, Redeeming American Political Thought,
38.
26. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 156.
27. Ibid., 147.
28. “Materialism is a dangerous malady of the hu-
man mind in all nations; but one must dread it
most particularly in a democratic people. . . .
Democracy favors the taste for material
enjoyments. This taste, if it becomes excessive,
soon disposes men to believe that all is nothing
but matter; and materialism in its turn serves to
carry them toward these enjoyments with an in-
sane ardor.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy
in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and
Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 2000), vol. 2, part 2, 519. See also
vol. 2, part 2, chapters 10-16.
29. “[W]hile the conception of original sin is made
vivid by inward knowledge of a man’s self, it is
reinforced by what a man observes of humanity
in general.” Miller, The New England Mind, 24.
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE REVIEW, Vol. 163 THE SCARLET LETTER

“Puritan thought incarnates a double-edged
paradox: the abasement of man points to a su-
preme ideal of perfection, and the sense of pos-
sible perfection makes man appear by contrast
immeasurably abased.” Ibid., 45.
30. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 161-62.
31. Ibid., 242.
32. “[T]he Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale so per-
fectly embodies the Puritan regime: He is—un-
til the very end—the complete hypocrite.”
Zuckert, Natural Right and the American Imagi-
nation, 68. This section of the article is indebted
to Zuckert’s insight into the tension within Pu-
ritanism, although I emphasize a different nu-
ance of this tension.
33. In keeping with the ambiguities of Hawthorne’s
dating of the novel, it is unclear in the text
whose election it is. Bradstreet, Endicott, Dud-
ley, and Bellingham are all mentioned in the
procession of magistrates.
34. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 338.
35. Ibid., 339.
36. Ibid., 340-41.
37. Ibid., 344.
38. Ibid., 257.
39. Ibid., 261.
40. Ibid., 259.
41. Ibid., 344.
42. “Americans, . . . have therefore elevated her
[woman] with all their power to the level of
man in the intellectual and moral world; and in
this they appear to me to have admirably under-
stood the true notion of democratic progress.”
Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, part
3, 576. See also vol. 2, part 3, chapters 9-12.
43. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 306.
44. Ibid., 307.
45. Lilla, The Stillborn God, 303.
FURTHER READING
Criticism
Fromm, M. Gerard. “Dimmesdale’s Ailment, Hawthorne’s
Insight.” In Hawthorne Revisited: Honoring the Bicenten-
nial of the Author’s Birth, pp. 99-112. Lenox, Mass.: Le-
nox Library Association, 2004.
Examines Hawthorne’s use of psychosomatic illness
in The Scarlet Letter.
Ryan, Michael. “‘The Puritans of Today’: The Anti-Whig
Argument of The Scarlet Letter.” Canadian Review of
American Studies 38, no. 2 (2008): 201-25.
Contends Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter was written
as an argument against the type of moral-driven gov-
ernment advocated by the Whig party.
Whipple, Edwin Percy. “A True Artist’s Certainty of Touch
and Expression.” In Critical Essays on Hawthorne’s The
Scarlett Letter, edited by David B. Kesterson, pp. 27-9.
Boston, Mass.: G. K. Hall & Co., 1988.
Positive review originally published in the May, 1850
edition of Graham’s Magazine.

Additional coverage of Hawthorne’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by
Gale: American Writers; American Writers: The Classics; American Writers Retrospective Supplement,
Vol. 1; Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 18; Beacham’s Guide to Literature for Popular Fic-
tion: Biography & Resources, Vol. 2; Beacham’s Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vol. 3; Children’s
Literature Review, Vol. 103; Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, Vol. 1640-1865; Dictio-
nary of Literary Biography, Vols. 1, 74, 183, 223, 269; Gale Contextual Encyclopedia of American Litera-
ture; Discovering Authors; Discovering Authors 3.0; Discovering Authors: British; Discovering Authors:
Canadian Edition; Discovering Authors; Discovering Authors Modules, Eds.: Most-Studied, Novelists;
Exploring Novels; Exploring Short Stories; Gothic Literature: A Gale Critical Companion, Ed. 2; Litera-
ture and Its Times, Vol. 1; Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism, Vols. 2, 10, 17, 23, 39, 79, 95, 158,
171, 191, 226; Novels for Students, Vols. 1, 20; Reference Guide to American Literature, Ed. 4; Refer-
ence Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; Short Stories for Students, Vols. 1, 7, 11, 15, 30; Short Story Criti-
cism, Vols. 3, 29, 39, 89, 130; St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers; Supernatural Fiction
Writers, Ed. 1; Twayne’s United States Authors; World Literature Criticism, Ed. 3; Writers for Children;
and Yesterday’s Authors of Books for Children, Vol. 2.

135

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