Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter: A Preview of the Early Modern Age

Abstract

The impact of the traditions of the sublime and the picturesque upon American painting and the literature of the Romantic period has been frequently examined, but the importance of these traditions in determining the structure and elements of The Scarlet Letter, one of the chief literary masterpieces of the age, has been little noticed. In the following essay, the author Nathaniel Hawthorne’s depiction of the era after the post-classical age i.e. the seventeenth century is put forward, illustrated through excerpts from the novel itself.

Introduction

Responding to a question about his fictional subject, William Faulkner insisted that he did not write about the South and the southern civilization save as they constituted the particular “country” he knew; his interest was the “human heart”. Similarly, Hawthorne wrote not only about his past and present, regions – explicitly – and on levels available to conscious control, but also from their regions insofar as his notions of “the heart” were inflected by their personal and cultural relationship to a distinctively local world and by the sense of life he introjected, half-unconsciously from its ethos. Over the course of his life, Hawthorne had four major habitations that were the scene and subject of his writing: Salem, MA, his ancestral home; Concord, MA; Liverpool, England, where he served as a consul; and Italy. Of all these, Salem – or New England – was not only his ancestral home but also the lens through which he processed all the others. Toward the end of the “The Custom-House”, Hawthorne wrote, with irrevocability, “Henceforth, it ceases to be a reality of my life. I am a citizen of nowhere else” (I: 4). It can be inferred that he never left Salem or divested himself of his identity-shaping ambivalence toward New England.

Through his literary compositions, Hawthorne came off – antithetically - as a regional historian and a cultural anthropologist. The Scarlet Letter, being concerned with the protagonist’s past’s intellectual and affective legacy for its descendants, is anthropologist Hawthorne’s myth of New England. The Scarlet Letter locates a major ligature between culture and literary text. On one level, the tale is about morality struggling for subsistence in the emerging New England; on another (that of the non-nuptial yet committed pair of Hester and Dimmesdale) about the growth of the soul; and on a third, about the inception of society in the passage to reality principle. It is evidently revealed that one could not escape the restricting terms, the neither/nor of the unrestrained philosophy of passion and a morbid denial of it; the conflicts and consequences of which are staged symbolically. The narrative shift from Boston as a Puritan community to Hester Prynne seems, if not to evade the problem of history, then at least to redistribute the allegorical weight of the tale from sociocultural to the moral and psychological. Through the fable, the story links itself with the narratives of the protagonist’s journey from an innocence that is ignorance to a sober awareness of life’s difficulties, all with a constant want for acceptance.

The first chapter, the Prison Door, starts off with the narrator setting the scene and introducing the characters and first of many symbols that will dominate the story. It is quite notable, in the very beginning, that Hawthorne went beyond his historical sources to emphasize on specific details, the likes of which is in the opening reference to the “gray, steeple-crowned hats” worn by Puritan men (47) and to his description of pastimes he added – “wrestling matches in the differing fashions of Cornwall and Devonshire”, “a friendly bout at quarterstaff” (231) – each of which is striking and picturesque but basically accurate.

Before briefly describing the crowd that had gathered around the scaffold, the congruity is taken to a generalization: “The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognised it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the Vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson’s lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard of King’s Chapel.”

Chapter I: The Prison Door (47)

The Puritans believed that the world already knows sin, hence when the colonists (who, here, are referred to as fore-fathers) first settled in Boston, they quickly established a prison in the area of Cornhill and a cemetery on Isaac Johnson’s lot in their “Utopia” for they knew that crimes, misbehavior, evil, and death are inevitable. It, nevertheless, indicates hypocrisy and restrictiveness of Puritanism, a motif that was relevant throughout the fable. This belief merges into the general Puritan doctrine which emphasizes on the idea of original sin – the notion that no person is sinless since they are all born sinners being the initial transgressions of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. According to the narration, had it been a different place or time, the grim faces of the residents gathered would have suggested a terrible event like the impending execution of a criminal so ignominious that the court’s judgement would merely confirm the community’s verdict; but given the brutal Puritan character, it could be for a deed as trivial as a lazy servant, a notorious child, a religious heretic, or an Indian about to be publicly whipped.

The open social affairs at the jail and the scaffold, both of which are situated in focal normal spaces – additionally addresses another Puritan conviction: the conviction that sin saturates our reality as well as that it ought to be effectively searched out and exposed with the goal that it tends to be treated and punished publicly. Because they are chained to forms, rules, laws, structures, the Puritans have no tolerance for secrets; they take people as purely public beings who hate and fear anything that cannot be confided. The beadle strengthens this conviction when he calls for a “blessing on the righteous Colony of the Massachusetts, where iniquity is dragged out into the sunshine.” His conceited grandiosity propose that Hester's mistreatment is fueled by more than the villagers’ quest for temperance. While uncovering sin is intended to support the miscreant and set an example for others, such tantrums accomplishes more than simply ensure the protection of the community. So, Hester turns into a scapegoat and the makes her an instrument for voyeuristic examination; it additionally gives the townspeople, particularly the women, an opportunity to illustrate – or persuade themselves regarding – their very own devotion and piety by censuring her as boisterously as could be expected under the circumstances. They put down their own offenses and instead of seeing their own potential sinfulness in Hester, the townspeople consider her to be somebody whose offenses outweigh and annihilate their very own mistakes.

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The entire scene of the judgement day can be dilated into two generic distinctions: political and ecclesiastical. This dilation raises a question whether the communal aggression is because the protagonist has “sinned” in the sense of breaking a divine commandment or whether, instead, they think a social law is broken. Since the morals and the time are primitive, no contemporary interpretation can be definitively established as the ideal one; however, the intensity and repercussive measures for the situation suggest that the latter reason is taken into consideration more. The chapter's utilization of symbols, just as their portrayal of the political truth of Hester Prynne's reality, vouch for the inconsistencies in the Puritan culture.

Hawthorne provides yet another detailed representation of the early modern period through the symbolic description of the Governor Bellingham’s mansion in Chapter 7, The Governor’s Hall. The mansion replicated an English nobleman’s home which marks the fact that this was the first generation of colonists who had not completely Americanized yet. Bellingham’s ties to his birthplace suggest that he had brought with him the very things the Puritans sought to escape by leaving England: intolerance and freedom. On Bellingham's walls are portraits of his forefathers who wear the stately and formal clothing of the Old World. Hawthorne says that, 'All were characterized by the sternness and severity which old portraits so invariably put on; as if they were the ghosts, rather than the pictures, of departed worthies, and were gazing with harsh and intolerant criticism at the pursuits and enjoyments of living men.'

Chapter VII – The Governor’s Hall (113)

In the 21st volume of American Literary History (Fall, 2009) author Robert Milder stated that the “(dark) Puritans” stand as emblems of “the sternest cares of life” (IX: 65)1 and the ethos of Puritanism itself is “associated with something like adult reality” with “a childish indulgence that the mature person has outgrown” (211). This scenario provided evidence to the cited statement.

The sailors, the Indians, the Quakers, Reverend Blackstone, the indentured servant at Governor Bellingham’s – there are many points where an allusion reaches out to the complex and cultural local web of Puritans. However, there are many cases in The Scarlet Letter where the supernatural or, as Hawthorne preferred to call it, the marvelous, is real. Even though Hawthorne did not fail to accompany the supernatural events with alternative explanations, dismissing it would be a deterrent. The scarlet letter ‘A’ itself is a chief gothic element in the tale; the narrator, in a moment of palpable enthusiasm perhaps, says “..there glimmered the embroidery letter, with comfort in its unearthly ray.” The letter also had the capacity to inflict pain upon Hester, the pain may be no more than the constant aching of her guilt-burdened heart and the excruciating solitude. Through the lines, “Some affirmed that the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the very day when Hester Prynne first wore her ignominious badge, had begun a course of penance—which he afterwards, in so many futile methods, followed out—by inflicting a hideous torture on himself. Others contended that the stigma had not been produced until a long time subsequent, when old Roger Chillingworth, being a potent necromancer, had caused it to appear, through the agency of magic and poisonous drugs. Others, again and those best able to appreciate the minister’s peculiar sensibility, and the wonderful operation of his spirit upon the body—whispered their belief, that the awful symbol was the effect of the ever-active tooth of remorse.”

Chapter XXIV – Conclusion (361)

Dimmesdale was burdened with guilt and the constant urge to confess his sins would not let him have peace within his own conscious – so much that he had begun a regimen of penance by inflicting a series of hideous tortures upon himself. At the end, he let his remorse push him into the philanthropy. On witnessing such a dramatic event, the community bode a bunch of explicable statements for the mark on his chest. Some believed that the sorcerer Chillingworth bore the mark on him with his medicines and herbs, while some (appreciably) noted Dimmesdale’s peculiar sensitivity towards the circumstances. Such marvelous assertions point out the fact that the early settlers’ community had a share of faith in sorcery and spirituality.

Simultaneously, the treatment of witches and rise in the science of witchcraft through the character of Mistress Hibbins, Governor Bellingham’s sister, adds to the gothic and paradoxical front. It is quite hypocritical that a woman who admittedly engages in satanic practices, is allowed to remain as an acknowledged member of the society, while Hester was made an outcast for falling prey to her passion.

One of the most prominent series of events that featured the drastic distinction in the perception of the scarlet letter ‘A’ of different classes of people. While the letter has many implied meanings, it also has particular and explicit meanings; the first and most ostensible meaning is for Adultery owing to the alleged-crime that Hester had committed; however, some people began to infer it as Able as a result of her charitable deeds; when the community sees a comet strike a scarlet ‘A’ in the sky for an Angel as it occurred on the night of John Winthrop’s death. Thus, throughout the course of the tale, an entire range of psychological conscious as well as subconscious perceptions of that period are encompassed through the interpretation of the scarlet letter ‘A’. Towards the end of the tale, the stigma had worn off the scarlet letter, thus depicting the end of the stern Puritan morals and the developing communities’ acceptance.

Works Cited

1. SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on The Scarlet Letter.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 2003. Web. 5 Dec. 2019.
2. Stubbs, John C. “Hawthorne's ‘The Scarlet Letter’: The Theory of the Romance and the Use of the New England Situation.” PMLA, vol. 83, no. 5, 1968, pp. 1439–1447. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1261317.
3. 1 Milder, Robert. “Hawthorne and the Problem of New England.” American Literary History, vol. 21, no. 3, 2009, pp. 464–491. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20638603.
4. Johnson, Claudia D. Understanding the Scarlet Letter: a Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents. Greenwood Press, 1995.