Scarlet Letter (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (39 page)

... From the fate of Hester and Dimmesdale we may learn that it avails not the sinner to live a life of saintly deeds and aims, but to be true; not to scourge himself, to wear sackcloth, or to redeem other souls, but openly to accept his shame. The poison of sin is not so much in the sin itself as in the concealment; for all men are sinners, but he who conceals his sin pretends a superhuman holiness. To acknowledge our sins before God, in the ordinary sense of the phrase, is a phrase, and no more, unproductive of absolution. But to acknowledge our sins before men is, in very truth, to acknowledge them before God; for the appeal is made to the human conscience, and the human conscience is the miraculous presence of God in human nature, and from such acknowledgment absolution is not remote....

Hawthorne, however, with characteristic charity, forbears to claim a verdict even against his reprobate. “To all,” he says, “we would fain be merciful;” and he goes so far as to put forth a speculation as to whether “hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom.” But hatred grows from self-love; and if love and self-love be not opposites, then neither are light and darkness, or good and evil. It is doubtless true, on the other hand, that we can never be justified in treating the most iniquitous persons as identical with their iniquity, although, in discussing them, it may not always be possible to make the verbal discrimination. In real life there will always be saving clauses, mitigating circumstances, and special conditions whereby the naked crudity of the abstract presentment is modified, as soil and vegetation soften the hard contour of rocks, or as the atmosphere diffuses light and tempers darkness.

Nor would I wish to appear as superserviceably detecting theories in the mellow substance of Hawthorne’s artistic conceptions. He himself felt a repugnance to theories, and in general confined himself to suggestions and intimations; he knew how apt truth is to escape from the severity of a “logical deduction.” Probably, moreover, he was uniformly innocent of any didactic purpose in sitting down to write. He imagined a moral situation, with characters to fit it, and then allowed the theme to grow in such form as its innate force directed, enriching its roots and decorating its boughs with the accumulated wealth of his experience and meditation.

—from
The Atlantic Monthly
(April 1886)

1. Hawthorne’s son Julian asserts that The Scarlet Letter finds its base in historical fact. Does Hawthorne employ techniques typical of nonfiction? Does Hawthorne slant the reading of the novel by introducing it with the Custom-House sketch?

2. Nancy Stade begins her introduction by asking, “What is a reasonable response to Hester Prynne’s crime?” There are private responses by Hester, Pearl, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth. Then there is the response of the community. Have any of these got it right?

3. As a result of her transgression and the aftermath, Hester becomes an original thinker. Are we to infer that one must commit a crime to have original thought—that daring ideas are themselves a kind of transgression?

4. Hester in her elaborate embroidery around the scarlet letter becomes an artist. The implication is that in their accomplishments artists are embroidering their sins, working them over, making them visible, transforming them into works of art. What do you think? Do artists have to be sinners, at least in thought if not in deed?

5. We moderns are likely to see a disproportion between Hester’s crime and her punishment. We are now likely to see adultery as a breach of contract between the adulterer and his or her spouse. The Puritans in
The Scarlet Letter
see it as a breach of contract between the adulterer and his or her community—thus the justification of a public humiliation. What do you think? If adultery should really be seen as an offense against God, what should humans do about it?

6. In
The Scarlet Letter
adultery is not trivial; from the puritan point of view, it is a sin that shakes the universe. Has life been diminished by the loss of that point of view? Or would holding on to that point of view have been otherwise too costly?

FOR FURTHER READING

Arvin, Newton.
Hawthorne.
1956. New York: Russell and Russell, 1961.

James, Henry.
Hawthorne.
1879. With a foreword by Dan McCall. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Miller, Edwin Haviland.
Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel.
Passages from the English Note-books.
Edited and with a preface by Sophia Hawthorne, and with an introduction by George Parsons Lathrop. Vols. 7 and 8 of the Riverside Edition of
The Complete
Works
of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1883.

—:
Passages from the American Note-books.
Edited by Sophia Hawthorne and with an introduction by George Parsons Lathrop. Vol. 9 of the Riverside Edition
of The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1883.

Erlich, Gloria C.
Family Themes and Hawthorne’s Fiction: The Tenacious Web.
New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1984.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel.
The Scarlet Letter: An Authoritative Text, Essays in Criticism and Scholarship.
A Norton Critical Edition; third edition. Edited by Seymour Gross, Sculley Bradley, Richmond Croom Beatty, and E. Hudson Long. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988.

Lawrence, D. H. “Nathaniel Hawthorne and
The Scarlet Letter.”
In his
Studies in Classic American Literature.
New York: T. Selzer, 1923.

Updike, John. “Hawthorne Down on the Farm.”
The New York Review of Books
(August 9, 2001 ).

Young, Philip.
Hawthorne’s Secret: An Un-Told Tale.
Boston: David R. Godine, 1984.