Scarlet Letter (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (4 page)

Given Hawthorne’s notorious preoccupation with ancestral sin,
The Scarlet Letter
could also be characterized as a “morbid meddling” of conscience and art. In
Studies in Classic American Literature,
D. H. Lawrence characterized Hawthorne’s writing as a dressing up of unpleasant, internal material: “That blue-eyed darling Nathaniel knew disagreeable things in his inner soul. He was careful to send them out in disguise.” Hester’s artistry, coupled with the errant intelligence that Hester allows to develop in her isolation, invite the speculation that she might have expressed her artistic ability as a writer. But Hawthorne had no use for women writers, pronouncing them “without a single exception, detestable.” The success of such female authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
immediately became a best seller, infuriated Hawthorne. Surely he exaggerated their dominance in American literary life and the effect of their popularity on his own success when he wrote that “America is now wholly given over to a d—d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash—and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed.” Though he created in Hester Prynne a heroine with a depth of perception and subversive intelligence that are consistent with literary creation, having her unite her intellect and her art in fiction writing possibly would have changed Hawthorne’s apparent estimation of Hester from that of an ennobled victim of the relations between men and women to a genuine threat to the advantaged position of the former. That the form Hester’s art takes is needlework—“then as now, almost the only one within a woman’s grasp”—should not diminish the role of her creations, which sustain Hester and Pearl economically, express what remains of Hester’s passionate nature, and over time earn Hester a role in the community.

The perspectives explored in the novel, then, provide responses to Hester’s crime that, while varied in nature, are uniformly extreme in degree. Understanding the act from the disparate perspectives presented is like reconstructing a disaster from the reflections on the charred and shattered surfaces of shrapnel. The psychological traits of the characters and their relationships to the adulterous affair so color their responses that the nature of the central issue is hard to discern. Neither collectively nor individually do these views jibe with contemporary views of adultery, to the extent that “contemporary views” can be known. While the existence, in many states, of laws prescribing adultery suggests continued intolerance, for decades these laws have been dead letters, serving at most as an expression of a community’s mores, but not as live instruments of the State’s penal authority. The existence of these laws, coupled with their nonenforcement, probably mirrors the views of contemporary American society. The distilled message from the repeated polling of the American people following the revelation of President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky in 1998 is that most Americans continue to view adultery as wrong in the abstract but are uneasy with attaching public consequences to its commission. If a disparity exists between prevalent views of adultery and the views embodied by the Puritan patriarchs and, with some gradations, by the Boston community and the four central characters,
The Scarlet Letter
remains an affecting dissection of shame, primarily in the person of Hester Prynne, and of guilt, primarily in the person of Arthur Dimmesdale.

One explanation for what seem hugely disproportionate responses to the crime of adultery is that the crime symbolized by the letter A and identified by a veiled reference in the title is a stand-in for a darker, unspoken sin. Scholars have uncovered court records and other materials documenting a scandal involving the ancestors of Elizabeth Manning Hathorne, Hawthorne’s mother. In 1681 the sisters of Nicholas Manning were convicted of incest with their brother Nicholas Manning. The sisters were sentenced to a night in prison and to being publicly flogged while naked. In addition, they were forced to sit in the town’s meetinghouse with signs affixed to them reading “This is for whorish carriage with my naturall brother.” Within a few years of the conviction of the Manning sisters, the law books of Massachusetts made the wearing of the letter I the mandatory sentence for incest. Gloria C. Erlich first explored the probable influence of the Manning episode on Hawthorne’s fiction in
Family Themes and Hawthorne’s Fiction: The Tenacious Web.
In
Hawthorne’s Secret: An Un-Told Tale,
Philip Young postulates that when Hawthorne wrote
The Scarlet Letter,
he had in mind a woman who gives birth to her brother’s child, and not necessarily an adulteress.

But the incestuous conduct of Hawthorne’s ancestors two centuries earlier is not an obviously more reasonable basis for the communal outrage and psychological torment depicted in
The Scarlet Letter.
Nathaniel’s Hawthorne’s unusually close relationship with his sister Elizabeth has caused some to speculate that the source of the author’s anxiety about the subject was more immediate than an ancient familial scandal. Hawthorne’s father died when his only son was four, leaving Elizabeth Hathorne destitute and with no choice but to move with her three small children into her brother’s home. As his mother withdrew into a hermit’s existence, rarely leaving her bedroom, Nathaniel and his attractive, strong-willed, and literate sister, Elizabeth, or Ebe, became constant companions. Although no evidence exists to suggest that the two had incestuous relations, some critics have suggested that
The Scarlet Letter
depicts the author’s revulsion at his own incestuous yearnings, if not at his personal experience of incest.

In only one instance, a pseudonymously published short story, does Hawthorne’s work overtly address incest. “Alice Doane’s Appeal,” which was likely Hawthorne’s first published fiction, tells the story of an orphaned brother and sister, Leonard and Alice Doane, who raise themselves in seclusion until a stranger develops a relationship with the sister. Leonard murders the stranger, whom he views as a rival, but later discovers that the victim was his twin brother. According to the thesis that makes of the Manning scandal and Hawthorne’s relationship to his sister, Ebe, a blot in Hawthorne’s lineage, the incestuous theme that is in plain view in “Alice Doane’s Appeal,” with the author’s identity hidden, lies also at the core of many of the shorter works for which Hawthorne is most famous, such as “Young Goodman Brown,” as well as
The Scarlet Letter.

If true, the thesis of Hawthorne’s felt ancestral guilt illuminates the gaping disproportion between the apparent crime of adultery and its catastrophic emotional, social, and penal consequences in
The Scarlet Letter.
The thesis also seems to explain Hawthorne’s reticence about speaking the name of adultery; by shrouding the crime in mystery, Hawthorne invites readers to speculate that some other law prescribing a primal taboo was violated. Were the reader to deduce that the scarlet A was a stand-in not for Adultery, but for Incest, the thesis would also help explain the continued effect of the novel on contemporary audiences. Incest remains one of the few transgressions that Americans reliably associate with shame, guilt, and horror. If the psychological damage depicted in
The Scarlet Letter
is understood as a response to incest, then Hester’s burdened self-abnegation and Dimmesdale’s guilt-mad undoing are consistent with widely held ideas about the consequences of incest even today. One problem with the thesis, among other problems, is that
The Scarlet Letter
has retained its power for more than a century and half, and readers have only in the past several decades had the benefit of an understanding that equates incest in Hawthorne’s family with Hawthorne’s putative obsession with incest, and even now only a small minority of readers are likely exposed to the “A is for incest” interpretation of the novel.

Any effort to tie the multiple and extreme punishments that play out in
The Scarlet Letter
to a single crime whose elements are easily defined—such as adultery, defined as intercourse with a man who is not one’s husband or intercourse with a woman who is married to a different man, or incest, defined as sexual contact with a close blood relative—hides from the reader Hawthorne’s positing of multiple causes, as well as many the author may not have intended, but that nonetheless enrich our reading of
The Scarlet Letter.
All of the central characters have unusual psychological and mental traits that intensify their experiences of the crime. Dimmesdale’s sensitivity magnifies his crime, while his position and his preoccupation with status add the dimension of hypocrisy; acuity and obsessiveness compound Chillingworth’s suffering; Pearl’s contempt for the Puritan children and her social exile play off one another in a way that increases her isolation; intellect and a tendency toward morbid introspection heighten Hester’s shame and despair.

In addition to these psychological factors, other explanations of the novel are latent in the text. The combined revulsion and titillation of the Puritan community, and the horror of the central characters, has echoes of the response of certain communities to certain works of art. For example, in recent times, several communities refused to host an exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe’s explicit photographs of homosexual sexuality. The response of the characters in
The Scarlet Letter
may be understood to give expression to Hawthorne’s internal responses to works of art—his writing—and his expectations and fears about the responses of others. In addition to being an adulteress, Hester is an artist, and her “voluptuous” needlework seems to emanate from the same passionate source as her yearning for Dimmesdale and her willingness to break her wedding vows to pursue that yearning. Perhaps the scarlet A is for artist.

A related explanation is that the central horror of
The Scarlet Letter
is actualized female sexuality: In one instance passion gives rise to artistic creation, while in the other sex results in the creation of life in the child Pearl. The Puritan community and its leaders react against Hester’s crime as if the crime threatened the very existence of the community and the leadership of the patriarchs. Their assessment is dead on: The prohibitions against sexual behavior so define the community that a softening of the prohibitions would transform the community and require different leaders. No explanation of
The Scarlet Letter’s
symbolism provides the key that will decode its every encrypted reference or posit a perfect correlation with Hawthorne’s psychological makeup. Together, however, they narrow the gap between the personal trespass and its social, legal, and psychological damages.

Understanding the action of
The Scarlet Letter
as a consequence of multiple causes may make it comprehensible to modern audiences, particularly when the causes are psychological and social, and thus presumably amenable to a particular set of laws governed by their own particular reasoning. But why should the novel be amenable to ordinary means of understanding? A fictional universe may operate according to its own system of logic; the measure of the fiction is not whether the logic is cognizable, but whether the universe created abides by a system of rules that are internally consistent, or consistently abides by no rules at all.

The portrayal of punishment, shame, and guilt in The Scarlet Letter remains viable because the portrayal reflects a unified artistic rendering. The responses of Hawthorne’s characters are consistent with the intensified reality and ambivalent suggestions of the unnatural with which Hawthorne infuses the work. The forest in which Hester and Dimmesdale plan their escape, and possibly where they conceived Pearl, is also associated with the Black Man and congregations of witches. The narrative does not resolve whether these associations mean that witchery actually transpires in the forest or whether they exist solely in the superstitious minds of the Puritan community. Similarly, a member of the community confirms Dimmesdale’s sighting of the celestial inscription of the letter A, which initially seems to be the imagined projection of Dimmesdale’s guilt. But our knowledge of the Salem witch trials, which occurred in 1692, or about forty-three years after the novel’s final scene following the Election Sermon, makes suspect even events witnessed by multiple observers within this community. The mass hysteria associated with the Salem witch trials suggests the psychological explanation that the entire Boston population shares a subconscious fixation with the scarlet letter, a fixation so pervasive and so suppressed that even when the community projects the symbol of its prurient obsession across the sky, the symbol is mistaken for something benign, the word “Angel.” Hawthorne depicts the Puritan Boston society as truly primitive in its understanding of the natural, yet leaves open the possibility that the supernatural occurrences they observe may be actual, but misunderstood. Thus, if the community’s vindictiveness, Dimmesdale’s self-loathing and torment, Chillingworth’s jealous obsessiveness, and Hester’s shame and isolation seem excessive when measured by reasonable systems of action and reaction, crime and punishment, provocation and response, they are nonetheless of a piece with the universe—fraught with misperceptions and latent energies—that Hawthorne has created.

What, then, is the reasonable response to Hester’s crime? A few answers come to mind: understanding and support from a community that measures Hester and Pearl by their characters and their contributions, rather than by the personal transgression of the former and the unchosen circumstance of the latter’s birth; love or at least child support from the Reverend Dimmesdale; anger, sorrow, and eventual forgiveness from Roger Chillingworth; some amount of remorse in Hester for the betrayal of this miserable old man. Reasonable reactions to individual failings that are commensurate with their provocation nourish intimate relations and build trust in the extended relations that create communities and states. They are irrelevant to fiction, as the endurance of this tale of the ill-treatment of a very fine woman by an unworthy lover and a vengeful society attests.