Scarlet Letter Overview

About Literature

• Words are intended neither to cohere with reality nor represent the views of their author.

• ‘Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.’ - Salman Rushdie

• For critic Lionel Trilling, Novels explore “the actual,” their field of…research being always the social world.”

Hawthorne as a writer

• Neither a historical writer• Nor a realist writerThen, at such an hour, and with this scene before him, if a man sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.• See p35 of The Custom-House

Agenda

• Themes / Concerns / Issues

• Structure: Plot Organization and Design, and Characterization

• Narrative Techniques and Presentation of Character;• Elements of Style: literary, and linguistic features of

the narrator’s mode of discourse, and that of the principal characters

Thematic Perspectives

• Hester Prynne is presented as a central character of majestic resonance and scope;

• And her struggle with the community that tries to condemn her, and ignore her.

• A stern and repressive community allowing little room for individualism;

• The Scarlet Letter presents many conflicts of great thematic significance

Communal and Cultural Beliefs

• The Puritan religious community of Boston believes that adultery is a sin in the eyes of God and accordingly has made it a crime;

• The important point is not whether adultery really is a sin, but how the belief that it is a sin, leads to certain actions by the Puritans

• And how these actions affect different individuals in the Boston community who themselves have different beliefs about adultery.

Conflict of Views and Values• Although Hester suffers enormously from the shame of her

public disgrace and from the isolation of her punishment,

• In her inmost heart she can never accept the Puritan community interpretation of her act;

• To her, the act is inseparable from love;• Love for Dimmesdale; love for Pearl• Because she does not believe that she did an evil act, she

retains her self-respect and survives her punishment with dignity, grace, and ever-growing strength of character in the course of the novel.

Dimmesdale’s Views and Values

• Dimmesdale in contrast believes that the act of adultery is wicked; sinful;

• And the course of his life is toward increasing self-hatred, mental anguish, and despair;

(Note: Need for constant conscious awareness of process of unfolding plot development)

• In a sense Hester’s act and Dimmesdale’s act are different;

Why?

• Because each character perceives the act of adultery differently, from a different perspective; (Point of View)

Other Themes / Issues / Concerns • The Individual and Community; Peace

and Battle; Order and Revolt• How social assumptions are prone to change through time;• Crime and Punishment• Moral Issues: Relationships

and different types of Good and Evil; Relationship of Individual Rights and Social Obligations;

• Reason and Passion• Alienation • Appearance and Reality; Exposure and Concealment• Public and Private Disclosure • Art and Artistry

Structure

• The Salem Custom-House Introductory; Nathaniel Hawthorne in the voice of a stylized narrator addresses the reader in the first person

• It sets the atmosphere; connects the 19th century present with the past, the 1640s

• It serves as a means of authenticating what follows by explaining the backstory of the finding of the scarlet letter, and the manuscript;

Backstory see pages 29-34

But, one idle and rainy day, it was my fortune to make a discovery of some little interest. Poking and burrowing into the heaped-up rubbish in the corner… I chanced to lay my hand on a small package, carefully done up in a piece of yellow parchment… But the object that most drew my attention, in the mysterious package, was a certain affair of fine red cloth, much worn and faded… This rag of scarlet cloth…. on careful examination, assumed the shape of a letter. It was the capital letter A.

p32My eyes fastened themselves upon the old scarlet letter,… Certainly, there was deep meaning in it, most worthy of interpretation, and which, as it were, streamed forth from mystic symbol, subtly communicating itself to my sensibilities, but evading the analysis of my mind. While thus perplexed,—and cogitating, among other hypotheses, whether the letter might not have been one of those decorations which the white men used to contrive, in order to take the eyes of the Indians,—I happened to place it on my breast. It seemed to me,—the reader may smile, but must not doubt my word,—it seemed to me, then, that I experienced a sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat; and as if the letter were not of red cloth, but red-hot iron. I shuddered, and involuntarily let it fall upon the floor.

In the absorbing contemplation of the scarlet letter, I had hitherto neglected to examine a small roll of dingy paper, around which it had been twisted. This now I opened. There were several foolscap sheets, containing many particulars respecting the life and conversation of one Hester Prynne, who appeared to have rather a noteworthy personage in the view of our ancestors. She had flourished during a period between the early days of Massachusetts and the close of the seventeenth century.

p33

Prying further into the manuscript, I found the record of other doings and sufferings of the singular woman, for the most of which the reader is referred to the story entitled “The Scarlet Letter”

The Scaffold as a Structural Device • Not much real action; more psychological (like Othello);• To be read more as a novel involving a drama of psychological and

philosophical interpretation;• A sequence of significant scenes in which various events occur

ranging from Hester’s interview• These dramatic scenes are interspersed with lengthy discussions of

character, motivation, and perspective;• Along with the narrator’s interpretative commentary and

sympathetic representation of Hester’s story, the intention of which is to present a moral reassessment of her transgression;

• Set within the framework of the three principal scaffold scenes;

• The novel is structurally built around the three scaffold scenes;

• At the beginning, middle, and at the end, the scaffold is the dominating point;

• The scaffold serves as a touchstone for the narrator’s sympathies;

• The first twelve chapters the narrator’s sympathies are with Hestor;

• Then the central chapters focus attention on Arthur Dimmesdale with evident narrator antipathy toward him partly because of Dimmesdale’s hypocrisy

Three Scaffold Scenes

• First Scaffold Scene Chapters 1 - 3 focus on Hester and the Scarlet Letter with all the principal characters present before the Boston Community

• Second Scaffold Scene: Chapter 12; seven years later, we now see Rev Arthur Dimmesdale on that same scaffold;

• The momentary flash of light in the night sky symbolically foreshadows the approaching public disclosure of Dimmesdale’s “scarlet letter”

Third Scaffold Scene Chapter 23

• The novel’s action culminates in this final scaffold scene; • It mirrors Hester’s first scaffold scene, even though he

proceeds from the church, she from the prison;• But unlike Hester, he seems to achieve peace, whereas

she achieved ‘a kind of lurid triumph’ • This time Dimmesdale reveals his “scarlet letter”;• Dimmesdale has come to realize the only way to truly

attain inner peace is to declare his guilt;• In this way his public and private self can again be

united

• At the point of revelation, Dimmesdale, ‘With a convulsive motion he tore away his ministerial band from before his breast. It was revealed. But it was irreverent to describe that revelation.’

• What do you think the spectators see?• As in Chapter 10, the narrator does not make the

details manifestly clear;• When Chillingworth is reported as having seen

something wondrous on Dimmesdale’s chest, the reader is left to conjecture what that something is;

• We note however the critical significance of Pearl kissing Dimmesdale; Symbolizing ‘A spell was [finally] broken.’ And peace and order restored;

• No longer will she be a symbolical reminder of the scarlet letter;

• Pearl symbolically will now be part of the community of humanity; [Her tears] ‘They were the pledge that she would grow up amid human joy and sorrow, not for ever do battle with the world, but be a woman in it.’ p222

• Ironically only through Dimmesdale’s public disgrace does he find inner peace;

Narrative Methods

• Multiple third person point of view; many angles;• Narrator’s implicit symbolic advocacy; • Psychological approach to his character subjects• Narrator Commentary, and dramatic use of Contrast • The techniques of Romance – the interfusion of the

actual and the imaginary, whereby reality is modified;

• Juxtaposing heavily prosaic chapters with chapters dominated by dialogic chapters

Features of Style • Anachronistic Diction and Dialogue Seventeenth century elegance of style;• Latinated diction: Under the appellation of Roger Chillingworth…’

Chapter 9 p104• And sentences of magisterial authority and elegance, with

frequent use of the subordinating style (Hypotaxis) and balanced antitheses;

• ‘When strangers looked curiously at the scarlet letter,—and none ever failed to do so,—they branded it afresh into Hester’s soul; so that, oftentimes, she could scarcely refrain, yet always did refrain, from covering the symbol with her hand.’ Chapter 5 p77

• Creating a rhetorical cumulative effect and final emphasis

Symbolism

• Note Some of Hawthorne’s symbols change their meanings depending on context;

• Characters as Symbols• Hester Prynne – her surname chimes with ‘sin’ • Pearl symbolizes wild, lawless, energy• Roger Chillingworth symbolizes the unrestrained, ‘lust to

know’, Faustean-like intellect wanting to no more than is deemed appropriate within a Puritan worldview;

• His misshapen form also symbolizes his evil within the Puritan worldview

Symbolical Significance determined by context

Setting and Landscape stylized as Symbol• The wild rose-bush• The forest symbolizes moral confusion and

decadence;• the jail and the cemetery symbolize the innate

sinfulness of humanity; • Light and darkness; sunshine and shadows• Colours: red, gray, black

Irony • Note uses of ironic contrasts; Chapter 6 the narrator

ironically contrasts the Puritan’s community treatment of Hester with that of God: ‘God, as a direct consequence of the sin which man thus punished, had given her a lovely child…’

• And pointed ironic understatement• “The Puritans compressed whatever mirth and public joy

they deemed allowable to human infirmity; thereby so far dispelling the customary cloud, that, for the space of a single holiday, they appeared scarcely more grave than most other communities at a period of general affliction.” Chapter 7

Concluding with Conclusion

• Hestor at the end renounces her radicalism;• Acknowledges that the type of woman to lead

reform movements of the future and establish women’s rights

• Must be less ‘stained with sin’ and less ‘bowed down with shame’ than she is;

• This new kind of woman must be ‘lofty, pure, and beautiful, and wise, moreover, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy.’

• Hester is a symbol of the artist, the ideals of passion, self-expression, freedom and individualism

• in contrast to the ideals of order, authority, and restraint

• Escapes the authority of the Puritan fathers she recreates her own identity

• Through her fantastic artistic embroidery of the scarlet letter