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Mrs. Hawthorne's Headache: Reading The Scarlet Letter
Author(s): David Leverenz
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Mar., 1983), pp. 552-575
Published by: University of California Press
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Mrs. Hawthorne's
Headache: Reading
The Scarlet Letter
DAVID LEVERENZ
WHENHawthorne read the end of The Scarlet Letter to his
wife, it "broke her heart and sent her to bed with a grievous headache -which I look upon as a triumphantsuccess!"His Chillingworthlike tone belies his own feelings. Ostensiblyhis "triumphant" sense
of professional satisfactiondepends on breaking a woman's heart
and mind, much as his narrativepacifies the heart and mind of its
heroine. But Hawthorne's "success" also depends on evoking great
sympathyforfemale suffering.Several yearslater he vividlyrecalled
"my emotions when I read the last scene of the Scarlet Letter to my
wife, just after writingit- tried to read it, rather, for my voice
swelled and heaved, as if I were tossed up and down on an ocean, as
it subsides after a storm." As Randall Stewart notes, "Hawthorne
was not in the habit of breakingdown." This scene, and the shaking
sobs that overcame him at his dyingmother'sbedside, "are the only
recorded instancesof uncontrolledemotion" in Hawthorne'scareer.I
?C)1983 by The Regents of the Universityof California.
'Randall Stewart, Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography (New Haven: Yale Univ.
Press, 1948), p. 95, cites both the firstquotation, which is from a letter to Horatio
Bridge, 4 Feb. 1850, rpt. in Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage, ed. J. Donald Crowley (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1970), p. 151, and the second quotation,
which is fromHawthorne's English Note-Books, 14 Sept. 1855.
552
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Reading The Scarlet Letter
553
Mrs. Hawthorne's headache is a rare moment in the historyof
American reader responses. It reveals not only a spouse's ambiguously painful reaction but also the author's incompatible accounts
of his own firstreading. Both responses seem deeply divided: one
with a splittingheadache, the other with a split self-presentation.If
we accept at face value the goal announced by Hawthorne's narrator
in the first paragraph of "The Custom-House," to seek a selfcompleting communion with his readers, his quest to discover "the
divided segment of the writer'sown nature" ends in frustration.
Both Hawthorne and his most intimate sympathizer experience
inward turmoil and self-controlledwithdrawal. As several first
readers commented in print, Hawthorne's romance left them with
similarlyintense and unresolved feelings- of sadness, pain, annoyance, and almost hypnoticfascination.
The Scarlet Letter's strangepower over its contemporaryreaders
derivesfromits unresolvedtensions.What startsas a feministrevolt
against punitive patriarchal authorityends in a muddle of sympathetic pity for ambiguous victims. Throughout, a gentlemanly
moralistframesthe storyso curiouslyas to ally his empathies withhis
inquisitions. Ostensibly he voices Hawthorne's controlling moral
surface, where oscillations of concern both induce and evade interpretivejudgments. Yet his characterizationsof Hester and Chillingworth bring out Hawthorne's profoundly contradictoryaffinities
with a rebellious, autonomous female psyche and an intrusivemale
accuser. The narrative's increasing preoccupation with Dimmesdale's guilt both blankets and discovers that fearfulinward intercourse. D. H. Lawrence's directiveto trustthe tale, not the teller,
rightlychallenges the narrator'sinauthenticmoral stance.2 But that
becomes a complicatinginsight,not a simplifying
dismissal.In learning to see beyond Hawthorne's narrator, readers can see what lies
beneath the author's distrustof any coercive authority,especially his
own. Though the narrator sometimes seems quite self-consciously
fictionalized,he functionsless as a character than as a screen forthe
play of textual energies.
The plot establishes incompatible centers of psychological
power: Hester's fierceprivatepassion, at once radically independent
2Studies in Classic American Literature (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1951),
p. 13; see also his discussion of The Scarlet Letter as a "colossal satire" full of "inner
diabolism" (pp. 92-110).
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Nineteenth-Century Fiction
and voluptuouslyloving, and Chillingworth'sequally privaterage to
expose, control, and accuse. These centershave surfaced in modern
criticismas feministor psychoanalyticresponses to the text. The
narrator'svoice acts as a safetyvalve, releasing and containing feelings in socially acceptable ways. His veryself-consciousrelation to
his readers, whom he frequentlyappeals to and fictionalizes,both
abets, displaces, and conceals his story'sunresolvedtensions.
The narratoralso mirrorsthe limitsof his contemporaryAmerican reader's toleration for strong subjectivity,especially anger.
As Trollope noted, "there is never a page writtenby Hawthorne not
tinged by satire." The narratorof The Scarlet Letter skillfullyinterminglesearnestappeals forsympathywithmockingexposureof rage,
distanced as cruelty.3His tolerance forhuman frailty,his addiction
to multipleinterpretations,
and his veiled hintsat self-disgust
deflect
his fear that anger destroysa lovable self. In claiming that art should
veil self-exposure,he invitesboth sympathyand self-accusation.He
is a Dimmesdale who doesn't quite know he is a Chillingworth.
Several nineteenth-centuryreaders sensed Chillingworth'sascendance in the narrator as well as his narrative. Trollope and
HenryJames both noted with some surprisethat the romance was
oddly a hate story,and James speaks of Hawthorne's constantstrug"4 Anne Abbott
gle between"his evasiveand his inquisitivetendencies.
felt "cheated into a false regard and interest"by Hester's seeming
sufferingand Dimmesdale's seeming faith, because Hester's pride
destroysher Christian character, while Dimmesdale's sufferingbecomes "aimless and withouteffectforpurificationor blessing to the
soul." "A most obstinate and unhuman passion, or a most unweary3"The Genius of The Scarlet Letter," in The Scarlet Letter: An Annotated Text,
Backgrounds and Sources, Essays in Criticism, ed. Sculley Bradley, Richmond
Croom Beatty, and E. Hudson Long, 1st ed. (New York: Norton, 1962), p. 242; see
also "He is always laughing at something with his weird, mocking spirit" (p. 244).
The article in the Norton edition is a partial reprintof Trollope's "The Genius of
Nathaniel Hawthorne," North American Review, Sept. 1879, pp. 203-22.
4Trollope, "The Genius of The Scarlet Letter, p. 243. James, Hawthorne, introd.
Tony Tanner (London: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 109-10. Taylor Stoehr, Hawthorne's
Mad Scientists: Pseudoscience and Social Science in Nineteenth-CenturyLzfe and
Letters (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1978), p. 116, stresses Chillingworth's
functionas "an evil chorus figurewhose perspectivehas much in common with that
of the reader and the author." An angry Salem Whig found nothing but Chillingworthin Hawthorne; see Benjamin Lease, "Salem vs. Hawthorne: An Early Review
of The Scarlet Letter," New England Quarterly,44 (1971), 110-17.
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Reading The Scarlet Letter
555
ing conscienceit must be," she continues,". . . but such a prolonged
application of the scourge." Finally, the man whom Hawthorne considered his most astute critic, E. P. Whipple, concluded that the
narrator's tendency to "put his victimson the rack" establishes an
uncomfortablycompelling despotism. Though the morbid suffering
appalls sensible readers, he said, they yield despite themselvesto
"the guidance of an author who is personally good-natured, but
intellectuallyand morallyrelentless."5
The narrator is protected by his duplicitous stance from full
exposure, as he half admits. The rhetoricalstrategiesthat can give
his reader a headache preservehis good name. Yet under his interpretive equivocations, unresolved conflictsabout anger, authority,
and female autonomy continuouslyimpel the contradictionsin his
voice as well as his story.A close reading of The Scarlet Letter along
these lines, as I tryto offerhere, raises the possibilityof using formalist methods to explore the text's intimate, ambivalent relationship to the author's own life and the contemporary interpretive
community.6
A surprisinglyaggressive feminist interpretation seems selfconsciouslymandated as the storytellingbegins. The narrator'sfirst
sentence deflates church and state to "steeple-crownedhats," while
5Anne W. Abbott, reviewof The Scarlet Letter, in North American Review, July
1850, rpt. in Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage, pp. 164-67; see p. 166. E. P.
Whipple, "Nathaniel Hawthorne," Atlantic Monthly, May 1860, rpt. in Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage, pp. 340-50; see pp. 344, 346. Whipple's 1850 review
of The Scarlet Letter is also reprintedin The Critical Heritage, pp. 160-62.
6In arguing that close reading opens out to questions of social history,I am opposing the antiformaliststance taken by Jane Tompkins in her December 1981
MLA talk on how criticshave preserved Hawthorne's reputation at the expense of,
say, Susan Warner's. I agree with Tompkins's larger contention that textual meanings are established by readers at any historical moment. But if I am right to say
that The Scarlet Letter both induces, replicates, and undermines the interpretive
expectations of its contemporary readers, that posits a more ambivalent relation
between text and community than the theory of interpretivecommunity so far
allows. Various writingsby Tompkins, Stanley Fish, and Walter Benn Michaels
have been developing the theory; Steven Mailloux usefullysummarizes them and
others in Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction
(Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982). Mailloux uses Hawthorne to orient
the theorytoward how textsconstitutecomplex ethical judgments.
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Nineteenth-Century Fiction
the firstparagraph associates those hats with the iron spikes on the
prison door. As the next paragraph explains, the colony'spatriarchs
have appropriated "the virgin soil" for graves and a prison, while
stiflingtheir utopian hopes with a grave distrustof human nature.
Hats and "sad-colored garments" blend with the "beetle-browed
and gloomyfront"of the prisonin a shared exteriorgloom.7 Inwardness has been shut up and spiked, along withyouthfulhopes and the
virginland.
The narrator'simplicit symbolic advocacy becomes overt with
his presentationof the "wild rose-bush," growingbeside "the black
flowerof civilizedsociety." If the prison is massive, forbidding,even
"ugly," the rose bush brings out feminine delicacy and "fragile
beauty." It also promises to awaken the body to imaginative life. It
"mightbe imagined" to offerfragranceto a prisoner,"in token that
the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him." Perhaps,
the narrator muses, this rose bush "survived out of the stern old
wilderness,so long afterthe fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that
originallyovershadowed it" (pp. 39-40). Without pinning himself
down, he allegoricallyintimatesthat patriarchswill die while tender
flowersendure.
Or perhaps, he continues, the rose bush sprang up under the
footstepsof "the sainted Ann Hutchinson"-the adjective lets loose
his anti-Puritan,even Papist bias- as she walked throughthe prison
door. In either case, his interpretivealternativesevoke a woman's
triumphant survival beyond her towering,glowering elders, or at
least her stubborn public opposition. As new elders die the natural
death of Isaac Johnson, the firstdead Puritan patriarch, they will
retreatto "the congregated sepulchres" that define theireternityas
interchangeablyas their gravitydefines their lives, while the rose
and true womanhood may perseveretoward a more naturally blossomingfuture.
Taking a final swervefrompatriarchal authorityby abdicating
his own, the narratorrefusesto "determine"which alternativeshould
hold. Instead he presents the rose to his reader, since it grows "so
7The Scarlet Letter: An AuthoritativeText, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism,
ed. Sculley Bradley, Richmond Croom Beatty, E. Hudson Long, Seymour Gross,
2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 39; furtherpage referencesin the text are to
thisedition.
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Reading The Scarlet Letter
557
directlyon the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to
issue fromthat inauspicious portal" (p. 40). With a lushlysymbolic
self-consciousnessthe narratorhas established a broad arrayof sympathies joining feminism,nature, youth, the body, and imaginative
life. This associational array opposes patriarchal oppression, which
doubly oppresses itself.The narrator'srhetorical strategiesawaken
reader expectations as well as sympathies. When Hester walks
throughthe prison door, she will "issue" as the narrativeitself,with
all the hopes embodied in what is now the reader's wild red rose.
Yet Hester also walks forthinto narrativehopelessness. With a
hand even heavier than his heart the narratorsuddenly imposes his
gloomy end on her brave beginning. He tells us that the rose may
"relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailtyand sorrow."
That portentous phrase shuts the door on her wild possibilitiesas
massivelyas the prison door dwarfsthe rose. His plot will undercut
the hopes his voice has just raised. His other alternative, that the
rose bush mightsymbolize"some sweetmoral blossom," seems deliberately anemic beside the contending passions his introduction
promises. The narrator'ssudden deflectionfromthe rose's prospects
suggestshis fatalistic alliance with the prison's "darkening close."
His narrativewill be both, inextricably.He opens and shutsthe door.
What seems here to be only a slightdiscomfortwith the rose's
radical implications eventually becomes an ambivalent inquisition
into the dangers of Hester's lawless passion. The narrative issues
forth as Chillingworthas well as Hester. Chillingworth'sprobing
brings out the reader's powers of psychological detection while
Hester's character encourages feministresponses. At once rebel and
voiceinquisitor,the narratorfalselyjoins these poles in a mystifying
over. He implies that the law can be transcended throughDimmesdale's growth toward spiritual purityor softened through Hester's
growthtoward maternal sympathy.To the degree that we can also
perceivehis own voice as an "issue" we can locate the unresolvedtensions under his still more mystified"sweet moral blossom" of being
true to oneself.
Hester Prynne's firstgesture, to repel the beadle's authority,
refocusesnarrative sympathies. Her radical feminismgoes further
than Hyatt Waggoner's sense of her as a champion of the oppressed,
and beyond Nina Baym's various argumentsthat she champions the
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Nineteenth-Century Fiction
privateimagination.8In chapter 13 she goes so far as to imagine the
"hopeless task" of building the whole social systemanew, changing
sex roles so completely that both womanhood and manhood will
become unrecognizable to themselves(p. 120). It seems an extraordinaryinstance of negative capability that Hawthorne, who forbade
his daughter to writebecause it was unfeminine,could imagine the
most radical woman in nineteenth-centuryNew England, even
retrospectively.9Though his narrator several times interjectsthat
Hester's mind has gone so astray only because her heart "had lost
its regular and healthy throb" (p. 120), his abstracted, fitfulcavils
seem to heightenour sense of her sustained independence.
Hester's private question about the "race" of women can still
leap offthe page formodern readers: "Was existence worthaccepting, even to the happiest among them?" (p. 120). She has long since
"decided in the negative" this question for herself.Later, fromher
radical freedom of freshperception, she sees all social institutions
"with hardly more reverence than the Indian would feel for the
clerical band, thejudicial robe, the pillory,the gallows, the fireside,
or the church" (p. 143). Not even Melville, with his more impulsive
extremes of negation, offerssuch a laconic, liberating list. For
Hester the comfortsof firesideand church grow from the punitive
powers of the clergy and judiciary, as interlocked and equivalent
institutions.
Yet Hester's rebellious autonomy shields two very different
kindsof loving. Why is it, the narratorasks in chapter 5, that Hester
does not leave Salem? She could go to Europe, where she could "hide
her character and identityunder a new exterior,"or she could enter
the forest,"where the wildness of her nature might assimilate itself
with a people whose customs and life were alien fromthe law that
8HyattH. Waggoner, Hawthorne: A Critical Study, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), p. 145; Nina Baym, The Shape of Hawthorne's Career
(Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 124-35. JudithFryermakes a
more dubious argument for Hester's potential "androgyny" in The Faces of Eve:
Women in the Nineteenth CenturyAmerican Novel (New York: Oxford Univ. Press,
1976), pp. 74-84. See also Baym's "The Significance of Plot in Hawthorne's Romances," in Ruined Eden of the Present: Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe: Critical
Essays in Honor of Darrel A bel, ed. G. R. Thompson and Virgil L. Lokke (West
Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 49-70.
9See Edward Wagenknecht, Nathaniel Hawthorne: Man and Writer(New York:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 17-18 and 150-53, forvarious remarks about Hawthorne'sambivalence concerning strongwomen.
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Reading The Scarlet Letter
559
had condemned her." In rejecting both these ways of abandoning
herself,whetherto a civilized mask or to diffusednatural passion,
Hester consciouslychooses to define her "roots" as her "chain." Her
identityis the sin so "galling to her inmostsoul." But the clear separationof outer sin frominnersoul showshow unrepentanther desire
remains. She becomes the jailer of a fearfulsecret: her dream of "a
union, that, unrecognized on earth, would bring them together
before the bar of final judgment, and make that their marriagealtar, for a joint futurityof endless retribution."I do not thinkany
commentator has noticed the sacrilegious force of the hope that
really impels her heart: to be united with Dimmesdale forever,in
hell. A Dante-esque fantasyof condemned love lurks in her depths
"like a serpent"(p. 61). 10 It terrifiesher more consciouslyself-reliant
conceptionsof herself.
Hester's dream of a love foreverframed by patriarchal punishment allows the narrator to present her as more victim than rebel.
She is a woman more sinned against than sinning. Moreover,she is a
mother as well as a woman in love. Her daughter's existence providentiallypreventsher frombecoming a radical prophetesslike Ann
Hutchinson. The narrator observes that mothering, like knitting,
fortunately"soothes" Hester's tendencytoward conflict. In the task
of educating Pearl, "the mother'senthusiasmof thoughthad something to wreak itselfupon" (p. 120)."l To reduce her ideas to an
"enthusiasm" ready to be "wreaked" shows the narrator'sbias. As a
solitary,victimized woman Hester can rethinkall social relations.
But as a mother she has to nurture conventional womanhood, in
herselfas well as her daughter. As Dimmesdale says to John Wilson
in chapter 8, the child "was meant, above all thingselse, to keep the
mother's soul alive" (p. 85). The narrator recurrentlyechoes the
minister's sense of this "softening" charge: "Providence, in the
person of this little girl, had assigned to Hester's charge the germ
'0EveryHawthorne commentator I have read has missed Hester's secret dream of
reunion in hell. They assume she hopes for heavenly reconciliation. See, for
example, Richard H. Brodhead, Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel (Chicago and
London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 66; and Michael Davitt Bell, The Development ofAmerican Romance: The Sacrfziceof Relation (Chicago and London:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 178.
"I am indebted here and throughout this essay to Richard Brodhead's incisive
commentaryon an earlier draft,as well as to helpful responses fromWalter Herbert
and Nineteenth-CenturyFiction's two readers.
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Nineteenth-Century Fiction
and blossom of womanhood, to be cherished and developed amid a
host of difficulties"(p. 120). The narrator veils his ambivalence
about Hester's intellectual independence and her passionate desire
by reinforcingwhat Nancy Chodorow has called "the institutionof
mothering"as the cure forall her ills.12
A less ambivalent narrator would see himself as part of his
heroine's problem. Hester is far from liberated, even inwardly,
despite her extraordinaryperceptiveness about social repression.
She avoids any struggleforpublic power except to preserveher conventional role as mother. She realizes that her winning advice to
Dimmesdale-"Preach! Write! Act! Do anything,save to lie down
and die!" (p. 142)-can apply only to men, not to herself.Yet she
does not realize how grosslyinadequate a man Dimmesdale turns
out to be, as lover, parent, and friend. While the narratorseeks to
shiftHester's ground from radical thought and sexual intimacyto
more acceptable maternal love, Hester's tenacious affirmationof
her continuously punished union holds fast despite increasingly
glaringflawsin her man as well as the man who tellsher story.
One scene in particular becomes a graphic paradigm of the
forcesconvergingto bringher strengthwithinthe sphereof Dimmesdale's weakness. In "The Child at the Brook-Side" Pearl stands
across the brook from the two lovers, deliberately disregarding
Hester's anxious pleas to come to them. When Hester triesto coax
her across by sayingthat Pearl will have twice as much love as before
with Dimmesdale beside her, the child fixesher eyes on her mother
and the minister"as if to detect and explain to herselfthe relation
which theybore to one another." Then, "assuming a singular air of
authority,Pearl stretche[s]out her hand, with the small forefinger
extended." She stamps her foot and "burst[s] into a fitof passion,"
with "piercing shrieks," her finger seeming to point at Hester's
bosom, which now lacks the scarletletter.Dimmesdale, neverone to
relish strongfeelings,erupts with the immemorial plea of a father
bent on adult matters:"Pacifyher, if thou lovestme!" (pp. 149, 150).
As with any key scene, the incident focuses larger issues. To
demand that Hester pacify Pearl if she loves him implies, most immediately,that Dimmesdale will continue to avoid the role of parent
himself.Hester has to accept his abdication as part of loving him.
'2The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1978).
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Reading The Scarlet Letter
561
More subtly,Dimmesdale's "if" is both a bargain and a threat. He
can measure Hester's love for him by her success or failure in disciplining Pearl. Dimmesdale's habit of mind here reflectstown values
of authorityand accounting, what the narrator satirizes in "The
Custom-House," rather than wildernessintimacy. It is one of the
narrator'smore sympatheticcues, here and elsewhere,that we know
Hester by her firstname and Dimmesdale by his last. Using her first
name encourages intimacywithher freedomfromher husband, and
while the near-impossibilityof
fromother imposed self-definitions,
calling him "Arthur" indicates his anxious conformityto inherited
social codes. 13
Yet the scene prefiguresHester's own accommodation to those
codes. The narratoralready has taken some care to assertthat Pearl
is Hester's hidden nature. She is a classic female double, in terms
that Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have made familiar. She embodies the lawless passion and impetuous rages constrained in her
mother. But as Hester senses from the first,her disturbinglyalien
"imp" also embodies society's punishing judgment, as well as the
letter'sown imperiousness.14 To pacifythese contendingelementsin
Pearl, Hester reassumesthe scarletletter.That acceptance of Pearl's
pointing finger means accepting love defined in Dimmesdale's
terms,as a self-pacification.15
As the storycontinues,Dimmesdale becomes the primaryagent
forHester'schange fromperceptiveradical to sad-eyed sympathizer.
I3This view of firstname as implyingintimacyand last name as social code should
by qualified by the fact that in early American culture one way of patronizing a
woman was to call her by her firstname, whereas use of the last name implied
respect.
14Brodhead, Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel, pp. 56-57, emphasizes Pearl's
oscillation between incompatible modes, especially in this scene. Most criticssimply
see Pearl as Hester's double. On doubles in general see Sandra M. Gilbert and
Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writerand the NineteenthCenturyLiterary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1979),
esp. pp. 69-92.
'5My analysis of this scene opposes the more narcissisticreadings offeredbyJohn
Irwin, American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the
American Renaissance (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 25051, which stressesthe interplayof mirrorswith absence; and by Sharon Cameron,
The Corporeal Self: Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne (Baltimore
and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1981), p. 84, which stressesPearl's connection to the letter as part of Hester's body. Both readings illuminate narrative
doublings and problems of identitybut avoid the interpersonalissues that generate
narcissisticfears. Cameron in particular reduces feelingsof anger to acts of violence.
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Nineteenth-Century Fiction
In theirforestcolloquy, forinstance, Hester seems not to notice that
the ministerprefaces her heretical claim to theirwilderness"consecration" by comparing their "sin" to Chillingworth's"blacker" sin
(p. 140). His mind stillhoversanxiouslyin a patriarchal hierarchyof
sin, guilt, and violation. Equally symptomatic,his firstresponse to
her urgentassertionof mutual sanctityis "Hush, Hester!" For him to
rise and say he has not forgotten,as he then does, avoids confronting
the impasse between his sense of violation and her sense of holiness.
His association of intimacywith violation also connects him to the
narrator. The very firstparagraph of "The Custom-House" both
solicits and denies the possibilityof "perfect sympathy" between
writerand reader by associatingknowledgeof "the inmostMe" with
veils and violation.
A comprehensivefear of public anger, suffusingthe entirenarrative, generates Dimmesdale's self-accusations.His obsessive guilt
for a moment of consummated desire masks a deeper reluctance to
expose aspects of himselfthat might displease authority.His pain
becomes a mystifiedaccommodation that internalizes authorityas
self-punishment. Overtly the narrator disengages himself from
Dimmesdale's morbid self-scrutiny.He accuses the ministerof selfishness, egotism, and cowardice, while presenting Dimmesdale's
closet self-flagellationsas bizarre. Yet the narrator frequently
locates the sources of both art and truth within Dimmesdale's
"anguish." When the ministerspeaks publicly, as he does several
times"in tongues of flame," his eloquence becomes analogous to the
writer'scapacity for "addressing the whole human brotherhood in
the heart's native language." Such eloquence must "gush" with "its
own throb of pain" (p. 104). For the narrator all art seeks ways of
sharing that pain, withoutfull self-exposure."The only truth,that
continued to give Mr. Dimmesdale a real existence on this earth,"
the narratorconcludes in chapter 11, "was the anguish in his inmost
soul" (p. 107). This anguish, he explains a few pages later, is not
guilt but "all the dread of public exposure" (p. 112). 16
'6This reading differsfromChristian readings that see Dimmesdale's "tongues of
flame" eloquence as the romance's central truth; e.g., see Roy Male's essay on
"Hawthorne's Literal Figures," in Ruined Eden of the Present, p. 90. My reading
also differsfrom those who see Dimmesdale's guilt in primarilysexual terms; see
Joel Porte, The Romance in America: Studies in Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville,
andJames (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 98-114.
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563
Twice in the narrative Dimmesdale allows flashes of anger to
break through,and twice the feelingssubside to a guiltysadness. In
chapter 10 the ministersuddenly demands of Chillingworth,"But
who art thou, that meddlest in thismatter?-that dares thrusthimself between the suffererand his God?" He rushes from the room
with a "frantic gesture." But after secluding himself for several
hours, he makes "the amplest apologies" to "the kind old man" for
the "violence" of his "unseemly outbreak of temper." As Chillingworthcalculates, manipulating his anger is a "step" towardexposing
"the hot passion of his heart." The physician'scool malice toyswith
the minister'sheated wrathto show the dangers of self-exposure."As
with one passion, so with another!" Chillingworthsays to himself
(p. 101).
When Hester tells Dimmesdale that Chillingworthis her husband, her loverexplodes withrage. Now the frighteningextremesof
his anger disturb the narrator as well as Hester. Suddenly imposing
a hierarchical interpretiveframe, the narrator associates violence,
blackness, and intermixturewiththe Devil's "portion."
"The minister
lookedat her,foran instant,withall thatviolenceofpassion,
which-intermixed,in more shapes than one, with his higher,purer,
softerqualities-was, in fact,theportionofhimwhichtheDevil claimed,
and throughwhichhe soughtto wintherest.Neverwas therea blackeror
a fiercerfrown,than Hesternow encountered.For the briefspace thatit
lasted,itwas a darktransfiguration." (p. 139)
Dimmesdale's "lower energies"yield, but only because he "had been
so much enfeebled by suffering." "Woman, woman, thou art
accountable for this!" he cries, again invoking the town's habit of
punitive accounting. "I cannot forgive thee!" But when Hester
throwsher arms around him with "sudden and desperate tenderness," he allows his forgivenessto emerge, "out of an abyss of sadness, but no anger." God, they agree, should be the punisher (pp.
139, 140). The narrator'srecoil fromhis character's rage diminishes
Dimmesdale's passion to guilt and constrictsHester's passion to
tenderness.
OutwardlyHester seems to have long since accepted her "stain,"
a taint that at last precludes any role forher as prophetess. In some
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564
respects, as Nina Baym and others have emphasized, her compromise compels the townspeople to softentheirharsh views of her.
it to the "power to sympathize,"
Her "powerto do," when she restricts
makes "the world's heavy hand" ordain her a Sister of Mercy, her
last Papist transfiguration(p. 117). At the end Hester returnsto
Salem to live out her life as a quiet forceforsympathyif not immediate change, invigoratingother despondent women with the hope
of some futureprophetess.17
But her real passions remain buried except forone last try.On
the scaffold with her lover, she desperately resurrectsher secret
dream of union in hell: "Shall we not meet again? . . . Shall we not
spend our immortallife together?Surely,surely,we have ransomed
one another,with all thiswoe!" (p. 181). Once again she claims that
their relation can be "ransoming" in its own terms, though now
throughthe more equivocal authorityof martyrdom.
Characteristically,Dimmesdale's firstresponse again is "Hush,
Hester, hush!" He has set his "bright,dyingeyes" on higherspiritual
possibilitiesforhimself.As he cites God, soul, reverence,and the impossibilityof "an everlastingand pure reunion," his language shows
an ascendant selfishness.Hester, willingto sacrificepurityforlove,
findsher love sacrificedforhis purity.Once again she is abandoned,
as Roger Prynnehad abandoned his wifeforalmost two years,as her
lover abandoned both her and her daughter formuch longer.18 The
men in her life have maintained their intellectual or spiritual selfcontrolby rejectingintimacy.The last she hears fromher lover'slips
is not her name but "Praised be his name! His will be done! Farewell!"
(p. 181).
'7Baym, "The Significance of Plot," in Ruined Eden of the Present, makes a
strong argument for Hester's consistentsocial power. Baym also stressesDimmesdale's moral inadequacy, though the sexism she attributesto Darrel Abel should be
lodged with the narrator. I think Baym overstatesHester's consistencyand underplays the narrator's ambivalence. The narrator'sCatholic associations for Hesterthe "sainted" Ann Hutchinson, the "madonna" that a "Papist" would have seen,
and here a "Sister of Mercy" whose letter "had the effectof the cross on a nun's
bosom" (p. 118)-may be meant to evoke suspiciousness as well as approval, given
the anti-Catholic feelingsrunningso high in the 1850s.
'8The narrator implies twice that Chillingworthhad been detained against his
will by Indians formuch of that time. Chillingworthis called "Master Prynne" by a
townsman in chapter 3. His "Peace, Hester, peace!" concluding chapter 14 parallels Dimmesdale's later formula.
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565
Hester'sexperiencehere finallydoes to Hester what Dimmesdale
demands forPearl in that scene by the brookside.It pacifiesher. Her
capacity to love diminishes to a tender mothering, the defeated
residue of a passionate equality. Pearl's own change toward tenderness, when she kisses the ministeron the scaffold, has been foreshadowed by several narrative admonitions about her dangerous
lack of "heart," as Hester was found wanting. Now Pearl gains her
narrator's praise for returning to femininity.Her tears, beyond
anger at last, indicate her "pledge" that she will no longer "do battle
with the world, but be a woman in it" (p. 181). Similarly,Hester
realizes that her futureprophetessmust never be stained with sin,
shame, or even a lifelongburden of sorrow. Mutely accepting the
conflationof town with narrativevalues, she must be content with
conflatingall the traditionalfemale roles: nurse, seamstress,mother,
helpmeet, confidante,and tenderheart.
Several critics, notably Nina Baym and Michael Colacurcio,
have argued that the ending shows Hester achieving at least partial
self-fulfillment.'9That may be true in terms that the town can
recognize. But it seems to me that the narrativeponderouslythwarts
the twinsources of her rebellious strength:her tenacious desire and
her fiercemind. More specifically,the narrator breaks his explicit
promiseof reunion withDimmesdale.
As the ministerassures Pearl on the midnightscaffold,all three
will stand together"At the great judgment day!" The narrator,too,
sees them illuminated in "the light that is to reveal all secrets, and
the daybreakthat shall unite all who belong to one another"(p. 112).
But Dimmesdale's revelation leads to eternal separation, not reunion. In the processionhe had seemed "unattainable in his worldly
position, and still more so in that far vista of his unsympathizing
thoughts, through which she now beheld him" (p. 170). Now the
narrator's final words bury Hester's hopes in a permanent gloom,
nervouslycommented on by the most sensitiveearly reviewersand
'9See Baym, "The Significance of Plot," in Ruined Eden of the Present; and
Michael J. Colacurcio, "Footsteps of Ann Hutchinson: The Context of The Scarlet
Letter," ELH, 39 (1972), 459-94, an essay which rightlyconnects Hester to Ann
Hutchinson and Dimmesdale to John Cotton but wronglyreduces Hester's radical
perceptions to her sexuality. He concludes that both the teller and the tale force
Hester to abandon conclusions to which we are sympathetic.
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Nineteenth-Century Fiction
symbolizedby her tombstone'slegend of red based on black. That
tombstoneis all that unites the two graves, whose dust, as the narrator at last concludes, "had no rightto mingle" (p. 186). Afterthe
child who danced on Isaac Johnson'sgrave in chapter 10 is reduced
to tears, the narratorescortsHester to her "darkening close" among
the congregated sepulchres. Hester's life has been a motherlysurvival among imprisonedpossibilities.
II
A narrativethat begins by challenging patriarchal punishment
ends by accepting punishment as a prelude to kindness. From AnthonyTrollope to Frederic Carpenter and beyond, the ending has
disturbed many readers who like Hester's spirited subjectivity.As
one criticnoted in 1954, "unlikehis judicial ancestor,who consigned
a witchto the gallows withan undismayed countenance, Hawthorne
would have sprung the trap with a sigh. If one were the witch, one
mightwell wonder whereinlay the vital difference."20
Though my reading continues that tradition, I question
whether the narrator representsall of Hawthorne. While he provides a safelyoverarchingframeof moral values to which both Hawthorne and his audience could consciously assent, the narrator's
evasive mixtureof sympathyand judgment also provides a safe way
of going beyond socially responsible norms to investigatedangerously attractiveinteriorstates of mind. From the firstparagraph of
"The Custom-House" Hawthorne presentshis "intrusiveauthor" as
a solicitous, sensible, yet receptive interpreterwhose movement
from torpid business surroundingsto a romantic sensibilityopens
the door for Hester's story. His firstreaction to the scarlet letter,
afterall, is hilariouslyinappropriate: he measures it, and findsthat
"each limb proved to be precisely three inches and a quarter in
length" (p. 27). This habit of precise accounting would seem perfectlynatural to the "man of business," the "main-spring" of the
Custom-House, who could "make the incomprehensibleas clear as
daylight," and for whom a "stain on his conscience" would be no
20MortonCronin, "Hawthorne on Romantic Love and the Status of Women,"
PMLA, 69 (1954), 98. See also Frederic I. Carpenter's fine essay, "Scarlet A
Minus," College English, 5 (1944), 173-80; rpt. in both the firstand second editionsof the Norton Critical Edition of The Scarlet Letter.
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Reading The Scarlet Letter
567
more troublesomethan an errorin his accounts or an ink-blotin his
record books (p. 22). But the scarletlettertakes the narratorbeyond
his own more satirical accounts. Its meanings "streamed forthfrom
the mysticsymbol, subtly communicating itselfto my sensibilities,
but evading the analysisof mymind" (p. 28).
This tension between sensibilityand analysis persiststhrough
the narrative.The power of authorityto take the shamefulmeasure
of vulnerable subjectivityterrifiesthe narrator. Yet he seems equally
terrifiedof the heart-freezingisolation inherent in aggressive autonomy. Fleeing coercive authority,including his own, he defines
himselfsimplyas an imaginativere-creatorof SurveyorPue's manuscript and imagines Hester's rebellious self-reliancewith sustained
flightsof empathy. Fleeing self-reliance,he chastises Hester's pride
and relentlesslyaccuses Chillingworth'sself-possessedmalice. For
him subjectivityseems always vulnerable to alien invasion. Chillingworth'sown invasion of Dimmesdale's soul manifeststhe devil's entry
-intothe scholar-physician.Perpetually oscillating between subjectivityand authority,the narratordodges being pinned down to one
mode or the other. To commit himselfeither way might expose his
fearfulcrueltyof heartor his equally fearfulvulnerability
to violation.2'
His solution, forboth himselfand his heroine, is the fluidityof
sympatheticrelationship. He strivesto "stand in some true relation
with his audience," fictionalizinghis reader as "a kind and apprehensive, though not the closest friend." Without such a relation, he
says, "thoughts are frozen and utterance benumbed" (p. 7). The
metaphor comes close to self-exposure. Seeking a nonthreatening
communication that protectshim fromreal intimacy, he indicates
his fear of a solidifyingself-possession.The audience has to warm
the intrinsiccoldness of his heart and tongue.
Similarly,the coldness of Hester's radical speculations must be
warmed by her motheringheart. "A woman," he concludes, "never
overcomes these problems by any exercise of thought"; theycan be
solved only be lettingthe heart "come uppermost" (p. 120). Having
established Hester's radical potential, the narrator now undercuts
2'Recent criticism has begun to explore these oscillations. See esp. Brodhead,
Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel; Kenneth Dauber, Rediscovering Hawthorne
(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1977), though Dauber is taken in by the narrator'sclaims forintimacy; and Edgar A. Dryden, Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Poetics
of Enchantment (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977), which argues for
Hawthorne's alternation between postures as his way of managing "a menacing
othernessat his own center" (p. 21).
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Nineteenth-Century Fiction
her force by dramatizingher transformationback to lovability,not
towardpublic combat. The "magic touch" to bringabout her "transfiguration,"as he says earlier (p. 119), sets the second half of the
narrativein motion. She vows to redeem Dimmesdale fromhis own
weakness and his malevolent tormentor.She will accomplish "the
rescue of the victim"fromher husband's "power" (p. 121).
Why the sudden swerve toward selfless liberation of a man
whom, even near the end, she can hardly forgivefor desertingher?
As the narratorsays so empatheticallyin one of his last oscillations,
"thus much of woman was there in Hester, that she could scarcely
forgivehim . . . for being able so completely to withdraw himself
from their mutual world; while she groped darkly, and stretched
forthher cold hands, and found him not" (p. 170). Yet here, nine
chapters earlier, she resolves to rescue her self-absorbed lover. In
part the narrator advocates a maternal sympathythat can subdue
Hester for her own good. More deeply, by both investigatingand
identifying
with the victim,the narratorencourages a Chillingworthlike interpretivemode that intensifiespunitive perceptions of guilt,
on all sides. In its latest formthis mode has become psychoanalytic
detectionof the Chillingworth-Dimmesdalerelation.
It seems obvious to post-Freudian readers that Chillingworth's
revengefulpenetrationinto Dimmesdale's bosom constitutesthe climactic momentof physicalintimacyin the story.His intrusive,sadistic rape firstawakens protracted"throb[s]of pain," then culminates
in the "momentof his ecstasy,"when his discoveryof what lies on the
sleeping minister'schest sends Dimmesdale into a "shudder" and
Chillingworthinto a "ghastlyrapture" of riotous gestures(p. 102).
The sexualization of revenge accompanies the desexing of love.
More broadly, the narrator'sovertlanguage of sympathyfrequently
masks his fascinationwith the violation of inward spheres. Various
readers have noted that Chillingworthbears the same relation to
Dimmesdale that Pearl oftenhas to Hester: the unrestrainedunderside of sociallyconformingenergies."2Dimmesdale's self-preoccupied
guilt, to take this view further,licenses Chillingworth'srage for
penetration,possession,and violation even as it recalls the minister's
22See Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (New
York: Stein and Day, 1966), p. 437; and Baym, The Shape of Hawthorne's Career,
who differsfrommy view in saying that at the end "the two shattered personalities
become whole again and the symboliccharacters disappear" (p. 130).
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Reading The Scarlet Letter
569
own momentof violationin the past. In the psychologicalallegoryto
which the narratorseems increasinglydisposed, malicious intrusion
is guilt'sdouble.
The narrative itself becomes a further stage for contrary
energies, as Richard Brodhead's fine discussion of its mixed modes
indicates. Afterestablishinginitiallyintensesympathieswith Hester's
resolute integrityand defiant creativity,it moves toward framing
her, in several senses. It also induces a covert fascination with violating her inwardnessand humbling her strength.This drama is displaced fromHester to Dimmesdale. The sexuality of victimization
and the intellectualized control of rage move Hester's subjectivity
toward the marginsof Hawthorne's romance.
Psychoanalyticreadings tend to suppress Hester's strugglefor
autonomy to reflect the Chillingworth-Dimmesdale connection.
Both Frederick Crews and John Irwin, the two most prominent
psychoanalyticinvestigators,assume the role of detectiveon the trail
of a narcissist. Crews presents the storyentirelyas if it were the
narrator's ambiguously ironic relation to Dimmesdale's libidinal
repression, while Irwin's Lacanian reading finds narcissisticmirroring doubled and redoubled throughout the text. But Dimmesdale's growthfromnarcissismto sublimated independence, like the
narrator's ironic pursuit, is a flightfrom feeling. Whether seeing
Freudian desire or Lacanian absence at the heart of the text, both
Crewsand Irwinmistakethenarrator'sdefensesfornarrativetruths.
23
Anxietyabout anger, more fearfulto him than sexual desire,
generates the narrator'sincompatible fascinationswith Hester's independence and Chillingworth'smalice. Both these frozen stances
intimate anger, in opposite ways. But because Chillingworth'srage
has its base in intimacy,unlike Hester's more generalized social rebellion, he is punished farmore severelyby the narrator,who makes
the cuckolded husband his prime villain. To the narratoranger and
23Irwin,American Hieroglyphics, pp. 239-84; Frederick C. Crews, The Sins of
the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes (New York: Oxford Univ. Press,
1966), pp. 136-53. Irwin sees Dimmesdale's guilt as the "true" self opposing his
false public role and presentsHester as the double for a Dimmesdale-like narrator.
Crews mocks Hester for "prating" of freedom and finds that the minister'sanxious
egotism finallyachieves "heroic independence" of Hester by sublimating desire into
oratory (pp. 143, 149). Baym, The Shape of Hawthorne's Career, pp. 138-39,
brieflysuggests a Freudian perspective, that Pearl might be Hester's id and ChillingworthDimmesdale's superego.
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Nineteenth-Century Fiction
desire are the same thing: low, base, the devil's plaything.They lead
to violence and violation, not love. Yet his idea of love is finallya
mystifiedself-projection.In affirmingsympathyas the key, he definesit as the capacity to complete one's divided selfwithoutundue
self-exposure,fromthe firstparagraph of "The Custom-House" to
the last pages of the story. That narcissisticdefinition avoids acknowledgingconflictas part of intimacy. In fact it avoids otherness
altogether,because forthe narratorothernessbringsa terrorof unloving regard. For him, anger is the terrorof unloving strangeness
within oneself. In rigidifyingChillingworth'sanger as possessive
malice the narrator controlsthat terroras allegory,while in transformingHester's more complicated subjectivityto maternal sympathyhe diffusesthat terroras romance.24
By the end of the storyboth Dimmesdale and the narratorrelease emotionsonlythroughan ascension of wordsthat nobody quite
understands. Dimmesdale's new power of unclear statement,in his
sermonand his confession,mirrorsa broader narrativemystification
of pain as the source of eloquence and transfiguration.From an
initialappreciationof Hester'sstrengthand fascinationwithChillingworth's power, the narrator has moved toward exalting Dimmesdale's weakness. The minister'sdiffuse anguish displaces Hester's
clearheaded suffering.Through insistent narrative framing, his
masochism becomes the scaffoldforself-magnifying
transcendence,
culminatingin the narrator'sadvocacy of spiritualizedmale narcissism as the way to complete one's divided self.
Dimmesdale's feminizedpain firstbringssome traditionalmale
rewards. Though he forsakeshis own fatherhoodfromthe moment
of conception, he ascends to meet his heavenlyfatherafterreceiving
a weepykissfromhis daughter,whom he barelyhas time to acknowledge before his death. Pearl's childhood is an extreme instance of
the absent fatherand the over-presentmotherso basic to American
241n Rediscovering Hawthorne Dauber astutely discusses the shift toward Dimmesdale as allegory's socialization of the forest'sromance world. Brodhead, Hawthorne,Melville, and the Novel, associates interpretiveopenness with Hester's symbolic mode, while Chillingworth embodies tendencies toward allegorical rigidity
and the punitive realism of a hierarchic male society. Bell, The Development of
American Romance, pp. 176-77, similarly argues that Hester's rebellion is "the
central 'story'" but that she, as well as society,repressesherselfto become a "victim
of allegory." Both Poe and Henry James vehemently opposed Hawthorne's allegorizing as artisticallydestructive,a perspective sometimes adopted by Hawthorne
himself.
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571
middle-classsociety,and experiencedby Hawthornein his own life.25
Consider her fatheras an American success story,made possible by
his flightfrom woman and child. He has no distractionsfrom his
work, and he can exercise to the full his intellectual powers. He
makes an extraordinarysocial impact, gains respect as a public and
private adviser, and after a satisfactorydark night of the soul he
gains his final reward of celestial approval. Meanwhile Hester, like a
good mistress,remainsbonded to her child, her duties, her isolation,
her marginal status, and her hopeless dreams of union.
The narrator's astonishing corollary to Hester's decline into
sympathy unites Chillingworth, Dimmesdale, and himself in a
lovingascension. AfterDimmesdale spurnsHester to gain an uncontaminated integration for his purified maleness, we are asked to
imagine him united in heaven not just with God but with Chillingworth as well. In the middle of the storythe narrator oddly interpolates that "hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be
transformedto love," ifnew irritationsof hostilitydo not impede the
process (p. 116). At several other points he implies that rage and
desire fuse as violent passion. Now the narrator invertsthe devil's
work. He takes the abilityto transformhate into love as his final test
of the reader's tendercapacities.
Askinghis readers to be mercifulto Chillingworth,he wonders
"whetherhatred and love be not the same thing at bottom." Each
supposes "intimacyand heart-knowledge."Each needs dependence.
Each dies ifthe object withdraws.
Philosophicallyconsidered,therefore,the two passionsseem essentially
thesame, exceptthatone happensto be seen in a celestialradiance,and
theotherin a duskyand luridglow. In thespiritualworld,theold physi- mutualvictims
as theyhavebeen- may,unawares,
cian and theminister
have foundtheirearthlystockof hatredand antipathytransmutedinto
(pp. 183-84)
goldenlove.
The passage stillseems to me the strangestin all of Hawthorne.
Transformingdevilish rage into divine love, it takes Dimmesdale's
hierarchyof high and low to its highest extreme. If the narrator
25See Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering; also see the last chapter of
David Leverenz, The Language of Puritan Feeling: An Exploration in Literature,
Psychology,and Social History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1980),
pp. 258-71.
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Nineteenth-Century Fiction
hesitates to assert their fancifulunion as spiritual fact, he has no
qualms about describing them as "mutual victims." Anne Abbott
cited this passage as a prime example of Hawthorne's "mistborn
ideas" and asked "if there be any firmground at all" here. Yet she
also mused, in some perplexity,that Hawthorne seems to share that
"doubt."26 Her reaction is quite right, because the passage substituteslovingvictimsforstrongselvesin conflict.Its severallevels of
meaning bring the reader's contraryresponses to their final suspended inversion.
The possibilityof spiritualunion in heaven joins the two whose
intercourseon earth comes to centerthe story:revengefulfatherand
violated/violatingson. The cuckold and the loverrise togetherto an
all-male paradise, while Hester mutely returnsto Salem. The narrator's fantasized embrace of father and son gives a more openly
Oedipal dimension to the classic American fantasy,firstdescribed
by Leslie Fiedler,of two men in flightfromstrongwomen. Moreover,
the transmutationsuggestsan integrationof the male self as well, if
onlyin coupling two sides of a self-falsification.
Intrusivesadism and
guiltyvulnerabilitycome togetherat last, released fromany pressure
to come to termswithanger, love, or fear.
Most significantly,the union occurs not in the plot but in the
narrator'srelation to his audience. He sets his readers a last challenge: can you take your sympathythat far? In asking readers to
sympathizewithDimmesdale and Chillingworthas "mutual victims"
and to imagine hate transmuted into golden love, the narrator
brings himself into that embrace, with his reader as witness. All
three male voices, ironicallyat odds on earth, escape together,free
from the body's sexuality and the mind's conflicts,and free from
genuine intimacy.27
Yet this narrative flight,like all his extremes, is momentary.
Returning to earth, he sympatheticallyconcludes with Hester's
26Abbott,review of The Scarlet Letter, in Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage, p.
165. Bell, The Development of American Romance, p. 178, suggeststhat even God
"becomes a kind of allegorical double" for Dimmesdale's "guiltyself-justification."
Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, p. 235, describes this
passage as "an equivocation which undercuts, at the last moment, the whole suggested meaning of his book."
27See Helene Cixous, "sorties," in New French Feminisms: An Anthology, ed.
Elaine Marks and Isabelle de CourCivron(Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press,
1980), pp. 91-92, on the reduction of the woman to the maternal implied in the
ascension of man to the father.
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573
solitude, not Dimmesdale's transcendence. Part of the narrator's
strategyfor reconciling conflictsis to condemn fixityof any kind,
physical or spiritual. If rigidityseems fearfullydemonic, associated
with anger and the lower parts of the soul or body, flexible sympathy becomes the narrator's vague placebo. This tactic allows
him momentaryparticipationsin his contradictoryextremes. But it
also establishes multiple authorial interpretations as a shifting
medium for the plot. His self-dramatizingceaselessly pacifies and
resurrectshis plot's tensions, while deflecting attention from his
punitiveplottingto the sympatheticpuppeteer.
Pearl representswhat most needs pacification: her rebellious
impulses toward creative autonomy and her aggressiveimpulses to
detect and accuse. Dimmesdale, farfrombeing the "true self" of the
romance, unites two weak contemporarydefenses against Pearl's
strongimpulses. He embodies a male accommodation to public role
and a female sense of selfas vulnerable victim. If Pearl joins contradictorystrengths,Dimmesdale joins fragile defenses. As the narrative awakens contrary energies of rebellion and intrusion, the
narrator's voice quells these polarized versions of anger and authoritythroughhis rhetoricof sympathyand his intimacywithwhat
he oftencalls Dimmesdale's "tremulous" voice. His feminizedhero,
a dimmed valley even in his name, becomes both the narrator and
the object of his inquisition.
In the narrator's increasingly Oedipal allegory, a regressive,
inquisitorialfamilytriangleof cruel impersonalfather,kind despairing mother, and tortured triumphantson all but drives out early
expectationsfor Hester's adult subjectivityagainst public patriarchy.
A sadomasochistic symbiosisof father and son becomes a vision of
transcendent,victimizedlove. Yet the narrativeinsistentlyreturnsto
itslatent subversionof male inauthenticity.Hester's integritymutely
survives.If Pearl ceases to do battle withthe world, she findsa wider
world unimaginable to Salem, or for that matter to the narrator
himself,whose Puritan roots "have intertwinedthemselves"with his
own nature (p. 12). This is as close as he comes to directlyacknowledginghis Chillingworthside. At the same time, however,his presentation of himself gives access to strong subjectivities beyond his
conscious accommodations.
A psychoanalyticfocus on anger and dependence might illuminate Hawthorne's biographyhere, especially if complemented by
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Nineteenth-Century Fiction
a feministanalysis of the polarized sex role expectations so basic to
his time. Hawthorne's remarkable empathy with a solitarywoman,
and his fear of an unloving other insinuated into his own psyche,
probably have their contradictorysources in his ties to his mother,
whose death helped to impel Hester's creation. The intensitiesof
that bond go deeper than the more obvious Oedipal guilt forhaving
possessed a woman whose husband strangelydisappeared.28 Yet the
complexitiesof narrative dissociation in The Scarlet Letter have as
much to do withHawthorne's canny relation to his audience as with
his uncanny relationto himself.
In conformingto his audience's expectationsfora morallycomfortablenarrator, Hawthorne fictionalizeshimselfso as to partially
undermine his own characterization. His fragmentingempathies
outstrip the narrator's growing alliances with Dimmesdale's selfcenteringscrutinyand Chillingworth'sintrusivedetection. He seems
fullyaware that his readers will accept Hester only while she suffers
for her sin; as no less than three reviewersremarked, the narrator
avoids the dangers of "the French school" by making his heroine
satisfactorilymiserable.29Yet while silencing Hester with values he
and his audience hold dear, he makes his readers uncomfortable
withthosevalues.
28AsJohn Franzosa has established for "The Custom-House," anger and dependence are issues more basic than guilt and sexuality. See "'The Custom-House,'
The Scarlet Letter, and Hawthorne's Separation fromSalem," ESQ, 24 (1978), 5771. Franzosa argues that a guiltyidentitybalances impulses toward hostile intrusion
and isolated self-possession, and allows inauthentic identity with the narrator's
community. Baym defends Hawthorne's mother from Hawthorne in "Nathaniel
Hawthorne and His Mother: A Biographical Speculation," American Literature,
54 (1982), 1-27. While suggesting that Hawthorne's various presentations of her
mask her "oppressive" presence in his psyche, Baym sees The Scarlet Letter as a
creative reversal that temporarilyfrees Hawthorne from dependency on maternal
power.
29The phrase is Whipple's (Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage, pp. 161-62).
Henry F. Chorley, in a reviewin the A thenaeum, 15 June 1850, praised The Scarlet
Letter forbeing "so clear of feverand of prurientexcitement" because "the misery
of the woman" is always present (rpt. in Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage, see p.
163), while E. A. Duyckinck, in a review in Literary World, 30 Mar. 1850, was
happy to see a "writerwho has lived so much among the new school" handle "this
delicate subject without an infusionof George Sand" (rpt. in Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage, see pp. 156-57). On the other hand, both Abbott's review and the
reviewby Orestes Brownson in Brownson's QuarterlyReview, Oct. 1850, condemn
the romance because Hester is not sufficientlyrepentant, as does the infamous
review by Arthur Cleveland Coxe in the Church Review, Jan. 1851 (rpt. in Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage; see pp. 165-66; 177-78; and 183).
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Reading The Scarlet Letter
575
When he at last offershis "sweetmoral blossom," it turnsout to
be a versionof Dimmesdale's anguish over self-display:"Be true! Be
true! Be true! Show freelyto the world, if not your worst,yet some
traitwherebythe worstmay be inferred!"(p. 183). This is the hesitant exhibitionismof a disembodied Salem Flasher, who encourages
his readersto imagine his worstwhile showingtheirown. He assumes
that his readers share with him not only a selfworthhating but also
the ambivalent desire to detect, to be detected, and to stay respectably hidden. A mutual revelation of guiltysubjectivityconstitutes
his idea of true sympathy,true community,and true interpretation.
As he quietly observes,just afterDimmesdale has seen his A flash
across the sky, "another's guilt might have seen another symbol in
it" (p. 113). At such moments, while interpretiveauthoritydisintegrates, writingand reading converge. They become equivalent,
equivocal acts of shared self-exposureand accusation. Uneasy lies
the tale that wears that crown.
Finally, however, The Scarlet Letter takes readers beyond its
narrator and his imagined audience. Dimmesdale's guilt, like the
narrator's, conceals a fear of losing approval. But Hawthorne's
romance evokes strongsubjectivityin opposition to dependence of
any kind. Throughout, like an anxious referee, the interpreter's
voice strivesto rise above the fray.Tryingto sympathize,judge, and
reconcile, he imposes the masks he wants to lift.Yet while the storyteller oscillates between guilt and decorum, his storybrings out a
much more riskyinwardness, whose unresolved tensions sent Mrs.
Hawthorne to bed and Hester to a deeper solitude. Hester's epitaph
suitablyblazons forthher red strengthagainst her black background.
By contrast,the narrator'sepitaph could be the remarkhe addresses
to "the ministerin a maze": "No man, for any considerable period,
can wear one face to himself,and another to the multitude,without
finallygettingbewildered as to which may be the true" (p. 154). In
accommodating his voice to the contradictionsof public authority,
the narratorjoins Salem's congregatedsepulchres,while Hester's life
continuesto speak withembattled vitality.
Rutgers University
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