Literary Significance and Narrative Foundations of The Scarlet Letter
The Scarlet Letter is a magnum opus of the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. Published in Boston in 1850, it has been considered one of the cornerstones of American literature. This was the first American novel to cause a wide resonance in Europe. A native of Salem, Hawthorne revives the way of life and the moral image of his ancestors, the Puritans of the mid-17th century, in the book. Questions of intolerance, sin, repentance, and grace are at the center of his attention.
The main character is Hester Prynne, who conceived and gave birth to a girl in the absence of her husband. Since it is not known whether her husband is alive, the sanctimonious townspeople subject her to a relatively light punishment for possible adultery: she is publicly shamed and must wear the letter A (abbreviated from adultery) embroidered with scarlet thread on her clothing for the rest of her life. For her husband, who returned to New England at the time of Hester’s public punishment, his wife’s main offense is her refusal to reveal the name of the child’s father (Hawthorne 155-475).
The novel The Scarlet Letter is the true crown of Hawthorne’s works, in which the principles of romance writers are significantly transformed and enriched, creating new versions of narrative structures that are turned into artistic matter. The Scarlet Letter is simpler and more complete than other novels, achieves its goal with great perfection, and is marked by a difficult-to-define charm that can be found in an artist’s work when he first reaches his peak—a kind of directness and naturalness of expression, obliviousness to the reader, and fresh interest in the topic (Hawthorne 155-475).
Historical Sources and the Representation of Puritan Society
The story on which the novel was based was conceived by Hawthorne long before he wrote it. For the first time, a woman with a scarlet letter on her chest appears in the story Endicott and the Red Cross, where she appears as one of the background characters. It is mentioned in his notebooks. One of the records from 1844 has a direct bearing on the future novel: the life of a woman whom the old law condemned to wear the letter A sewn on her clothes as a sign of the adultery she committed. She became the heroine of the novel, Hester Prynne. The diary entry of October 27, 1841, symbolizes moral or spiritual illness in bodily form: when a person commits a sin, it can lead to the appearance of an ulcer on the body.
The action of the novel is related to the past and occurs in New England in the era of the first settlements. However, the haze of time cast over these events and separating them from the present was not intended by Hawthorne to create an idyllic picture. In working with historical material, the writer abandoned the approach to history that developed in Romanticism, which determined the significance of his artistic achievements (Hawthorne 155-475). In Romanticism, the past is often presented as the antithesis of an unacceptable present for either the hero or the author. One might even say that, when referring to history, the novelist did something similar to the flight of a romantic hero. Illuminated by an iridescent aura of fantasy and explicitly and implicitly endowed with positive traits absent from the surrounding reality, the past was a striking contrast to the present and often served as the embodiment of the author’s social, ethical, or aesthetic ideal, whether or not the author was inclined toward its romantic idealization. It could be expressed by depicting the past as the golden age, the new Arcadia, medieval freemasonry, the motifs of a pastoral or fairy tale, etc. These aims were also served by the aesthetics of the past, in which past epochs were portrayed as the realm of beauty and harmony.
Against the background of the traditional romantic historical narrative, The Scarlet Letter is distinguished precisely by the complete absence of the idealization of the past, a characteristic, as one can see, of Hawthorne as a novelist. Approaching the past very critically, the writer is not inclined to turn a blind eye to those pages of history that are worthy of condemnation, which strengthens the impression of the author’s objectivity as opposed to the subjectivity associated with Romanticism in the narrative. Hawthorne achieves this complex effect by using a whole arsenal of artistic techniques that enrich his artistic palette, giving it new, bright colors (Hawthorne 155-475).
Documentary Framing and The Custom-House
Among these methods are, in particular, insistent references to the primary source of the novel, which seems to be merely the processing of genuine notes by a certain customs guard, Mr. Pugh. At one time, this was a fairly common method: authors often presented their works as manuscripts found in a bottle or an old chest, or as documents inherited from relatives or acquaintances. For greater persuasiveness, Hawthorne also introduces material evidence—a scrap of scarlet matter, which turned out to be a real scarlet letter. The materiality of this miraculously preserved relic of the past is intended to strengthen the reader’s impression that the story is genuine rather than fictional.
The role of the context in which these facts are presented is also significant. The Scarlet Letter opens not with a traditional preface explaining the author’s intentions and describing the strange circumstances under which the manuscript was found. The text of the novel is preceded by a detailed autobiographical essay devoted to Hawthorne’s service at the custom house in the years preceding the writing of the novel. The portraits of fellow servicemen drawn from life, the undeniable authenticity of the biographical information, and the tone of the narrative in the Custom-House—at times trusting, sarcastic, good-naturedly mocking, caustic, or mildly ironic—also enhance the work’s sense of objectivity, preparing the reader to perceive the events of the novel as genuine.
Objectivity, Subjectivity, and Narrative Contrast
The original combination of the author’s desire for objectivity and the subjective orientation inherent in the genres of romantic prose used by Hawthorne allows us to speak of dialecticism as the most pronounced trait of his artistic thinking, conditioning the uniqueness of his artistic vision. However, the writer was not always equally successful in resolving this contradiction. Nowhere else in Hawthorne’s work is this combination of opposing trends embodied in such a perfect, harmonious, and natural form as in The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne 155-475).
The contrast between the introductory essay and the text of The Scarlet Letter itself is so striking that it seems that the author intentionally set himself the goal of writing about what leads him away. The main text is immersed in history, depicts the life of the Puritan community, and focuses on complex moral and philosophical questions. It is presented in an analytical mode and a gloomy tone with a touch of solemnly ominous grandeur. The Custom-House sets the tone of the present, sometimes with a sense of burning urgency. Portraits of contemporary colleagues, whose lives are so primitive and whose needs are so basic that the question of the moral foundations of such an existence can be posed only in a negative form, in turn, contrast with autobiographical motives designed to highlight the absolute incompatibility of the author and his environment, leading to the complete extinction of his creative impulses. At the same time, both lines of this strange introduction are combined by a game-like element inclined toward a phantasmagoric grotesque.
Romance, Imagination, and Hawthorne’s Genre
Perhaps, at least in part, such a visible difference between these texts is due to a change in the initial design in the course of work on the book (Hawthorne 155-475). Unexpectedly for the author, who originally intended to publish another collection of stories, The Scarlet Letter grew and displaced the other stories intended for the volume. The work progressed so quickly that the Custom-House, written shortly before the novel was completed, contained references to one of them, Main Street. Without knowing it, Hawthorne, as it were, foresaw the advice of D. H. Lawrence, who resolutely insisted three-quarters of a century later: Never trust an artist. Trust the story itself (tale). Subordinated to the higher logic of artistic creation, Hawthorne allowed his Scarlet Letter to do to him, in essence, what, according to Pushkin, his Tatyana did to him.
Hawthorne defined the genre of The Scarlet Letter as a romantic novel (romance), first resorting to this designation in the story May Pole (the word romance is used in this work in relation to all four of his large-scale works, not as opposed to the author’s definition, as it is often found in American criticism—the word romantic is omitted only for the sake of brevity). The famous and often quoted pages of the introductory essay contain an opposition between two genre varieties of the novel—realistic and romantic. Until recently, it was customary to understand the writer’s arguments too literally in theoretical and personal terms (in relation to his own creativity). They were taken as a direct expression of his literary and aesthetic views. Individual statements, especially with regard to the romantic narrative, were considered almost as formulations of laws (Hawthorne 155-475).
It should be added that, while reflecting on imagination in this essay, Hawthorne basically speaks of two different things, implying not only the romantic imagination that Coleridge wrote about but also the creative imagination that lies in the nature of all art. Everything is complicated by the fact that both these meanings are sometimes combined within one statement, which, in fact, has gone unnoticed by criticism. Thus, in the famous passage stating that a person who is unable to dream of strange things and make them look like truth should not try to write a romantic novel (9, p. 45), the first part clearly refers to a romantic novel, while the second has a broader meaning, echoing Shakespeare’s words about making fiction seem like truth.
Works Cited
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings : Authoritative Texts, Contexts, Criticism.” A Norton Critical Edition, 2005.
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