Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850)

1. The text belongs to the tradition of American romance, so technically it is not a novel.
Like with Cooper, the romance is a distinct mode of representation: liberal treatment
of historical sources, fantastic and Gothic elements (characters, settings, plots).
Hawthorne, additionally, introduces a variety of symbolic and allegorical elements.
2. Hawthorne and Melville knew the allegorical literature of English Renaissance, e.g.
Chaucer’s House of Life and Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Both authors
acknowledged these works as influences. And, of course, they knew allegorical
exegesis of the Bible from tracts and sermons. This invites many intertextual readings
of The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick, e.g. David Reynolds’s Beneath the American
Renaissance (1988), a survey of 19th-century pop intertexts.

3. Definitions based on:

Sławiński, J. (ed.) Słownik terminów literackich. 1988.
Fletcher, A. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. 1976.
Auerbach, E. Mimesis: Represented Reality in Western Literature. 1967.
De Man, Paul. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary
Criticism. 1971.

Symbol Allegory Figure

A single motive or set of motives whose
meaning is hidden, ambiguous. The
function of symbol is to direct the reader’s
attention to that meaning. Reception of
symbol requires a twofold interpretation: a
motive (character, object, situation, event,
plot) must be localized in the represented
world of a work, and then identified as
denominator of the hidden meaning. This
duplicity links symbol with allegory; the
difference between s. and a. is that in
allegory the relation between a phenomenon
and its hidden meaning is purely
conventional, definite and stable, whereas in
symbol the relation is unique and
ambiguous. Thus, allegory has generally
only one, correct, interpretation, whereas
the symbol is purposefully open to many
interpretations. However, in Romantic
theory, symbolic meaning is also described
as a unique, unconventional, mystical
(given, not arbitrary ) one.
Allegorical meaning is hidden, but it is
conventional, codified, based on traditions:
classical literature, Christian texts, Baroque
iconology and emblematic art. In rare cases,
allegorical meaning stems from a natural
similarity or linguistic and logical relations
(as in visual puzzles). (…) An important
source was Iconology by Carlo Ripa (1593),
where
meanings were hidden in every detail of an
allegorical image: the body (especially
swollen or disfigured), the attire (including
colors and patterns), the attributes (musical
instruments, tools). (…) Medieval aesthetic
gave allegory an absolute meaning: all that
is sensual, the evident, visible, human, was
an indication of the divine, supernatural,
and invisible. This aesthetic was criticized
in Romanticism (Goethe, Friedrich
Schlegel, S.T. Coleridge), when the
absolute quality of allegoric meaning was
thought to be incompatible with the
arbitrariness of its conventional sources.
Figurative interpretation is also called
typology: in Biblical interpretation, events
from the Old Testament were figures
(allegorical anticipations) of events in the
New Testament. What distinguishes figura
from allegory or symbol is: 1.) temporal
sequence (anticipation, prophecy), and 2.)
autonomy and equal prominence of both
events (i.e. the symbol was subordinate to
its meaning, whereas the figure is not
subordinate to what it anticipates). Erich
Auerbach was particularly impressed by the
fact that figures are as expressive and
important as the events that they pre-figure;
he quoted examples from Dante’s Inferno,
where the plight of punished souls (figures)
is the same as the plight of apocalyptic
events (figured). Auerbach saw it as a proto-
realism. In Hawthorne, think about Hester’s
plight as a timeless equivalent of
contemporary exclusion and oppression of
women.

4. Hawthorne, arguably, is using all these modes of representation. Authorial (narrator’s)

comments in the text suggest that he does so both in earnest and ironically.

5. The visual prominence of symbol and allegory also have a bearing on the text: flat
characters, simple plot (in the technical meaning), action as progression of allegorical
scenes, wealth of descriptions. For speculations about continuity of this mode of
representation in American fiction: Joel Porte, The American Romance. Continuers
include Herman Melville (a biographically confirmed case), Henry James, Stephen
Crane, William Faulkner, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Toni Morrison.
Notes from reception and criticism:

The Scarlet Letter is a psychological romance. The hardiest of Mr Malaprop would never call
it s novel. It is a tale of remorse, a study of character in which the human heart is anatomized,
carefully, elaborately, and with a striking poetic and dramatic power.
Everet A. Duyknick, review in the NY Literary World, 1850.

It is upon her guilty lover that the author projects most frequently the cold, thin rays of his
fitfully-moving lantern, which makes here and there a little luminous circle, on the edge of
which hovers the vivid and sinister figure of her retributive husband.
Henry James, “The Three American Novelists”, 1875.

black flower rosebush

shadows the Scarlet Letter
dungeon artistry
forest moral blossom
John E. Hart, “The Scarlet Letter – One Hundred Years After” 1950.

Hart also includes fragment of a letter from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Sophia Peabody:

Thou only hast revealed me to myself; for without any aid, my best knowledge of myself would
be merely to have known my own shadow. Indeed we are but shadows (…) till the heart is
touched. The touch creates us.

(With reference to the abundant visual imagery in H’s fiction, and numerous, long scenes of
watching and being watched. H and his characters want to touch instead, intersubjective
contact initiates creation of personality etc. Beginning with the 1970s, this spurred a number
of philosophical readings along the more ‘touching’ lines in hermeneutics and
phenomenology, such as Husserl, Buber, Levinas, and Heidegger.)

It is a cliché in our contemporary thinking about American literature as possessing two

threads of continuity: the light and the dark, the optimistic and the pessimistic, the naïve
innocence and the shattered experience – in short, the crude ebullience of The Leaves of
Grass and the life-tempered restraint of Moby Dick. And since one cannot be satisfied with
less than the best, the pessimistic strand had to have some tragedies to hand upon it (…) and
The Letter became translated into an American tragedy. From this view Hester Prynne
certainly wouldn’t do as a tragic protagonist. She is female, and, worse, a nonvirginal female
in a way that Antigone never is; she is, at least for the duration of the novel, a passive rather
than active sufferer; she is too long too honest with herself to be eligible for a recognition
scene; and she rises continually through the action without any tragic dénouement at all. Thus
the critics of this persuasion were forced to seek another protagonist and the most likely
character was not terribly difficult to find. Roger Chillingworth was counted out from the
very beginning and Arthur Dimmesdale was twisted into the contorted shape necessary for the
new role he was to play.
Earl H. Rovit, “Ambiguity in Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. 1961.