Transcript Scarlet Letter Overview

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 writer
Then, 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.
p32
My 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