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... s and timidity. He aggravates his sin of adultery by his prolonged concealment of it and he further aggravates it by trying to keep up an appearance of piety. As the novel is primarily a story of fall of a great priest, we can easily defy Dimmesdale as the tragic hero. His life is also one long misery.
He succumbs to temptation once again when in the course of his forest interview with Hester; he agrees to flee from Boston with her, though he could not stick to it. This action also leads him to collapse and makes him a tragic hero. His weakness magnifies rather than lessens the power of story. His fight is internal.
His confession to the public is in of the noblest climaxes in stories to tragedy. Crime and punishment are dealt here both on personal and social level. The act of adultery is a crime against the individual, that individual being the wrong husband or wife. But adultery is also a crime against society. Hester Prynne has by her adulterous action, wronged her husband Chillingworth and that is what she tells him in so many words.
The wrong that she has done to her husband is a crime to a personal level. But as a member so society she is also a sinner. Hester herself does not consider her adulterous action to be a serious crime or sin. For the reason, she does not experience any deep sense of guilt even after society has pronounced his judgment upon her.
Hester believes in the sanctity of love relationship between her and Dimmesdale. The scarlet letter A is the sigma that Hester has to carry always for her misdeed. Children follow her and shout at her. She is cruelly treated by the society.
But the inherent goodness of Hester and her maternal solitude to Pearl keep her from further evil. Her crime is the serious one and her punishment is great. But it must be pointed out that the punishment comes from the society and is unaccompanied by any pangs of the society. Dimmesdale's punishment comes purely from within. Society does not punish him because it does not know but he is a greater sinner of adultery and also of hypocrisy. He is all the time haunted by the sense of guilt.
The fact of concealment serves only to intensify his misery. He undergoes various kinds of penance including vigils, fasts and flagellation. Society does not play the least part in the mental torture, though the role played by Chillingworth cannot be ignored. However, the crime that Dimmesdale done is severe and the more bitter crime is his being hypocrite.
But he receives his punishment and through it Hawthorne shows us his noble characteristics. Sin, in a sense, creates hester; it nearly damns Dimmesdale. Yet the clergyman failing is less hypocrisy than want of courage. And Chillingworth the wronged husband turns into a fiend when he dedicates his life to a hideous event.
Hester goes through the punishment but she does not need the purification because she does not commit any crime. Love cannot be called a crime, though society tortured her. Dimmesdale is the real sinner and we see him going through hid mental purification for seven years. He understands his sin and he confesses his crime before his death. We can call Chillingworth a great sinner here because he is not a good husband and he also choose a way to torture Dimmesdale which is also a kind of hypocrisy from social point of view. But this character does not go through any significant regeneration of mind.
Hawthorne seems assert to, at times, the converse of Christ words: If ye were blind, ye should have no seen. He shows the effect of sin in many characters and seems to imply that it will be sin when a person is conscious in doing it. The writer here is considering his own point of view and he is not supporting the view of the society. So when he makes the characters to purify themselves, the readers takes them as positive approaches and agree with the writer. Hawthorne's is authentic here as an American poet and that is an important reason of his being so popular. The main ideology of the society in The Scarlet letter is Puritanism.
The puritan society is creating all the punishment for the characters. The society is the judge of an individual and he or she is not allowed to do whatever is honest according to him or her. And the controller of this society is the puritan church and priests. The puritan law of the time allowed for a sentence of death for an adulteress, which is totally brutal. Hawthorne comments ironically on the puritanical ideas of the ti 9 me to which the story relates. Hester is treated by the society as a great sinner but the main sinner Dimmesdale is considered as a noble man.
This is the hypocrisy of that society. Hawthorne shows this novel based on harsh, stern and self-righteous Puritanism. Hawthorne here covers the whole range of puritan life, all the way from governor Bellinhgham and the senior clergyman, Mr. John Wilson, to the children of the community, and none of these representatives of a puritan society produces a pleasant impression upon us. Ironically it is the coarse sailors of the Bristol ship who lend a touch, a very small touch, of gaiety to the book, which is otherwise dominated by the odious behavior and attitude of mind of the puritans. Both The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun touch the daring theme of salvation not through sin but through the suffering, which follows sin.
Hawthorne does not believe that law can deal with the sins of the soul. But we are never told what Hester's views are. This has sometimes been imputed to timidity on Hawthorne's part. As a matter of fact it is due to his sound aesthetic instinct. Generally speaking, a symbol is something, which used to stand for something else.
In literature, it is most often a concrete object, which is used to represent something more abstract and broader to represent something, often a moral, religious or philosophical concept or value. In Hawthorne's use of symbol in The Scarlet Letter, we observe the author making one of his most distinctive and significant contributions to the growth of American fiction. In the novel the letter A appears in a variety forms and places. Even as the original mark of adultery, the letter has different personal meaning to various characters. To the puritan community it is a mark of just punishment.
To Hester the A is a symbol of unjust humiliation. To Dimmesdale A is a piercing reminder of his own guilt. To Chillingworth A is a spur to the quest for revenge. To Pearl, it is bright and mysterious curiosity. The symbol is actually not criticizing the character but is mocking the society.
The forest also symbolizes the place where darkness and gloom pre-dominate and one can find his way only by following a narrow, twisting path; it is the symbol of moral wilderness in which Hester has been wandering. The brook in the forest is also symbolic in several ways. First, it suggests Pearl, because of its unknown source and because it travels through unknown gloom. Because of it mournful babble, it becomes a kind of history of sorrow, to which one more story is added. We find the building of the prison, which represent the crime, and punishment of the society. The most revealing symbol lies in his use of characters.
His minor characters are almost wholly symbolic. The puritan notions of church, state and witchcraft are personified in the figures of the Reverend Mr. Wilson, Bellingham and Mistress Hobbies. It is interesting to note that Hawthorne mentions all three of them in connection with each of the scaffold scene. The scaffold, for instance, is not only a symbol of stern puritan code, but it also becomes a symbol of open acknowledgement of personal scene. Each of his major characters symbolizes a certain view of scene and its effects in the human heart.
Mark Van Doren considers the novel as one of the great love stories, though it gives us no details of love. It has been suggested that with a little shift of angle of attention it can be called love-story. If there are no sentimental or passionate scene depicting the love of Hester and Dimmesdale, it is because of the setting of the story is 17 th century puritanical Boston. But the emphasis of the love passion is clear. Marriage and passion are shown to be in conflict in the story, and the claims of passion seem to be weightier. The sentiment, which unties Hester and Arthur, is of a different kind altogether.
The conjugal relationship between Hester and Chillingworth is completely devoid of passion. But the love of Hester and Dimmesdale matures them morally and spiritually. The story also deals with the love of a mother. We are conscious about the love of Hester for her daughter Pearl. Hawthorne deals with love in a different way where love enters the story but it is briefly considered. Hawthorne makes abundant use of irony in The Scarlet Letter.
The remark of the female spectator becomes ironical, as Dimmesdale himself is the partner of Hester's sin. There are also other consequences, which show the same thing. There are some situational ironies where a contrast is made between pretence and reality. Chillingworth, by his concealment of his identity, and by his concealment of his motives in developing an intimacy with Dimmesdale is a constant irony. And it is the contrast between appearance and reality. Chillingworth tries to wreck and ruin the minister but the irony is, he damns himself.
Dimmesdale himself remains in lie in front of public. There is irony too, in the way Reverend John Wilson is described. Most of the ironies lie in the characters themselves. Hawthorne is very tactful in making the use of allegory through characters. Hawthorne's use of ambiguity or as the critic F. O.
Matthiessen has called it; multiple choice is employed several times in The Scarlet Letter. It is, however a device, which has its origin in a number of Hawthorne's earlier stories. He continued to use this device to defuse the skeptical objections of his common-sensible readers. In all senses Hawthorne leaves the solution to the reader; the reader must decide what is literary true. It seems as if he wishes to make use of the supernatural or fantastic devices for symbols and also offers an optional explanation for the literal minded reader to whom the fantastic is not justified, not even for an artistic effect.
Actually his method of ambiguity gives the reader the better of two worlds. He is somewhat like the trial lawyer who withdraws a telling remark upon the judges objection, but knows that the implications of his remark will remain in the minds of the jury members. The Scarlet Letter is read with various approaches. In effect, though with great delicacy and circumspection, Hawthorne is suggesting that the writing of this novel is an intensely personal experience for him, the working out of deeply autobiographical emotions. Certainly, both in his writing and in his works at the custom house he has attempted to be a good citizens of his society, now, he is writing a book what gives voice to a deep rejection and defiance of social regulations. The exposition of the novel, though dramatic, has a classical obviousness; there is no trace of obscurity in any of the characters and relationships.
It has the art of saying things well and it is very positively tested. Hawthorne treats of those matters among which it is very easy for a blundering writer to go wrong-the subtleties and mysteries of life, the moral and spiritual maze. Prepared by Gold Rabbani (Shihab) Batch 29, Session: 1999 - 2000 Department of English Jahangirnagar University Save, Dhaka Bangladesh Bibliography Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter.
Penguin Classics: Ohio State University Press, 1962 James, Henry. Hawthorne. (English Men of Letters Series) London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd. , 1879 Doren, C. V. The American Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952.
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