Topic :- The Scarlet
Letter and the Language of History: Past Imperfect, Present Imperfect, Future
Perfect?
Name :- Chauhan Sejal
Arunbhai
Subject :- The American
Literature.
Paper :- 10
Roll No :-
M.A. PART-II SEM-III
Year- 2013-15
Submitted to :-
Dr.Dilip.Barad
Smt.S.B.Gardi
Department of English
M.K.Bhavnagar
University.
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The Scarlet Letter and the Language of History: Past
Imperfect, Present Imperfect, Future Perfect?
As we know that the first appearance of the scarlet letter is
particularly striking in that everything about the artefact is remarkably
obscure except for its ambiguous historicity:
“ time, and wear, and a
sacrilegious moth, had reduced it to little other than a rag.”
Initially it is not
even recognizable merely “ a certain affair of fine red cloth”, an object stripped of its glamour, its
‘glitter’.
Its history is doubly
one of loss for not only is it “defaced” but, even in its decayed state, it “
gives evidence of a now forgotten art.” Its very from has to be recovered: only
careful examination allows it to assume “ the shape of a letter”. However
although its shape may have been established, form does not confer meaning, but
only the strong possibility that the letter has significance:
“ there was some deep
meaning in it, most worthy of interpretation”.
For that interpretation
to be possible, story is needed Mr.Surveyor Pue’s narrative which reveals the
meaning of the letter. Hawthorne makes it clear that his central symbol belongs
to, is the product of history and therefore can only be understood in terms
provided by narrative, by a historiography. And as “ The Custom House ” further
indicates, history is not only a crucial subject of the fiction as a whole, but
the very existence of The Scarlett Letter is the product of history as
Hawthorne’s personal history intersects with a wider public history.
Here Hawthorne
argues that the experience which is dependent on habit destroys the historical
imagination on which a true recognition of reality must be based. The elderly
members of the Custom House are condemned for their inability to have made
anything useful or valuable from their pasts.
Here the General’s
identity can be recreated as Hawthorne shows when he looks at him
“affectionately”. And he suggest that the true reality for the General himself lies
within his own consciousness as he recreates and inhabits his past. As the
scarlet letter initiates Hawthorne’s desire to retell Hester’s story and come
to terms with Old New England, so it is one item from the General’s past that
makes it possible for Hawthorne to understand him:
“ There was one thing
that much aided me in renewing and recreating the stalwart soldier of the
Niagara frontier, the man of true and simple energy. It was the recollection of
those memorable words of his, “I’ll try sir!”……… breathing the soul and spirit
of New England hardihood comprehending all perils, and encountering all.
It is the
historical imagination that makes it possible for Hawthorne to comprehend what
the General was which is at least as important as what he is.
One purpose of “
The Custom House” is then to demonstrate that the past can be reconstructed
through the sympathetic and informed imagination, an imagination whose other
name should be the historical sense. Hawthorne stresses that he has a double
past and with that emphasis he prepares us for his concern with the different
but ideally united realms of the public and private sides of human identity
which is so crucial in the main story. One of Hawthorne’s pasts is his
immediate personal past when he defined himself as a writer.
He emphasizes that the “discovery” of the
letter re-awoke his literary feelings and made him realize that neither his own
past as writer nor the public, historical past was dead. That fictive fragment
from history is presented as having a wider function than re-awakening his old
artistic impulses for it also brings into focus a concern with a wider history,
with Hawthorne’s evolution of the past of Salem and his seriocomic account of
his relationship ith his ancestors.
The fact that
discovery of the only too clearly symbolic A is so obviously at the centre of “
The Custom House ” might seem to contradict this. But as I have tried to
suggest, while the reader is told that the letter is an artefact containing
considerable power, as long as its meaning remains unknown, which is to say as
long as its historical context is unknown, as long as it lacks a placing
narrative, it can only communicate itself to Hawthorne’s ‘ sensibilities” while
“ evading the analysis of ” his “mind”. However “ worthy of interpretation ”
the sign in isolation may be it cannot be decoded until the accompanying text
is read, when it can take its meaning from its place in a story. Until then,
what it ” signified “ is an insoluble “ riddle ” because of the way in which
meanings can be lost from history, “ So evanescent are the fashions of the
world.”
If the main narrative
argues that history will vanquish symbolism’s attempt to freeze time and
meaning “ The Custom House ” suggest that the Present is in any case both a
fragile and a problematic concept. There Hawthorne makes a confession of
failure yet the very fact of making the confession invites us to consider
whether the question of social reality in the present is not always dependent
on history.
His fiction of
contemporary life, The House of the Seven Gables, is overtly built on history,
connecting as the preface tells us “ a by gone time with the very present that
is flitting away from us “ and it is that historical narrative which enables
Hawthorne to offer a picture of the modern world. One crucial problem in producing or, rather
reproducing the realistic text that Hawthorne might have written instead of The
Scarlet Letter is the way in which contemporary reality is always vanishing not
so much into history as into limbo because Hawthorne lacks the proper
perspective to deal with the experience even though contemporary reality
appears to him as an already written text:
A better book than I
shall ever write was there; leaf after leaf presenting itself to me. Just as it
was written out by the reality of the flitting hour, and vanishing as fast as
written, only because my brain-wanted the insight and my hand the cunning to transcribe
it.
One point
about “ The Custom House “ is that he had shown ways that such a work might be
constructed with its necessary roots in private and public history. Another
related point is that the difference between Hawthorne’s historical romance and
a realistic fiction of contemporary life is one of degree, not kind. The
rupture with the Custom House means that the immediate past is in danger of
being lost to history even if it is history as autobiography were it not far “
The Custom House”.
The life of Custom
House lies like a dream behind me. The old Inspector….. and all those other
venerable personages who sat with him….. with only imaginary inhabitants to
people its wooden houses…..Henceforth, it ceases to be a reality of my life.
Dream, shadows,
images, fancy, haze of memory, mist cloud- land, imaginary: these are the words
that Hawthorne uses to describe his
sense of his very recent past.
Here
Hawthorne’s emphasis that meaning must be socially negotiated to be valid, that
morality is above all social morality, means that, however palliated, Hester’s
and Dimmesdale’s adultery must be seen as wrong. Adultery destroys the
possibility of the fulfillment of private relationships and of wider public
relationships. For Hawthorne it is only when the two are brought together that
there is the possibility of sustained authentic life. It is to take the
diseased Dimmesdale seven years to learn the lesson that public confession is
necessary to heal the split not only between the way he sees himself and the
way he is seen but also to heal the relationship between father and daughter,
and indeed to enable pearl to escape from the solitary confinement of symbolic
definition imposed by her mother.
It is crucially important to realize
the value that Hawthorne places in living in right relationship in society, in
living a life of open and spontaneous reciprocity, because it is only by
remembering this that we can adequately recognize the way symbolism is
presented and judge in the fiction. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that
Hawthorne is writing a fiction critical of symbolic definition rather than a
symbolist work. Thus, Pearl is forced to exercise the function of a symbol not
by the reader but by Hester as she replicates what the authorities had done to
her, Pearl’s whole appearance was the scarlet letter in another form; the
scarlet letter endowed with life! The mother herself as if the red ignominy
were so deeply scorched into her brain, that all her conceptions assumed its
form had carefully wrought out the similitude; lavishing many hours of morbid
ingenuity, to create an analogy between the object of her affection, and the
emblem of her guilt and torture. But in truth, Pearl was the one, as well as
the other; and only in consequence of that identity had Hester contrived so
perfectly to represent the scarlet letter in her appearance.
Dimmesdale return
from the forest full of an amoral energy produced by his dislocation from his
previous history and by the feeling that he can now have hopes for the future.
When he returns to his house, this vitality needs to be channeled, and as Male
puts it,
“nourished by a
communication with the tomb-fed faith wisdom of the past”.
Here he had studied and
written: here, gone through fast and vigil, and come forth half alive; here,
striven to pray: here, borne a hundred thousand agonies! These was the Bible,
in its rich old Hebrew, with Moses and the prophets speaking to him, and God’s
voice through all!
Here the private and
the public selves can begin to be reintegrated.
For such a short
fiction, The Scarlet Letter covers a remarkable length of time and a period
which has a considerable historical resonance: seven years 1642-49. Whatever
the reason for choosing the period of England’s Civil War for the main action
of the novel, a substantial length of time in necessary for Hester to build a
new identity after her old European self had been destroyed by her sin and its
punishment on the scaffold:
“ It was as if a new
birth, with stronger assimilations than the first, had converted the forest-
land….. into Hester Prynne’s…….life long home”.
And not only Hester’s construction of
a new self but also the related matter of
the mutual relationships between herself and the community have to be given
time to develop so that a long revolution in the community’s interpretation of
the letter and Hester can take place. That relationship is not only long but
complex and not without its ironies one irony is that her subversion by
decoration of the letter not only enables Hester to find a place in the
community’s economy but also that art of needlework that labour of the
outsider, in large part reinforces the power structure of the society even
though her own thoughts radically question that structure:
Public ceremonies….such a
ordinations, the installation of magistrates, and all that could give majesty
to the forms in which a new government manifested itself to the people, ….even
while sumptuary laws forbade these and similar extravagances to the plebeian
order.
There is much that could be said
about this passage but one obvious point is that Hawthorne is drawing attention
to the class structure of the infant democracy. In so far as her identity is
constituted by the letter signifying one meaning along with her labour for the
establishment, the patriarchy could hardly ask for a more useful “citizen” than
Hester at once a strong warning against hiding the father who has broken the
rules and a figure who enables the patriarchy symbolically to declare their
command over “painfully wrought” labour – a labour which in its products
signifies their power, their difference from “ the plebeian order ”. But the
simplicity of symbolic labeling cannot, over time, survive the necessary
multiplicity of Hester’s relationship with the society as a whole.
As Hawthorne
forcibly suggests, authority’s definition has to be seen as a distortion:
“ Owing to the peculiar
effect of this convex mirror , the scarlet letter was represented in
exaggerated and gigantic proportions, so as to be greatly the most prominent
feature of [ Hester’s ] appearance”.
I have already
argued that one consequence of Dimmesdale’s public acknowledgement of his
connection with Pearl and Hester is that Pearl can escape from her limiting
status as symbol and become fully human, a woman in the world. It is this that
explains her movement to Europe. Pearl is not a Jamesian heroine who has
somehow strayed into the wrong book, as is occasionally suggested. She can go
to Europe because she has no historical ties with New England. Her only
identity there has been as symbol, used by others but without independent
existence when that is destroyed, she is free.
Hester must
return, because it is New England and her sin that has given some sort of
organizing principle to her life. After her first appearance on the scaffold,
“ Her sin her ignominy,
were the roots which she had struck into the soil…The chain that bound her here
was of iron links…. But never could be broken.”
During Dimmesdale’s sermon, Hester
stand at the foot of the scaffold
“ Whence she dated the first hour of
her life of ignominy….There was a sense within her….that her whole orb of life,
both before and after, was connected with this spot, as with the one point that
gave it unity”.
To be true, as Hawthorne admonishes
us, is freely to declare ourselves to the world, to recognize that we cannot
reject or deny the personal history that defines us. We must choose reality
over symbol, as Hester chooses to return to New England to live the ethical
life:
“But there was a more real life for
Hester Prynne, here, in New England, than in that unknown region where Pearl
had found a home. Here had been her sin; here her sorrow and here was yet to be
her penitence”.
That last sentence is a more economic
version with authorial approval of a feeling that Hester had experienced at the
beginning of her life of isolation: Here, she said to herself, had been the
scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly punishment; and
so, perchance the torture of her daily shame would at length purge her soul,
and work out another purity than that which she had lost, more saint like
because the result of martyrdom.
Hawthorne, by
giving Dimmesdale and Hester the role of prophet, brings the future into the
sphere of the novel. So that readers are not trapped into conservatively
dwelling in and on the past. With both characters, the reciprocal relationships
between the public and the private spheres are stressed and developed
throughout the course of the novel. The symbolic sign is, at the last, stripped
of its various imposed meanings, and becomes simply the letter A, a dead
letter. The true significance of the novel can be seen to lie in its creation
of structure based on the personal histories of the central characters
interacting with the historical life of the new community of New England. Both
in turn interact with the double history of the artist and with on imagined
better future.
Thus, at the end, we
can say that The Scarlet Letter is an historical novel one which takes past,
present and future into consideration and is at the same time political in that
the future is presented as something that we have to struggle to make a making
based on desire corrected by our perspectives on the past.
Reference:-
Charles Swann / The
Scarlet Letter and the language of History: Past Imperfect, Present Imperfect,
Future Perfect?
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