Scarlet Letter Lecture 3

The Individual and Society

Introduction

• In the British Museum, a bronze medal of the Dutch theologian, Erasmus (1466-1536); a portrait of Erasmus in profile is on the front of the medal

• On the reverse, the smiling bust of Terminus, the Roman god of boundaries, and the words

• “Concedo nulli” – I yield to no one• Erasmus kept the figurine of the god Terminus on his

desk

Wilhelm Richard Wagner (1813-1883)German Composer

Respecting boundaries was not Wagner’s thing. Transgression he took in his stride – stealing other men’s wives when he needed them, spending other people’s money without worrying much about paying it back – while his artistic ambitions knew no bounds.

There is something awe-inspiring about his productivity under hostile conditions, the way, though living on the breadline, he turned out masterpieces…

Central Concern in relation toThe Individual and Society

• Radical, unconventional outsider, and outcast; Hester Prynne’s rebellious autonomy; Her intellectual independence and passionate desire

Radical thought and sexual intimacy and• Limits and Boundaries - of Puritan Society• And ironies: Dissenting from the Dissenters— Hester

Prynne as a Puritan heretic• The clash between Individual and Society• Parallels with other unconventional characters• Ways in which Hester Prynne is presented; such

as through the use of suggestive language

Narrative Techniques

Narrative Point of View and Methods• Narrator’s implicit symbolic advocacy, • Also more overt advocacy, and musings• Narrative interjections [to ‘point-of-view’

Hester’s mind] on the part of the narrator• Narrator’s abstracted interjections heighten

our sense of Hester’s sustained independence;• Presents different versions of the same event

Features of Style Choice and form of words e.g. notable use of latinisms e.g. contagious, condemnation, conjuration, retribution• Anachronistic diction• Use of Verbal Patterns e.g. repeated use of ‘tremulous’ ‘an autobiographical impulse’ It was Dimmesdale’s ‘genuine impulse to adore the truth’ • Imagery and Symbolism e.g. the wild rose bush;

Characters as tropes: Pearl symbolizes wild, lawless energy ; Light and Darkness

• Irony

Narrator-Reader Relationship

• Narrator strives to stand in some true relation with his audience

• Fictionalizing his reader as• kind and apprehensive, though not the closest

friend• Without such a reader-narrator relationship• Thoughts are frozen and utterance benumbed (Extracted from the ‘Custom-House’ chapter)

Hester in Disgrace and Shame

First four chapters focus on Hester’s disgrace;Chapter 1• Narrator directs our attention to the door

of Boston’s prison;• Crime exists ‘whatever utopia of human virtue’• Opening scene presented - sets the stage for the

entrance of all the main characters;• Sets the tone for the narrative• A tale of human frailty and sorrow

• The narrator himself implicitly presents himself as having abdicated a patriarchal authoritative posture;

• The narrator’s rhetorical strategies

awaken reader expectations as well as reader sympathies

Opening SentenceStructure and Meaning

A throng of bearded men,in sad-coloured garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, andothers bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice,the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, andstudded with iron spikes

The nature of this society;Effective use of Language

• An event is anticipated and human actors, but the work of the sentence is done by colours and textures

• arranged in a series of descriptive phrases• The men are seen as beards; and as dressed in grey; • Connotations of this adjective?• Connoting somber and sad hues;• leading to a passive action: “was assembled”

Point of ViewSentence Focus; Reader Attention

What we do see• A dark and heavy door having the attributes of a

weapon• “studded with iron spikes”• The door is presented as the most aggressive actor;• Its spikes are aimed at Society• Symbolical Significance? Symbolizing

“the early severity of the Puritan character.”

Multiple other points of viewof Puritan Women Characters

• Such malefactresses as this Hester Prynne• At the very least, they should have put the

brand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne’s forehead.

• This woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die.

• Attitude suggestive - if they had power themselves, their response – more punitive

Point of View and Diction

• The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance, on a large scale. She had dark and abundant hair

• Characterized by a certain state of dignity and grace• But the point which drew all eyes, was that SCARLET

LETTER, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated on her bosom.

• ‘It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations of humanity, and inclosing her in a sphere by herself.’

Hester’s Disgrace

• ‘Knowing well her part, she ascended a flight of wooden steps, and was thus displayed to the surrounding multitude.’ Chapter 3 p52

• Hester presented - a figure of pride and strength;• Astounds and infuriates the crowd; Why?• Puritan Society – blinded by their morality;• Ch 2 Narrator observes how they contrast favourably

with later society having ‘grown corrupt enough to smile, instead of shuddering” at a person’s guilt and shame.’

Chapter 3 p53Method: Counterfactual Contexts

Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful young woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious painters have vied with one another to represent; something which should remind him, indeed, but only by contrast, of that sacred image of sinless motherhood, whose infant was to redeem the world.

At this point

• The narrator has established a broad mixture of sympathies

• Feminism, nature, youth, the body, and imaginative life

• Opposed to patriarchal and Puritanical oppression

What of presentation of Pearl in relation to Hester?

• Pearl is presented as Hester’s hidden nature;

• She symbolically mirrors the lawless and impetuous rages constrained in her mother

Hester released into the Community

Chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8

• After her ordeal on the scaffold, • Hester is free to leave the colony;• However, chooses to remain in the

community, taking up residence in an abandoned cottage

Chapter 5Hester and her Needle p73

Hester Prynne, therefore, did not flee. On the outskirts of the town, within the verge of the peninsula, but not in close vicinity to any other habitation, there was a small thatched cottage. Its comparative remoteness put it out of the sphere of that social activity which already marked the habits of the emigrants.In this little, lonesome dwelling, with some slender means, she possessed, and by the license of the magistrates, who still kept an inquisitorial watch over her, Hester established herself, with her infant child.

Commentary

• Critical significance of location of cottage between town and wilderness,

• Physically isolated away from the community• Symbolically suggestive of her outcast status

vis-à-vis society;• The Scaffold Scene in Chapter 1?

Chapter 6Pearl

Narrative Point of View; and Ironic Juxtaposition• Notes Hester’s fellow community members• “Man had marked this woman’s sin by a scarlet

letter, which had such potent and disastrous efficacy that no human sympathy could reach her, save it were sinful like herself”

• “God, as a direct consequence of the sin which man thus punished, had given her a lovely child…to be finally blessed in heaven.”

Chapter 8The Elf-Child and the Minister

Significance of Pearl’s response to her religious interrogation by the Minister• The offspring of a radical thinker• Symbolically an externalization of Hester• Similar to the blooming wild rose by the prison

symbolical of Anne Hutcheson, alluded to in Chapter 1

• Suggestively links Hester to other women who philosophically / reflectively opposed the strict controls of Puritan society

Hester as a Sexual Outlaw

Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were in desert places, where she roamed freely as the wild Indian in his woods. For years past she had looked from this estranged point of view at human institutions, whatever priests or legislators had established; criticizing all with hardly more reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the church. The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been set free. The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread.

Represented as an ‘Indian’• Hester escapes the social control and surveillance of the

community• She has, at least temporarily, access to the forest • Not the demonized forest of the Puritans• But the “mother-forest” of nature rather than social custom• As a stranger she is able to see the arbitrary nature of signs;• As the fallen woman like the prostitute to whom she is

linked, • She can see first hand all of its hypocrisy.

The course of her lifeReturns and Resumes

She assured them, too, of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven’s own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on surer ground of mutual happiness.• Here we see her awareness of the recalcitrant

reality of human nature and relationships• And the need for reconstructing society.