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Name Kubavat Kishan
B
Semester :- 3
Roll no :- 11
Enrolment No :-
Pg14101021
Year :- 2015-16
Paper No :- 10
Paper Name :- The
American Literature
Topic :-
Hawthorne’s style and symbolism in The Scarlet Letter
Email ID :-
kishan.kubavat@gmail.com
Submitted to
:- Department of English
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Introduction
Life of the Author :-
 |
| Add caption |
Born
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July
4, 1804 Salem, Massachusetts
United
states
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Died
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May
19, 1864 ( aged 59) Plymouth, New Hampshire , United states
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Language
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English
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Alma
mater
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Bowdoin
college (1825)
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Notable
work
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1)
The House of the seven Gables
2)
Twice Told Tales
3)
The Scarlet Letter
|
(Wikipedia)
Born July 4 , 1804 Nathaniel Hathorne was the only son of captain Nathaniel and
Elizabeth Clarke Manning Hathorne. His family descended from the earliest
settlers of the Massachusetts Bay colony; among his forebears was John Hathorne
one of the judges at the 1692 Salem witch trials. Throughout his life, Hathorne
was both fascinated and disturbed by his kinship with John Hathorne attended
Bowdoin college in Maine where he met two people who were to have great impact
upon his life. Henry Wadsworth Long- fellow who would later became a famous
poet and Franklin Pierce, who would later become president of the United
states.
After college Hawthorne tried his hand at writing,
producing historical sketches and an anonymous novel, Fanshawe , that detailed
his college days rather embarrassingly. Hawthorne also held positions as an
editor and as a customs surveyor during this period. His growing relationship
with the intellectual circle that included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret
Fuller led him to abandon his customs post for the utopian experiment at Brook
farm, a commune designed to promote economic self- sufficiency and
transcendentalist principles.
Transcendentalism
was a religious and philosophical movement of the early nineteenth century that
was dedicated to the belief that divinity manifests itself everywhere,
particularly in the natural world. It also advocated a personalized direct
relationship with divine in place of formalized, structured religion. This
second transcendental idea is privileged in The Scarlet Letter.
After marrying fellow transcendentalism Sophia
Peabody in 1842, Hawthorne left Brook farm and moved into the old Manse, a home
in concord where Emerson had once lived. In 1846 he published mosses from an
old Manse, a collection of essays and stories many of which are about early
America.
Mosses from an old Manse earned Hawthorne the
attention of the literary establishment because America was trying to establish
a cultural independence to complement its political independence and
Hawthorne’s collection of stories displayed both a stylistic freshness and an
interest in American subject matter. Herman Melville among others, hailed
Hawthorne as the “American Shakespeare”
His works
Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and
short story writer. Much of Hawthorne’s
writing centers on New England, many works are considered part of the romantic
movement and more specifically Dark romanticism.
His themes often center on the inherent evil and sin
of humanity and his works often have moral message and deep psychological
complexity. His published works include novels, short stories and a biography
of his Friend Franklin pierce.
Notable work
|
1)
The House
of the seven Gables
2)
Twice Told Tales
3)
The Scarlet Letter
|
The majority of Hawthorne’s work takes America’s
puritan past as its subject, but The Scarlet Letter uses the material to
greatest effect.
Ø Hawthorne’s style
The style of The
Scarlet Letter is clean, precise and effective. Hawthorne’s vocabulary is wide
and well controlled. He wrote at a formal level
that is he avoided ungrammatical expressions, slang, vulgarisms,
colloquialisms and profanity. He chose his words with sharp sense of precise
meaning and he had a keen ear for euphony or pleasant sounds. ( Cliffs Notes)
"In our nature, however, there is a
provision, alike marvelous and merciful, that the
sufferer should never know the intensity
of what he endures by its present torture, but
chiefly by the pang that rankles after
it."
"A bodily disease, which we look
upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all,
be but a symptom of some ailment in the
spiritual part."
While reading this
novel, one may occasionally have to consult a dictionary but more often than
not , the word in question will be a word which was in standard usage in 1850,
but has become obsolete since that time. During Hawthorne’s own time, his prose
was extraordinarily precise. It was not overly ornate, as it sometimes might
seem to today’s readers.
“She had wandered, without rule or
guidance, into a moral wilderness. Her intellect and
heart had their home, as it were, in
desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild
Indian in his woods. The scarlet letter
was her passport into regions where other women
dared not tread. Shame, Despair,
Solitude! These had been her teachers stern and wild
ones and they had made her strong, but
taught her much amiss."
Hawthorne’s style is
also noteworthy because of his frequent use of images. Metaphors and similes
abound in the novel, most of them strikingly fresh and effective and he makes
skillful use of colors from the read rose of the opening chapter to the red and
black tombstone of his final sentence. In fact, the color red, black and gray
predominate in this novel. Their effectiveness in creating the mood and
supporting the meaning of the novel is apparent to anyone who has read the book
carefully.
"It is to the credit of human
nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into
play, it loves more readily than it
hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even
be transformed to love, unless the
change be impeded by a continually new irritation of
the original feeling of hostility."
“ Let men tremble to win the hand of
woman, unless they win along with it the utmost
passion of her heart! Else it may be
their miserable fortune, when some mightier touch
than their own may have awakened all her
sensibilities, to be reproached even for the
calm content, the marble image of
happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as
the warm reality."
T
The
chief fault to be found Hawthorne’s language is that it tends to be too
consistently the same, whether inside quotation marks or not. The character
when they speak all sound essentially like Hawthorne, and although the
characters are quite different in their
ages, their educations, their personalities, and their backgrounds, it is
almost impossible to tell them apart from the manner of their speech. This
failure to individualize, the dialogue, or to make the speech consistent with
the character and situation of the speaker, is a weakness which later novelists
tried to avoid.
Ø Hawthorne’s symbolism
Generally speaking a
symbol is something which is 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 in scope and meaning often a moral, religious, or
philosophical concept or value. Symbols can range from the most obvious
substitution of one thing for another to creations as massive, complex and
perplexing as Melville’s White Whale in
Moby Dick.
.
Symbol can be
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·
Moral
·
Religious
·
Philosophical
|
In Hawthorne’s use of
symbols in The Scarlet Letter, we observe the author making one of his most distinctive and significant
contributions to the growth of American fiction. Indeed, this novel is usually
regarded as the first symbolic novel to be published in the united states.
Several of Hawthorne’s many symbols in The Scarlet
Letter are obvious. In the first
chapter, for example he the prison as, “The black flower of civilized society”;
by using the building of the prison to represent the crime and the punishment
which were aspects of early Boston’s civilized life and by constrasting this
symbol with the tombstone at the end of the novel, he appears to be suggesting
that crime and cruel punishment may well bring about the death of civilized
life.
In the same chapter, he uses the grass plot “Much
overgrown with burdock, pigweed, apple-Peru, and such unsightly vegetation” as
another symbol of civilization
corrupted by the elements which make prisons necessary. He also points out
another symbol, this one a positive symbol in the wild rosebush. He says that “It may serve….to symbolize some sweet
moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening
close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow”.
Shortly afterward, in chapter 2, Hawthorne uses the beadle (“ like a blak shadow…grim and
grisly…with a sword by his side, and staff of office in his hand”) as a symbol for Puritanism, in general.
These symbols are easy
to find. More impressive, however are the symbols which Hawthorne sustains
throughout the novel, allowing each of them to develop and take on various
appearances and meanings as the book progresses. Among such symbols is the letter A itself. In its initial form, it is a
red cloth letter which is a literal symbol of the sin of adultery. But
Hawthorne makes the A much more richly symbolic before the novel ends.
The
letter A appears in a variety of forms and places. It is the
elaborately gold-embroidered A on
Hester’s heart, at which pearl throws wildflowers. It is magnified in the armor
breastplate at governor Bellingham’s mansion, seen “in exaggerated and gigantic proportions, so as to be greatly the most
prominent feature of her appearance. In truth she seemed absolutely hidden
behind it”
Later, the A on Hester’s breast decorated by pearl
with a border of “prickly burrs from a
tall burdock which grew beside the tomb.” One of the most dramatic of the
several A’s in the book is the A so frequently hinted at earlier and
which is finally revealed to be an A on
Dimmesdalle’s chest by “most of the
spectators” who witnessed his confession and death.
Not only does the A appear in various forms, but it also
acquires a variety of meanings. Even as the original mark as adultery, The Scarlet Letter has different
personal meanings to the 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, the A is a piercing
reminder of his own guilt. To chillingworth, the A is a spur to the quest for
revenge. To pearl the A is a bright and mysterious curiosity. In addition, the
A also symbolizes things other than adultery.
Many of the other
sustained or important symbols in the novel lie either in the setting or in the
characters. The scaffold, for instance, is not only a symbol of the stern
puritan code, but it also becomes a symbol for the open acknowledgment of
personal sin.
Night
is used as a symbol for concealment
and day is a symbol for exposure. The sun is also used as a symbol of untroubled, guilt – free happiness,
or perhaps the approval God and nature.
In addition, it also
symbolizes a place where Pearl can
run and play freely, a friend of the animals and wild flowers, and where even Hester can throw away here Scarlet A,
let down her hair and feel like a woman again. It is also symbolic of a natural laws as opposed to the artificial
strict community with its man-made puritan laws.
The
forest, also symbolizes a place where darkness and gloom
predominate and where one can find his way only by following a narrow, twisting
path; it is a symbol of the “moral
wilderness”. In which Hester has been wandering.
The brook in the forest
is also symbolic in several ways. First, it is suggestive of Pearl- because of
its unknown source and because it travels through gloom. Because of its
mournful babble, it becomes a kind of history of sorrow, to which one more
story is added. The natural setting, then provides many of the most striking
symbol in the novel.
But perhaps the most
revealing display of Hawthorne’s symbolism 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,
Governor Bellingham and Mistress Hibbins.
It is however, in the
four major characters that Hawthorne’s powers as a symbolist are brought in to
fullest play. Each of his major characters symbolizes a certain heart. And one
of them, Pearl, is almost a self- contained symbol- perhaps the most striking symbol that Hawthron ever created.
Conclusion :-
Thus, Nathaniel Hawthorne's style in the Scarlet Letter is very simple. he uses various symbols to convey his meaning. Even the title itself is very symbolic. and this symbolism keeps novel open for various interpretations.
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WorksCited
Dibble, Terry J. The Scarlet Letter. New
Delhi: Kalyani, 1991.
Wikipedia contributors. "Nathaniel Hawthorne." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The
Free Encyclopedia, 29 Oct. 2015. Web. 30 Oct. 2015
