Hawthorne’s style and symbolism in The Scarlet Letter

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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	July 4, 1804 Salem, Massachusetts United states
Died	May 19, 1864 ( aged 59) Plymouth, New Hampshire , United states
Language	English
Alma mater	Bowdoin college (1825)
Notable work	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."

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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.

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Symbol can be

·        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