When we are reading an American classic, submission to the imagination expressed before us is paramount. And, paraphrasing C. S. Lewis from his An Experiment In Criticism, when masterly created, all—rests, movements, quick or more measured passages, easier and arduous episodes—all will be what we need at that moment. Glancing back over the whole experience, he says, we will feel that we've been led through a dance for which our nature cried out. In Hawthorne's dark aesthetic, shot through with the occasional thread of silver or gold, with here or there that jolt of red—this is what Nathaniel Hawthorne has given us with The Scarlet Letter.
His panoramic tapestry rolls out, beginning small in a corner with the intimate tableau of how this story came to the narrator—touching on his imagination by antique words on paper accompanied with a scrap of embroidered cloth; and found in a custom-house where he was serving. In our imaginative submission, we become slowly involved in the dark and spiritually violent story of Hester Prynne. By its shadowy vitality and raveling insights, the pattern is pointed out with a variety of somber motifs; the most vivid of which is the letter A, with its straight sides conjoined as though to form an arrow. But there are other motifs, some recurring to nature, one to the blast furnace (that of iron), another to wooden devices of torture. But the thematic element that concerns me is that of the human bosom or breast. It occurs first when, impulsively, the narrator places the disintegrating scarlet letter upon his own breast with “a sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat; and as if the letter were not of red cloth, but red-hot iron.”
The emblematic human breast is throughout the story. Sometimes it's scarcely noticed, as in his description of Roger Chillingworth's obsession with the soul of adulterer Rev. Dimmesdale. As readers we might not notice it for the morbid metaphor that surrounds it like necrotic tissue; “He now dug into the poor clergyman's heart, like a miner searching for gold; or, rather, like a sexton delving into a grave, possibly in quest of a jewel that had been buried on the dead man's bosom, but likely to find nothing save mortality and corruption.” There, again, the bosom.
More often its reference is piquant, as when little Pearl, the offspring of adultery, makes a green A of eel-grass to decorate her own small bosom in imitation of her mother's. Perhaps the most mysterious of these references is that of Rev. Dimmesdale with his hand frequently fluttering toward or cleaving upon his own bosom in nervous distress. Later in the tale we'll find there is a red adulterous A, almost like a birthmark, on the skin of the Reverend's bosom ... and we think back to that found in Hawthorne's custom-house ... and placed just so on his own breast.
One difficulty the modern reader has with the small masterwork is in discerning how the adultery was accomplished. DH Lawrence, in his Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), savagely suggests a willful seduction on the part of Hester Prynne, but I cannot find this in the text unless it be through fabulous inference. Noting the recurrence upon the “white bosoms” of “the young virgins who so idolized their minister,” I began to wonder if this was Hawthorne's decorous, yet pointedly sardonic, way of suggesting seduction by the idolized reverend. If so, it seems that the motif itself must be relied upon, for the character of Hester gives no hint urging willful seduction. And when we consider the nervous Dimmesdale's roll, together with her character, still we are left solely to imagine without much help from the narrator. Hester tall, cloaked, lance-like and gliding; the other high-strung, filled with artistic preachments. “These two Puritans, in this place where the “milk of human kindness” is prone to institutionalized curdling—these Puritans are not easily pictured as Lawrence's Adam knowing “Eve as a wild animal knows its mate, momentaneously, [sic] but vitally, in blood-knowledge.”
Did Lawrence, with his phrase, “leprous-white, seducing, spiritual women,” take biblical reference from Exodus 4:6-7? (Perhaps not.) Here Moses, in obedience to God, puts his hand into his bosom only to withdraw it in a leprous state, then reversing the act finds it whole—again in obedience to the command. I don't know if the allusion is certain, but in this biblical context it may not be unreasonable to assume the reference. And (to mince my words finer) it is in keeping with Lawrence's other allusions and with the bitter tone of his piece.
Yet Hawthorne may have had it in mind... as well as Job 31:33-4: “If I cover my transgressions as Adam, by hiding mine iniquity in my bosom; did I fear a great multitude, or did the contempt of families terrify me, that I kept silence, and went not out of the door”?
This is the voice of one who understands temptation. Any temptation, really. Hawthorne shows Dimmesdale laboring under temptation for seven years after the initial act. Yet Job, having encountered and overcome the temptation, puts the question in rhetorical acquittal of himself. Had Dimmesdale been so able, Hawthorne's (and Lewis's) subsequent pattern, with its movements and rests, its quickening and slowing of narrative pictures, would not have succeeded. And the story of the scarlet letter would've been to no purpose. But there are some mighty arduous passages in this work, thanks to the reverend's dreadful and pitiable weakness; his impotent and literal self-flagellation, his introspective self-torture.
We have first mention, again in passing, of the bosom “under the wing of the federal eagle,” where its physical softness covers a lack of tenderness within, as he references America-seeking immigrants escaping famine and upheaval in Europe.
“But she has no great tenderness, even in her best of moods, and, sooner or later—oftener soon than late—is apt to fling off her nestlings with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling wound from her barbed arrows.”
Here we are back upstairs in that custom-house corner with the tapestry.
With his suggestive and ironic use of the words “black hole,” is Lawrence echoing this?
“The deliberate consciousness of Americans so fairer and smooth-spoken, and the under-consciousness so devilish.... And the world hears only the Love-and-produce cackle. Refuses to hear the hum of destruction underneath,” wrote Lawrence
He misunderstands so much of the letter and spirit of Hawthorne, yet here he bitterly amplifies the frequent spirit of our society—an impotent and institutionalized obsession with right and wrong as a function, complete with its thunderbolts, arrows and letter A. This is the crucible of the Dimmesdale-type temptation.
There is one bosom that Hawthorne delighted to sketch, offering it as a friendly refuge to the offspring of adultery, the small Pearl. “The great black forest—stern as it showed itself to those who brought the guilt and troubles of the world into its bosom—became the playmate of the lonely infant.” In The Scarlet Letter he has the forest double as a place of mischief and reveling. Tall, mysterious and fragrant, it's a place of intimacy where the erstwhile lovers did, at last, haplessly meet to work out in their own feeble, fumbling, yearning and desperate way a futile outline of escape. The American forest, vast, ancient, primeval, is in all these instances a type of the human heart in its fathomless mystery as seat of volition. Yet here, in this dark bosom, it was said that a wolf may have “offered his savage head to be patted by Pearl's hand.”
No New England panorama would be complete without its community procession stitched in colorful threads upon a stark or somber background. In Hawthorne's tragedy we have his cathartic climax coming at the tail end of an election day processional. Here we see the whole and varied Puritan community, complete with its strangers and visitors looking on. The design of the story is nearly complete with its piquantly vivid appliqués of the lushly embroidered letter A attracting fresh attention. Being doubly troubled with a private agitation, occasioning the reader's suspense, and though used to this now strengthening, now waning notice, Hester Prynne, is figured here in the dancing of Pearl, “who was the gem on her mother's unquiet bosom.” Hester's bosom is again brought to our notice in the midst of great communal joy, by her daughter who—ever bitter in Lawrence's take— “flatly refuses any Heavenly Father, seeing the earthly one such a fraud.”
It may be that at last, as we consider Hawthorne's moral, it might be permissible to couple Lewis's “personal heresy” with the text, if we are willing to consider that the author had not been able so to flesh out Dimmesdale's character without a personal experience of the temptations of— hypocrisy. (Not adultery.) He has taken up his own moral and carried it on his back and labored under it; “Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!” Fear of hypocrisy is evident in Hawthorne's frequent self-mockery found in letters to his friends, as well as in his fictions.
He wrote, “we have thrown all the light we could acquire upon the portent, and would gladly, now that it has done its office, erase its deep print out of our own brain; where long meditation has fixed it in very undesirable distinctiveness.”
There may be deep satisfaction in this as a well-made tapestry of narrative art, but who finds the pleasure Lewis speaks of? Hawthorne had completed the pattern with its somber final touches, having recurred often to the portent of his letter A—everywhere on some bosom, whether Hester's, Pearl's, imaginative Dimmesdale's, Hawthorne's own ... and the very bosom of the sky under which we shelter. Or having been through the pattern—and joining in the work of receiving it—on our own hearts also. He goes down into the grave like some miner after gold, or a sexton after a precious pearl lying on the bosom of a corpse. We might not doubt he spent a lot on that quest, bringing forth the pearl of his text. He was glad enough to set it on a shelf somewhere, among other books, and walk away again.