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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
The scarlet letter has been interpreted as a story of sins and sinners for so long that this perspective has hardened into a convention. In Hester, Dimmesdale, and Pearl the sin of adultery and its consequences are seen; to Dimmesdale is added the further, less sympathetic sin of hypocrisy; and beyond the pale stands Chillingworth in his isolating sin of pride and self-consuming revenge. Once this standard point of view is assumed, it can be supported by what is incontrovertibly in the text, but if the angle of attention is shifted so that the novel is seen as a love story, that is, as a tragedy of the grand passion rather than as a tale of sinful passion, then certain features in our picture of the novel, obscure before, will leap into prominence and some of the previously more emphatic features will change their value in relation to the whole composition. Hawthorne's masterpiece may remain for us a haunted book, but it will be haunted by a mystery which we can identify as the mystery of erotic passion itself. It will be seen, in this perspective, that passion is the fixed reality throughout the novel and that it is “sin” which is the shifting, ambiguous term, as it is refracted in the many-sided ironies of the plot and of the narrative commentary. Further, from this point of view it becomes clear that the passion of the lovers is entering its most interesting phase when the story opens instead of being over and done with, except for its consequences, as is tacitly assumed in the conventional approach.
1 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, ed. Harry Levin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, Riverside Editions, A-45, 1960), p. 75. Subsequent page numbers within parentheses in my text refer to this edition, the only one at present which is both widely accessible and based on the first and most authoritative edition of the novel.
2 Some of the pious lectures which this narrative voice delivers are so plainly out of key with what is going on that we may suspect they are pieces of calculated irony. In fact, it may be that most, if not all, of the sermonizing passages are tinged with the irony of Hawthorne's concession to his readers' prejudices, even while they serve simultaneously to keep clearly in view the moral distinctions which form the basic structure of the novel.
The tone of the narrative comments and their relation to the total effect of the story deserve to be studied in greater detail than is feasible here. But the same test would seem to be required in every instance: does the comment in question run against the grain or with the grain of the narrative context?
3 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The English Notebooks, ed. Randall Stewart (New York and London, 1941), p. 225. The entry in which the quoted passage appears is dated 14 September 1855.
