The Obliquity of Signs and Symbols in The Scarlet Letter

Abstract

In the United States, a group of novels like Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851) are remarkably complete embodiments of the symbolic form, written as they were at a time of flourishing American optimism, materialistic expansion, and sentimentalism in fiction.Presumably the central drive in The Scarlet Letter is directed towards an attempt at inquiring the tragic phase of human conjecture, involving of course the skilful portrayal and interaction of characters and done through the inner organisms of image, polysemy and symbol. These indeed constitute the complex architecture meant for clarifying and objectification of that condition. The main character of the novel is Hester Prynne, a young married woman who has borne an illegitimate child, Pearl, while living away from her husband in a village in Puritan New England. The husband, Roger Chillingworth, arrives in New England to find his wife pilloried and made to wear the letter 'A' (meaning adulteress) in scarlet on her dress as a punishment for her illegal affair and for her refusal to reveal the name of the child's father. Chillingworth becomes obsessed with finding the identity of his wife's former lover. He learns that Hester's lover is a saintly young minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth then proceeds to revenge himself by mentally tormenting the guilt-stricken young man. Hester herself is revealed to be a compassionate and splendidly self - reliant heroine who is never truly repentant for the act of adultery committed with the minister; she feels that their act was consecrated by their deep love for each other. Hester's sense of sin is incomplete; her inspirited individualism insists (as she tells her lover) that what they did had a consecration of its own. The resulting conflict in her heart and mind is never resolved, and, although it does not destroy her, she lives out her life in gray and tragic isolation. In the end Chillingworth is morally degraded by his monomaniac pursuit of revenge and Dimmesdale is broken by his own sense of guilt and publicly confesses his adultery before dying in Hester's anus. Only Hester can face the future optimistically, as she plans to ensure the fortune of her beloved little girl by taking her to Europe.