Hawthorne's Redemptive Aim in The Scarlet Letter

Introduction: Romance as a Vehicle for Reconciliation

As Hawthorne noted several times in his own works, he wrote "romances" — not novels. The romance writer, he contended, gave himself a degree of "latitude" that a novelist could not enjoy (Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables 1). What Hawthorne attempts to "enjoy," so to speak, in The Scarlet Letter is the reconciliation of diametrically opposed forces. On the one hand is Hester, who is ready to quit the Puritan community and embrace "freedom" (Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter 175) — freedom from sin, from guilt, from the past, from societal constraints, from judgment, from everything. On the other hand is Dimmesdale, who knows that there is no redemption in such a life as the one Hester is tempted to pursue. In between the two is the Calvinist-Puritanical community, which is so severe and harsh that it seemingly drives a wedge between itself and any real concept of Christian charity, grace, or atonement.

The community effectively reduces itself to the level of the Biblical Jews who wish to "cast stones" (John 8:7) at the sinful woman, and who are in turn roundly condemned by the same God Whom the Puritans think they are pleasing when they pin the letter to Hester's chest. In their marginalization of her, they are no different from other groups who, in the past as well as the present, seek to suppress others in order to save, elevate, or differentiate themselves.

This paper argues that it is Hawthorne's objective to overcome the obstacle of bad faith — or spiritual blindness — within the Puritan community (including the characters of Hester, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth), by effecting a true reconciliation through a redemptive or cleansing act. In the case of the novel, this consists of a full confession, a humbling, and a prayer. It is part of Hawthorne's sense of reality that he chose to identify the novel as a "romance" because, realistically speaking, the tale needed a little "magical realism" — an infusion of grace not necessarily available to the realistic novel — in order to arrive at the conclusion he sought to produce.

Hawthorne's Method: The Puritan Community as Medium

To better understand the objective that Hawthorne aims to achieve, it is necessary to look at his method. As Marshall McLuhan observes, "The medium is the message" (1), and for Hawthorne the medium — in the sense of that which he uses to effect his desired end — is the Puritan community. That he should choose the "romantic" route through this medium to his end is indicative of the message which the Puritan community itself projects: it is a contradictory message, visible in both the words they historically preach and the actions they historically take. Hawthorne couples those actions (the identification of Hester as an adulterer and her subsequent marginalization) with the preaching (the final speech of Dimmesdale, which serves as both sermon and confession) to overcome the central difficulty of the novel.

He does so by what Wendy Faris might well call "magical realism" — though this is certainly not a term invented in the nineteenth century but rather the twentieth, and it typically applies to post-colonial works of a particular surrealist quality, wherein everyday reality is blended with an imaginative, spiritual reality. It may nonetheless apply to Hawthorne's novel in the sense that he effects the final conversion of characters (except that of the incorrigible sinner Chillingworth) through the working of "a native grace" as well as the hand of "Providence" (The Scarlet Letter 89). By "magical realism," Faris means the combination of "realism and the fantastic so that the marvelous seems to grow organically within the ordinary, blurring the distinction between them … [including] different cultural traditions … [and reflecting] the hybrid nature of much postcolonial society" (1).

The blended traditions in the novel would be the relatively recently developed Protestant tradition and the more ancient and long-established Christian or Catholic tradition of the Old World — from which notions of penance, confession, atonement, and redemption spring long before they do in the Protestantized New World. In this sense, Hawthorne utilizes the "fantastic," by his own admission (by writing in the "romance" genre and digging into spiritual depths), to deal directly with reality.

The Romance Genre and the Symbolic Surface of Sin

Colacurcio points out that for Hawthorne, the tactic of calling his works "romances" allowed him to embrace a "more fictional, and therefore less realistic" form of narrative (Colacurcio 31). In other words, Hawthorne's novels were not to be read as works of realism — a term not even defined in antebellum America — but rather almost as one would read a fable: full of symbols and interpretable meaning. Indeed, among his published works were many short stories that read as fables — tales of morality and immorality and the effect of sin on the soul, mind, and body of the individual as well as the community. Hawthorne's "romance" writing was not like modern romances geared toward the fulfillment of lovers' wishes. His idea of a "romance" was that which peeled back the veneer of reality to get to the heart of human nature. Novels of "realism," he felt, did not accomplish this: they merely concentrated on the surface, the superficial expression of life in its day-to-day enactments.

Hawthorne did not shy away from such day-to-day expressions, but he did look beneath them to the psychological and spiritual motivation — which he then depicted in his expressive, symbolic, fable-like way, making him a forerunner perhaps to the genre of magical realism (replacing surrealism with spiritualism). Thus, in The Scarlet Letter itself can be seen a visual representation of that which lurks beneath the surface — beneath the veneer, the façade, the superficial reality. The letter is a symbol of sin, and yet only Hester wears it, as though she were the only human being in the community who had ever committed a sin.

What is unsaid but implied by Hawthorne is that sin lurks beneath the surface of nearly everyone, and it is only "seen" in society when its effects — such as childbirth out of wedlock — are clearly visible. That is why Hester is given the letter to wear: because she is the one among them whom everyone can identify as a sinner. In their hypocrisy, they act like the Jews who seek to stone the woman and who are in turn admonished by Christ, who says, "Ye without sin cast the first stone" (John 8:7). Of course, they all drop their stones and leave — a Biblical point that supports the implicit theme of Hawthorne's "romance." They are also similar to Shirley Jackson's community in "The Lottery," who seek to hurl their bloodlust upon any random member of society, just so long as they can hurl it upon someone.

Conclusion: Confession, Grace, and Redemption

Erving Goffman notes, "The Greeks, who were apparently strong on visual aids, originated the term stigma to refer to bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier" (11). In The Scarlet Letter, the letter signifies, ultimately, not the stigma of Hester's sin, but the blindness and harshness of the soul that rejects the Christian ethos. The true stigma is the guilt that racks the preacher and blinds the community. The misplaced love of Hester and Dimmesdale — which results in Pearl, the beautiful if imperfect child and representation of the Old World soul — is the root of all sin, according to Augustine (Duffy 598), and it is this point that Hawthorne makes through the process of reconciliation. Misplaced love is sinful in that it is love directed toward the self rather than toward God.

Dimmesdale and Hester (as well as Pearl, as Hawthorne implies) come to recognize this as the preacher calls them both forward: "Hester," said he, "come hither! Come, my little Pearl!" (217). By publicly acknowledging them and taking responsibility for them, Dimmesdale — like Christ with the woman about to be stoned — shows them to be his own and affirms that judgment is reserved for God alone. Through God, Dimmesdale makes right through confession, acknowledging his own sin. Thus Hawthorne uses the "romance" of the mystery of grace in the soul to achieve his redemptive aim.

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