This paper gives a brief overview of Hawthorne’s most important and famous work "The Scarlet Letter" from the point of view of five contemporary theories of criticism: Psychoanalytic Criticism, Reader-Response Criticism, Feminist Criticism, Deconstruction and The New Historicism.
"The Scarlet Letter" was first published in 1850, but its genesis can be found in tales and sketches Hawthorne wrote some years before he began to work on this novel. Being a Puritan descendent, in one of those sketches from 1845 he speculates about what life would be like for a young woman who would be condemned always to wear the letter A for having committed adultery. For Hawthorne this is a moral tale; the wild rose in the opening chapter points out the novel’s moral purpose: it is our duty to show to the world our true nature.
FEMINIST CRITICISM
DECONSTRUCTION
THE NEW HISTORICISM
CONCLUSION
REFERENCES
ABSTRACT
This paper gives a brief overview of the Hawthorne’s most important and famous work “The Scarlet Letter” from the point of view of five contemporary theories of criticism: Psychoanalytic Criticism, Reader-Response Criticism, Feminist Criticism, Deconstruction and The New Historicism. The introduction contains general information about the book, its main plot, characters and the society in which the story takes place. The paper itself is divided into five chapters, each for one contemporary theory of criticism. The first part of every chapter presents general information about that theory and the second part the analysis of the Hawthorne’s work from that theory’s point of view. The conclusion summarises the most important the positive and negative sides of each theory of criticism in relation to this book according to my opinion.
Key words: Hawthorne, scarlet letter, Psychoanalytic Criticism, Reader- Response Criticism, Feminist Criticism, Deconstruction, The New Historicism, Puritans, Hester, Pearl, Arthur, Chillingworht.
APSTRAKT
Ovaj rad daje kratak pregled Hotornovog najznačajnijeg i najpoznatijeg djela “Skarletno slovo” sa stanovišta pet savremenih kritičkih teorija: psihoanalitičke teorije, teorije recepcije, feminističke teorije, dekonstrukcije i novog istorizma. Uvodni dio sadrži opšte informacije o knjizi, njen glavni zaplet, likove i društvo u kome se radnja događa. Sam rad je podijeljen u pet poglavlja, svako za po jednu kritičku teoriju. Prvi dio svakog poglavlja prezentuje opšte informacije o konkretnoj teoriji, a drugi dio je analiza Hotornovog djela sa stanovišta te teorije. Zaključak sumira, po mom mišljenju, najznačajnije pozitivne i negativne strane svake teorije u pogledu ove knjige.
Ključne riječi: Hotorn, skarletno slovo, psihoanalitička teorija, teorija recepcije, feministička teorija, dekonstrukcija, novi istorizam, Puritanci, Ester, Perl, Artur, Čilingvort.
INTRODUCTION
“On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A”
(Hawthorne 1992: 39)
The Scarlet Letter was first published in 1850, but its genesis can be found in tales and sketches Hawthorne wrote some years before he began to work on this novel. Being a Puritan descendent, in one of those sketches from 1845 he speculates about what life would be like for a young woman who would be condemned always to wear the letter A for having committed adultery. For Hawthorne this is a moral tale; the wild rose in the opening chapter points out the novel’s moral purpose: it is our duty to show to the world our true nature.
“This is a tale of adultery, or more precisely, of its consequences, even though that word has never been used in the text.” (Claridge 1992: 10) Hawthorne does not treat the sexual relationship between two adult people the way we would expect him to. That is attributed to his puritan origin and the time in which the novel is set. By displacement of the sexual act in time it gains even prehistoric connotations; so this story can also be interpreted as the one about the Original Sin and its consequences.
The centre of the story is not the sin itself but the way in which it will be punished, how the society will respond to it, and how the ones who committed it will be affected by it. Even though Hawthorne shows sympathy for Hester and Arthur, he still remains faithful to his idea that adultery is a sin, but what is important is that he sets a dilemma before us: is sin excusable or not, does what Hester and her lover did have a moral justification or not? The answer is up to us.
A conflict between communal and individual views on morality is evident. Hester’s and Arthur’s tragedy is, in fact, due to these differences. The exact same action is interpreted quite differently by the persons involved compared to the community they live in. the Puritan magistracy hopes to bring the privacy into the public domain and thus to control the workings of private lives behind closed doors. Here, Hawthorne poses another good question: how much should the opinion of people around us influence our own? Or in other terms: who is right when what we think differs from what and whether sticking to personal guns in opposition to everyone else is the best option?
Hester’s sin is not the only one dealt with in this novel. There is also Chillingworth, her husband, and his behaviour towards her and Arthur. His sin is less forgivable than Hester’s.
The Puritan world Hawthorne describes, its values and punishments are morally questionable. From the very beginning he insists on intolerance and repression of Puritan New England. But, even though it is set in Puritan time, this is not a historical novel. Hawthorne’s New England is meant to contribute to romantic frame of the story more than to historical veracity. This is a romance, not a historical reconstruction of that period, even though, more or less, all the characters, except for the four main ones, are historical personages: Governor Bellingham, John Eliot, Mistress Hibbins and Pastor Wilson. But, Hawthorne managed to turn our attention from them as historical characters focusing it instead on their psychological profiles that really interest him. According to Harry Levin, this is “the only romance of Hawthorne’s in which the past is not a problem.” (Levin 1958: 78)
As far as the construction of The Scarlet Letter is concerned, Hawthorne was economising. Most of the action of the story took place before the novel began, and this concept was in many ways new to novel writing of the time. All 24 chapters contain five acts of classical tragedy, and this structure “accentuates the inevitability of the plot, which is itself reinforced by the unity of the mood consequent upon the scarlet letter’s place at the centre of the drama.” (Claridge 1992: 15)
Not surprisingly, every generation of readers and critics interpreted and understood it differently. So, the five contemporary criticism theories should give us a more complete picture of all the things that need to be paid attention to in the novel.
PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
This theory of criticism is one of the five leading literary criticism theories.
Freud, the single most respected authority in psychoanalysis, greatly influenced this critical theory and created a new direction in analysing literary works. Especially important for literary analysis was his theory of duality of human nature. According to Freud, one part of human psyche is “id” – irrational and unconscious, and the other is “ego”, rational and conscious. There is also “superego”, a projection of the ego, which represents moral judgments, self sacrifice and everything we have learned from the “outside” – our parents, friends etc. What superego or ego tells us not to do is repressed into the sub-consciousness and it liberates itself in many ways, one of which is creativity through writing.
Of course, Freud did not invent unfulfilled desires and repression. These things were written about long before him, but it was he who created a recognisable language that was later being used even in literary analysis. So, this criticism does not base itself solely on Freud, it just begins with him.
There are certain analogies between Freud’s followers and psychoanalytic critics. It is well known that psychoanalysts examine dreams in an attempt to explain their significance. The basis of this criticism is that a dream and a novel (or any other literary works) are related in a way that there are certain analogies between them. Both of them are fiction – inventions of the mind based on reality. All of psychoanalytic critics have had the same basis (Freud), but in their literary analysis they took different paths, explaining the same things differently.
In general, psychoanalytic criticism tries to provide a psychological study of a writer, to explore the nature of creative process and talk about the psychological influence and effects of literature upon its readers.
Psychoanalysing the author, the critics saw the work as a result of his wishes while the characters, either good or bad, were seen as the author’s potential selves or as projections of repressed aspects of his psyche. A novel was a fantasy or a dream, which contained the author’s usually infantile repressed wish, and the psychoanalytic critic tries to expose that latent desire or content of the work, just like a psychoanalytic analyst tries to expose the message of a dream. The mind, in dreams, disguises desires and fears, and so does the author in his work.
Psychoanalytic critics treat figurative literary language (metaphors and other figures of speech) as something that represents a repressed fear, desire or an idea. In figurative language they are not clearly expressed, just as they are not clearly recognised in the author’s mind.
The later tendencies focused more on how the ways in which the authors create their works appeal to our own repressed wishes and fantasies. They shifted the focus from the author to the psychology of the reader and in that way helped establishing the new school of critical theory: a reader – response criticism. Others, who concentrated on what is actually written, rather than how it is written, claimed that a successful bond between readers and the text depends greatly on the latter. We can accept that, because in order to appreciate the text fully, one has to relate to it through what one feels and thinks.
The analysis of the author’s biography and his life in general is important, but it might just be that psychoanalytic criticism stresses too much the personality of the writer. Of course, up to a certain point, everything that happens in the novel, every character, is a product of the writer’s vision, but it would be too much to seek in every character the personality of the writer, to analyse every situation trying to find a hidden (usually a perverse) meaning. Not everything that a writer thinks, says or writes is a product of his/her unfulfilled desires or complexes. However, on the other hand, this theory of contemporary criticism is very useful, because it assists us in seeing and understanding the subtleties, which otherwise might go unnoticed.
When it comes to psychoanalytic analysis of The Scarlet Letter, psychoanalytic critics believe that the basis of the novel is Hawthorne’s incestuous wish toward his mother, and as such represents his attempt at dealing with that forbidden desire. ”Hawthorne’s master work in part is the product of the author’s attempt to resolve his Oedipal complex, which was reactivated immediately prior to his writing the story by the death of his mother.” (Daniel 1986: 23)
That was an extremely traumatic experience for him, because, as psycho analysts say, every son wishes the death of his father, so that he can be with his mother. The desire for the father’s death makes a son feel guilty, but with the death of the mother this guilt is complicated by resentment, because the mother deprived her son not solely of the means of fulfilling his oedipal complex, but also of finding forgiveness for it. Hawthorne hardly ever saw his father during the first three years of his life, which intensified his relationship with the mother. After she died, he had a reawakening of his early repressed memories (the non-acceptance of his mother by his father’s family, her struggle to create an independent home for her children, the failure of his father’s return). His need to express his longing for the mother and the need to control it are dominant in the novel.
The bond between Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale can as well be seen as the bond between Hawthorne and his mother. For Dimmesdale, Hester is not simply his lover; she is a mother, too. We see that at the very beginning of the novel, when he implicitly asks from her not to reveal his identity. He is like a lost child in need of protection and forgiveness. At the end of the novel, he dies in her arms, an embrace that can be seen as a lover’s embrace and unification, but also as a mother – son reunion.
For the right and successful interpretation of Hester’s character, it is very important to be familiar with how the psycho analysts saw and understood women. Their female attributes were sexually, not just motherly interpreted. In the Puritan society, woman’s sexuality didn’t exist, it was forbidden. But Hester wears her scarlet letter, fantastically embroidered, on her breasts, which are a symbol of motherhood and womanhood. The letter, which should be a sign of shame, a reminder of sinful human and woman’s nature, is worn in a place which emphasises the very thing it is supposed to stand against. Even though restricted by the author’s story (the society), Hester still represents a pure female.
In discovering the letter, Hawthorne was impressed by the fine work and skill with which it had been made, “a now forgotten art” (Hawthorne 1992: 23) which can not be recovered. It drew his attention immediately: “My eyes fastened themselves upon the old scarlet letter, and would not be turned aside. Certainly, there was some deep meaning in it, most worthy of interpretation, and which, as it were, streamed forth from the mystic symbol, subtly communicating itself to my sensibilities, but evading the analyses of my mind.” (Hawthorne 1992: 24)
In the text, Hawthorne gave a special status to the letter – that of a fetishistic object. It has a conflict between desire and repression. Even the way in which it is written is suitable for the Freudian interpretations of repressed sexuality:
Indeed, the A articulates through its linear geometry the illusion of forbidden desire. Its divergent verticals suggest a schematic drawing of the vagina, viewed at one frontally and from below, and the horizontal bar of the letter signifies the intact hymeneal membrane, the sign that no violation has occurred. Thus, the A signifies a double denial: no marriage and no consummation. Scarlet recalls both the blood of the torn hymen (presenting what is in the same symbol denied – that the mother has, or not, been violated) and the colour of sexual passion. (Diehl 1991: 247)
All the skilfulness and artfulness with which the letter was made is there to show us how tempting and beautiful the forbidden is. And being embroidered by a woman brings us back to the Original Sin, to the Fall of Man, with a woman as a source of temptation. There is no use trying to escape the urges of our body. They are a part of us and we should not negate our instincts and sexuality.
A defines itself in relation to each of the primary characters:
a) to Dimmesdale it is a mirror for the physical and psychological torment he suffers, a reminder of his sin, too, from which he is trying to escape but can not. That letter should be on his chest as well. And he wore it, only no one could see it. Were his burden and his hidden letter more difficult to carry than the one everyone could see? It depends on whether it is harder for us when we condemn ourselves or when others condemn us. Either way, Dimmesdale was tortured by all words of praise from society, by the perfect picture that the community had of him. He felt remorse, but not because of the affair with Hester, but because he was not man enough to stand by her side in the public and admit that he is the father of the baby. This was slowly killing him, and maybe also the fact that he still desired Hester but did not have the courage to do something about it, to walk the path he had taken until the end.
b) to Hester it is a constant torture and the reminder of her shame. It is something that has marked her forever. She even tried not to wear it when she did not have to any more, but, in the end, she had put it on again. We see that it has become a part of her personality; she was not herself without it. She held to it until the end, something Dimmesdale did not do. The A transforms its two negative connotations in Puritan society – the absence of male and twisted desire into two positive symbols – “a nursing mother and a creative woman.” (Diehl 1991: 249)
The scarlet A symbolises the oedipal anxieties and incestuous desires. It also signifies the wish to break out the silence about it, and the restraint of our ego that does not allow it. It is a wish to mask desire while naming it, the scar of primal desire, the dark necessity that implicates us all. It also represents the object of desire that must be denied considering that not all our desires are acceptable, so some of them we negate. But, to deny desire does not mean to make it disappear, to eliminate it. On the contrary, by denying something, we condemn ourselves to seeing it everywhere. Thus, the A does not diminish the desires but does quite the opposite.
Representing the hidden truth and something that can not spoken of, the A is, for Hester, a reminder of the temptation and her sin, which should be protecting her from both of them. It is influencing the development of her character, making her a stronger person by separating her from the community and thereby forcing her lean solely on herself. She transforms the A from the symbol of guilt into the symbol of strength. Because f it, she is more strict toward herself. She can not allow herself even a slightest of mistakes, for it would have gigantic proportions in the eyes of the society. Here we see the community’s double standards, since Hester was not the only one who committed adultery – simply the only one who got caught. Women on the street who would see her secretly thought they should be wearing the same letter, too. But, they do not sympathise with her. On the contrary, they judge her even more; they are making her pay for their sins as well. Thus, the message of the novel can be understood differently: do not sin because it will be impossible to hide you action, or do sin – just make sure you do not get caught.
In the novel, the patriarchal community at its full power can be seen in its successful attempt of controlling women. That control is even metaphorically expressed through the surroundings – jail, Hester’s house at the end of the village, governor’s mansion and even the woods. The woods are the book’s most extreme attempt to break away. In that sense, Hester lets hair, the symbol of woman’s seductiveness and sexuality, fall down and, as such, the hair represents a symbol of temptation itself. There, Arthur gains self-knowledge, a sense of duplicity – she should not want her but he does. Incapable of refusing her suggestion to flee with her to Europe, we see how strong his desire is, but it not stronger than his sense of duty and his image of himself. Thus, he uses the emotions she evoked in him to write the best sermon of his career. Dimmesdale, just like Hawthorne, finds another way of expressing his forbidden desire – words. They are helping in dealing with pain, making both of them write their masterpieces. Arthur’s sermon united him and Hester again – he dies looking at her, the source of both his pain and his desire: “He withdrew his dying eyes from the old man, and fixed them on the woman and the child.” (Hawthorne 1992: 191)
READER – RESPONSE CRITICISM
This theory of criticism, deals with readers’ response to the text read or, more precisely, with the variety of reactions to the same text. It “raises theoretical questions about whether our responses to a work are the same as its meaning, whether a work can have as many meanings as we have responses to it, and whether some responses are more valid than, or superior to, others.” (Murfin 1991: 252)
Reader – Response criticism in the 1970s focused on the impression that the text makes on its reader. Special importance was given to the notion of feeling the text – person’s specific understanding of it, as well as his/her overall intimate experience while reading it. In simple terms, the text is what we make of it – a colloquial concept that opens a wide array of possibilities for interpretation, which can be and usually are, different from the accepted literary critical norm.
Our opinions regarding the text are formed on a subjective basis – we bond with the characters because they remind us of someone we know. We quickly establish similarities in the situations from the text with those from real life; in other words, our personal experiences, feelings and opinions interfere with the objectivity that is necessary in literary criticism. It is precisely here that the reader – response critics contradict the formalists who analysed the text itself (its language, style etc.) rather than what it signifies to the readers. While admitting the formalists were right in granting a certain amount of independence and authority to the text, examining only its formal parts, thus leaving the emotional part out, would mean neglecting the very essence of literature and reading.
Another important issue raised by the reader – response critics is the definition of a reader. According to Fish, a reader is an informed individual who has literary and linguistic knowledge, whereas Iser recognises as readers only those who are “educated”. This brings us to the next question: are all responses equally valid? Is every reader competent enough to discuss literature? Reader – response critics have made it clear that not all responses and interpretations of the text are valid; that there are not as many valid interpretations of a literary work as there are readers who read it. Texts are full of gaps, which are left for readers to fulfil. They can affect them powerfully, leaving them to the possibility of finding a clandestine meaning with private implications; to give sense to something that can be contradictory or not clear enough.
Reader – response critics emphasise the era in which a given text is being read as immensely important factor in the process of forming an opinion about it. They provide a history of readers’ responses to the novel and compare it to reception of contemporary readers. The readers’ interpretation of a literary piece usually differs greatly depending on a period of time in which the readers have lived. Thus, these critics have redefined the terms of literature and literary work. Literature meaningfully only exists in the reader’s mind and a literary work is a catalyst of mental events.
Subjective reader – response critics believe that the reader’s response is not guided by what is actually in the text, but rather by reader’s personal psychological needs. What that single person finds in a given text is personal identity, feeling, modus operandi, characteristic patterns of desire etc. the problematic issue in this view is the following: if every single reader response to a text is individual and exclusive, than why do completely different readers react in the same, or extremely agnate, way to the same text? A possible common – sense explanation would be that the text’s meaning is already clearly and explicitly stated in its body, so the only thing left for us to do is to accept it or not.
- Quote paper
- Aleksandra Vujovic (Author), 2009, "The Scarlet Letter" in Contemporary Criticism, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/1271882
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