Denis Donoghue The American Classics, A Personal Essay (pdf)(1)

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deathlike slumber, must always create a sunshine, filling
the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the
outward world.
It overflows, too, apparently, upon the sin these lovers have com-
mitted and intend to commit again. The narrator we may call
this figure Hawthorne seems to insist that love and nature are
insuperable values and that morality has nothing to say to them.
When Dimmesdale agrees to Hester s plan, Hawthorne writes:
The decision once made, a glow of strange enjoyment
threw its flickering brightness over the trouble of his
breast. It was the exhilarating effect upon a prisoner
just escaped from the dungeon of his own heart of
breathing the wild, free atmosphere of an unredeemed,
unchristianized, lawless region. His spirit rose, as it were,
with a bound, and attained a nearer prospect of the sky,
than throughout all the misery which had kept him
grovelling on the earth. Of a deeply religious tempera-
ment, there was inevitably a tinge of the devotional in
his mood.
Do I feel joy again? cried he, wondering at himself.
Methought the germ of it was dead in me! O Hester,
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The Scarlet Letter
thou art my better angel! I seem to have flung myself
sick, sin-stained, and sorrow-blackened down upon
these forest-leaves, and to have risen up all made anew,
and with new powers to glorify Him that hath been mer-
ciful? This is already the better life! Why did we not find
it sooner?5
All they have done is spend some hours in the forest rather than
in the town, and enact a little pastoral of life without law. But that
is enough. They have invoked the authority of the natural world
and repudiated the Puritan law of their community, the settle-
ment, the town.
True, Hawthorne was not an Irish Catholic. But in The Scar-
let Letter he invented two characters Hester and Arthur who
did not believe that what they had done was a sin. On the con-
trary. What we did had a consecration of its own, Hester says
to Dimmesdale. We felt it so! We said so to each other. Hast thou
forgotten it? and even though Dimmesdale subdues her inten-
sity Hush, Hester! he also says, No; I have not forgotten!
That leaves open the question of Hawthorne s ability to imagine
what it would be or what it meant in the New England of the
mid-seventeenth century to commit a mortal sin. If Nature
and the sun are deemed to bless adultery, what is the status of
law? The sexual character of the relation between Hester and
Dimmesdale is so vaguely rendered that only the existence of
Pearl as a consequence of it makes it credible. But even if we add
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The Scarlet Letter
our own erotic imagination to Hawthorne s equivocation, it is still
the case that Hawthorne conceives of sin as a social transgression
only, an act by which I isolate myself from the community to
which I belong. That was not a consideration in Newry. I was
taught to respect the communion of saints, the spiritual soli-
darity that binds together the faithful on earth, the souls in pur-
gatory, and the saints in heaven in the organic unity of the mysti-
cal body under Christ its head, but by committing a sin I was not
conscious of offending the communion of saints, I was offending
God alone. My relation to God was mediated by the sacraments
of the Church, not by any community to which I belonged. In
Hawthorne, the terms of reference and rebuke are entirely social.
The transgression is committed against the Puritan community.
It is an act of pride and it becomes even more scandalous if,
like Dimmesdale, I keep it secret. The community takes the place
of God, according to the practice of a people amongst whom re-
ligion and law, as Hawthorne says, were almost identical. The
forms of authority in New England during the years of the story
1642 to 1649 were felt to possess the sacredness of divine in-
stitutions, but the understanding of sacredness and divine in
that sentence or in the community to which it refers was al-
ready, it appears, diminished, it was dwindling into a habit of so-
cial and civic life.6 If religion and law were almost one and the
same, that one was almost entirely law. The sense of evil was mov-
ing from theology and morality to sociology. Evil was incorrigible
because no social institution could accommodate it. The Puritan
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The Scarlet Letter
community as Hawthorne depicts it was strikingly impoverished
in ritual and symbolism, in its sense of the sacred, the transcen-
dent, the numinous. The world according to Puritanism was ceas-
ing to be sacred.
Hawthorne had no trouble imagining universal evil Origi-
nal Sin without the theology of it. In Earth s Holocaust he at-
tributes evil to a defect of the Heart. The Heart the Heart
there was the little, yet boundless sphere, wherein existed the
original wrong, of which the crime and misery of this outward
world were merely types. Purify that inner sphere, the narrator
of Earth s Holocaust says, and the many shapes of evil that
haunt the outward, and which now seem almost our only realities,
will turn to shadowy phantoms, and vanish of their own accord. 7
In chapter 42 of The Marble Faun Hilda and Kenyon talk about
the possibly fortunate aspects of the Fall the paradoxical felix
culpa and Miriam comes back to the question in conversation
with Donatello and Kenyon in chapter 47, but in the end Haw-
thorne lets the possibility drift out of sight. But if a defect of
the Heart accounts for the original wrong, Hawthorne seems
to have no capacity to imagine actual sin, the guilt of it, and
the hope of forgiveness. He could imagine the Devil, but not his
works, their manifestation in particular acts. If you compare
Hawthorne s sense of sin with the Puritan Thomas Hooker s, as
in the sermon on A True Sight of Sin, you find that Hooker s
sight of it is far more acute:
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The Scarlet Letter
Now by sin we jostle the law out of its place and the
Lord out of His glorious sovereignty, pluck the crown
from his head and the scepter out of His hand; and we
say and profess by our practice, there is not authority
and power there to govern, nor wisdom to guide, nor
good to content me, but I will be swayed by mine own
will and led by mine own deluded reason and satisfied
with my own lusts.8
Those are words of almost Catholic particularity: jostle,
pluck, swayed, led, satisfied. The worst that Hawthorne
can say of sin in The Scarlet Letter is that it is psychologically dam-
aging to the sinner and that the damage can t be repaired. Hester
knows why she has been ostracized: she has incurred social dis-
grace and the punishment of being for a time cast aside. But she
does not feel guilty. Nor does Dimmesdale: his actions are oc-
cluded by his hypocrisy. Even in his last hours, he convicts himself
not of actual sin but of sharing the universal sinfulness of man-
kind. In the conclusion the narrator reports that according to cer-
tain highly respectable witnesses, Dimmesdale had desired, by
yielding up his breath in the arms of that fallen woman, to express
to the world how utterly nugatory is the choicest of man s own
righteousness. It is a moral lesson so general that no particular
soul need tremble on learning it. After exhausting life in his
efforts for mankind s spiritual good, Dimmesdale had made the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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