Research Paper on "Hawthorne and Redemption the Scarlet Letter"

Research Paper 7 pages (2503 words) Sources: 11 Style: MLA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Donald Trump, for instance, with his comments about making Muslims carry identification cards because of their religion, or the identifying of Jews in Germany by their armbands. Though these "symbols" are not directly related to the spiritual concept of sin, as Hawthorne's "A" is, they are still significant representations of the modern way in which society will marginalize a group for its own purposes. In The Scarlet Letter, Hester is marginalized by her Puritan colony so that the others can feel empowered, enshrined, holier-than-thou, and "of the elect," so to speak. In her failure is their exaltation -- so they believe. Hawthorne's aim is to show that they are mistaken in this belief and he uses the vehicles of Hester, Pearl, Dimmesdale and Chillingworth to drive the reader to this revelation.

However, just as it is the neoconservative dream to marginalize the Muslim world or as it was the ambition of the National Socialist German Worker's Party to identify the Jews and isolate them so as to keep them out of the affairs of the State, it is the aim of the Calvinistic-Puritan community in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter to identify and punish the sinful. In this sense, Chillingworth is the actual representation and physical embodiment of the community. He does in a revengeful manner to Dimmesdale what the community does in an explicit and literal manner to Hester. But Chillingworth is the manifestation or personification of the hypocrisy at the heart of the Calvinist-Puritan ideology: its severity is the opposite of the Christian ethos which it purports to project. It wants to imagine that it shines its light like the city upon the hill, (identified by the uber-Protestant of New England, John Winthrop) but what it actually projects is a lack of charity, a lack of empathy, a lack of sympathy, a lack of compassion, a lack of spiritual vision, a lack of grace, and a lack of Christian character. If the Calvinist-Puritan community of Hawthorne's novel is supposed to be Christian, it is not based wholly on all that Christ did. Christ ate with sinners, talked with sinners, and forgave sinners. In this community, they label the sinners with a letter and banish them to the margins of society -- or, in the case of Dimmesdale, stubbornly refuse to admit that their "saintly" pastor could be as touched by sin as the "adulterous" Hester Prynne.

Religious topics dominated early American literature in the 18th century, from the works of Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather to the works of Hawthorne and Melville. Their strict Calvinistic, Puritanical environment gave the writings of the former a "fire-and-brimstone" type of style -- an inflammatory rhetoric meant to rouse religious fervor (Baym 103), while the latter adopted a more questioning, soul-searching posture in order to root out the internal hypocrisy that they felt beneath the surface. Hawthorne's novel aims to bridge the gap between the Puritan stance and the Christian redemption offered to all penitents. The difficulty for the community lies in the notion of Atonement and the teaching of Calvin: Calvin, building on his own doctrine of the nature of grace, argues that no one can resist grace. He, of course, questions the nature of free will in relation to predestination and the role of the elect. His doctrine stems from the idea that Christ came only to save those who would accept Him and His grace -- in other words, the elect. Therefore, he views the Atonement as Limited (Nicole) -- not for all, but only for the elect (those, who, in other words, avoid wearing the cursed "letter"). The problem with Calvin's doctrine is that it takes away from the essence of the free will given to man by God -- the essence which Dimmesdale represents with full force in his final act of reconciliation, of public repentance.

In conclusion, 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 stigma is the guilt which racks the preacher and blinds the community. The misplaced love of Hester and Dimmesdale, which results in Pearl -- the beautiful if imperfect child (again, the 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 reconciliation process. Misplaced love is sinful in that it is love that should be directed towards God rather than towards self: Dimmesdale and Hester (as well as Pearl, as Hawthorne implies) recognize this as the preacher calls them both: "Hester," said he, "come hither! Come, my little Pearl!" (217). By publicly acknowledging them and taking responsibility for them, he, like Christ with the woman about to be stoned, shows them to be his own and that judgment is reserved for God. By God, Dimmesdale makes right through confession -- acknowledging his own sin -- and thus Hawthorne uses the "romance" of the mystery of grace in the soul to achieve his aim.

Works Cited

Bauer, Herman. Baroque. Cologne, Germany: Taschen, 2006.

Baym, Nancy, ed. Norton Anthology of American Literature. NY: W.W. Norton, 2001.

Colacurcio, Michael. New Essays on The Scarlet Letter. UK: Cambridge University

Press, 1985.

Duffy, Stephen J. "Our Hearts of Darkness: Original Sin Revisited." Theological

Studies vol. 49, 1998: 597-622.

Faris, Wendy. Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004.

Goffman, Erving. Stigma. London: Penguin, 1963.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The House of the Seven Gables. Gutenberg, 2008. Web. 29 Nov

2015.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. London: Bibliolis, 2010.

Jackson, Shirley. "The Lottery." Middlebury. Web. 29 Nov 2015.

Laux, John. Church History. IL: TAN, 1989.

McLuhan,… READ MORE

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