Of Wanderings & Such

Swan Song

Not mine, but definitely the novel's. It's shocking to me that I've taken over two weeks to get through The Scarlet Letter, but there it is and there you go. Not to say that it's been a bad journey, but journeys tend to get wearisome. And there's always a moral around travels and great fables and such...wandering feet tell tall tales, no?

But getting on with the reading...The moral is, if you're reading literature and you want to get to the shuddering cold depths of the "intended" meaning, then character analysis ain't it. Stories, by and large, and especially the ones that fall into Literature with a capital "L," very rarely mean to stay by the characters depicted in them. There are issues that lay at the very core of written texts...social injustices, revolutions, change in perspective, treatment of women, apartheid, cultural imperialism...the list is endless. Characters are more or less conduits to get the point across. Not to say that character development, description and analyses are worthless points of discussion. There are extremely close observances being made all over the blog, but lets move on people!

To go back to basics, let's think about the point that Hawthorne is trying to make. Is he talking about how society treats women? Sure he is. He's pretty forward in his thinking that gets relayed across the pages more than once. Hester is very seldom chastised by her creator, i.e., Hawthorne.

For example: "Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of Divine Maternity," (39 - my text). That's not exactly a finger being pointed at her at this juncture. Hawthorne is definitely trying to control the reader's reaction.

Which is closely connected to the fact that the author is god in his/her universe. Every character, every description, every turn of events is an extremely conscious choice and is very carefully manipulated to lead to the desired end. Think "puppeteer." Is it just a coincidence that Hester happened to be in the "New World" when she committed a sin of passion? Hardly. But the ultimate focus is not so much on her adultery as it is on her being ostracized out of the only community she has possibly ever known. So naturally, the focus shifts from her emotional torture to the society being depicted as the cruel, heartless and unforgiving beast, if you will, for lack of a better word.

Lets consider the concept of Divine Retribution for a moment. Dimmesdale, as we all know by the end, has forever been consumed with guilt for not admitting to his mistake. Is Chillingworth's acquaintance with Dimmesdale Hawthorne's way of giving him his just desserts? Does that mean that the reader is supposed to believe in Providence, regardless of the fruits that one's labors bear? Maybe the book isn't about society at all. Maybe it's about reaffirming one's faith and belief in Divine justice. It's a small world, and what goes around comes around. But ya can't clap with just one hand people. Just some food for thought.

And then there's a whole other notion of human fallibility. Perhaps the message of the book is to make people see each other in a fair and just light. People don't come standardized because they're not cut out from the same mould. How high of a pedestal should we really place people on? How fair is it really for people to put anyone on a pedestal? In the same paragraph that I've cited above, Hawthorne makes this fallibility wholly clear.

"Here, there was the taint of deepest sin in the most sacred quality of human life, working such effect, that the world was only the darker for this woman's beauty, and the more lost for the infant she had borne," (39).

Should they accept her or abandon her? Do people really have a right to judge other human beings without understanding that they might be wearing the exact same shoes some day? These might sound like rhetorical questions, but they've definitely been presented in the book with some clarity.

The story might drag on, the language might be archaic, the literary devices might be over-dramatised, but The Scarlet Letter is a book with many, many layers to it. It's a book that reveals a completely new issue in a completely different light every time its read, which makes it fall under Literature (with a capital L), which in turn means that there's more to the book than the characters. Shouldn't it deserve deeper thought?

Posted by NehaBawa at September 18, 2005 10:55 PM | TrackBack