Abstract
Any theory of Hawthorne must meet, on the battleground of The Scarlet Letter, his most resolute ghost; for with the exception of a small knot of tales this book offers us the purest example of his art. This is surely the best that he could do; if one cannot recognize it Hawthorne has nothing else to offer. But it is a curious book, existing at various levels, and with interesting limitations. In the subtle intricacy of its construction it is a virtuoso’s book, showing up Hawthorne’s neoclassic bent more strongly than any other of his works;1 it is, as has often been remarked, an extremely narrow book in its focus, a study in the operations and influences of certain passions in somewhat the same genre, let us say, as Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, though using different techniques; from a cultural angle of vision it is a dramatic presentation of certain ambiguities at the heart of the Puritan system; it is an image, probably Hawthorne’s definitive one, of the solitary, the spiritual exile; and in it there is an employment of symbolism which, at least more so than in Hawthorne’s other important writings, is generally successful.
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Notes To Chapter Four
See Leland Schubert, op. cit., for an analysis of this constructive aspect of the book. Schubert’s reading, however, is far from complete.
Randall Stewart, Hawthorne, 93-95.
John E. Hart, “The Scarlet Letter One Hundred Years After,” (New England Quarterly, XXIII (1950), no. 3, 381-95).
Complete Works, V, 305-307. See Bertha Faust, Hawthorne’s Contemporaneous Reputation (Philadelphia, 1939), 78-82, on this book. Dr Faust appears to conclude as I have done, that Hawthorne’s work found an audience chiefly among the “intellectual class,” — such as it was.
See Perry Miller, “Jonathan Edwards To Emerson,” (New England Quarterly, XIII (1940), no. 4, 589-617), on this general subject of the shift from Calvinism to transcendentalism.
Complete Works, V, 172-76, e.g.
Ibid., V, 159, 232.
Ibid., V, 88.
Ibid., V, 233.
Ibid., V, 155-57, 211-12.
See A. L. Reed, “’Self-Portraiture In The Work Of Nathaniel Hawthorne.” (Studies In Philology, XXIII (1926), 40-54).
Complete Works, V, 208.
See ch. iii, supra.
Complete Works, V, 113-24 passim.
Ibid., V, 119-21, 213-14, 244-46.
J. E. Hart, art. cit., 392.
Complete Works, V, 139, 179, contain the only explicit notations of passing time.
Ibid., V, 127.
Ibid., V, 112.
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© 1955 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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von Abele, R. (1955). The Wages of Sin. In: The Death of the Artist. International Scholars Forum, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9471-6_4
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