Passion and Authority in The Scarlet Letter

Abstract

W ITH the composition of The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne, after two decades of hesitation and experimentation, finally accepted his vocation as an author and produced a major work. In this book he defined the focus of all four of his finished novels: the conflict between forces of passion and of repression in the psyche and in society. The book also gave definitive symbolic shape to a number of elements in his continuing exploration of this theme. In Hester, he developed the dark lady type of his stories into an embodiment of the soul's creative and passionate impulses; this type is subsequently varied to form Zenobia and Miriam. In Dimmesdale he presented the most memorable version of the guilt-prone, emotionally divided young men who are so often at the center of his work. And, having treated the Puritans in a number of ways in his short stories and sketches, he fixed on a use for them as symbols of authority and repression in both society and the self. The sexual encounter which forms the donnde of The Scarlet Letter was an act neither of deliberate moral disobedience nor of conscious social rebellion. The two characters had forgotten society, and were thinking only of themselves, their passion, and momentary joy. Yet, in the world of this novel, where the community dominates all life, to forget the claims of society is to sin against it. But the sin has no reference beyond its social dimension, and society has no reference beyond itself. The community in which Hester and Dimmesdale live is represented as the historical New England Puritan community, but the entire world view within which this historical com-