The Carnivalesque in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter

Abstract

This study sets to examine the applicability of Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. The canonical novel of the American literature published in the middle of the nineteenth century portrays the genesis of the American Puritan culture, while the polyphonic nature of the novel, it is argued, exposes the rifts of and the grotesqueness of this culture.