The Forest Cannot Hide It: The Maritime and the Revolutionary in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter

Abstract

ABSTRACT Toward the end of The Scarlet Letter (1850), in Massachusetts’s wilderness, Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale luxuriate in a moment of intimacy that Boston cannot afford them. The wilderness emerges here initially as a green world reminiscent of the one theorized by Northrop Frye—a space in which actors can attempt to usher alternative social relations into being. Yet, unlike the green worlds of medieval romances or Renaissance dramas, Hawthorne’s fails to reorient society and politics along the more equitable lines his characters desire. This article answers a question prompted by the repeated failure of the Hawthornian green world: If such terrestrial spaces prove fruitless for those seeking new ways of being socially and politically, what territories would provide effective and affective laboratories? The author contends that Hawthorne rejects the continental, national green world in favor of the fluid, anti-national blue world of the maritime as the optimal site to revise meaningfully social relations and political moods.