The Scarlet Letter: Hawthorne's Emblem Book

Abstract

THE SCARLET LETTER: HAWTHORNE'S EMBLEM BOOK Donald Darnell* Illustrations by Betty Watson Three thousand miles and three hundred years separate the Italian original of the emblem of Aeneas carrying Anchises from burning Troy and the description of Dorothy, Catharine, and Ilbrahim from Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Gentle Boy" (1832).· There is, however, more than a casual relationship between the highly formalized Renaissance genre on the left and the scene described by America's foremost allegorist. As a result of the conjunction of illustration and 'Donald Darnell is a Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He has published a book on William Hickling Prescott and numerous articles on Prescott, Cooper, and Hawthorne in American Literature, South Atlantic Bulletin, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and American Transcendental Quarterly. He is currently working on an article on The Deerslayer. 154Donald Darnell passage from Hawthorne there is a striking similarity to the older form of the "emblem" with its divisions of motto, picture, and explanatory poem used collectively to expound some moral or ethical truth. Such passages are typical in Hawthorne's work, for he constructs the crucial scenes in his fiction as emblems. He found in the emblem, a form long associated with the exploration of moral and ethical questions, a highly appropriate device to structure his treatment of man's sin, fall, and moral growth. This is particularly evident in The Scarlet Letter, where a series of emblems develops the narrative and provides explicit interpretation of the novel's themes. Hawthorne's familiarity with the emblem tradition is now well established: he read The New England Primer, a type resembling the emblem book, and two of his favorite authors, Spenser and Bunyan, had incorporated the techniques of the emblematists into their own works.2 In 1947 Newton Arvin noted Hawthorne's link with the emblem and referred to him as an "emblematist" rather than as an allegorist or a symbolist.3 By the 1970s doctoral dissertations and articles in scholarly journals examined in detail the emblem's influence in Hawthorne's fiction.4 But even before the precise identification of Hawthorne's scenes as emblems, critics had been impressed by the strong pictorial-moral element in Hawthorne's work. In 1952 Richard Harter Fogle noted that "the framework of Hawthorne's fiction is customarily a doctrine, a belief, or a moral proposition which he proceeds to test by using his imagination."5 Earlier, F. O. Matthiessen, describing Hawthorne's scenes as "tableaux," found Hawthorne starting with a "dominant moral idea, for which his picture, like Spenser's, was to be an illustration."6 Especially pertinent is the comment made one hundred years ago by George Parsons Lathrop: Hawthorne "does not, like a playwright, reflect the action swiftly while it passes, but rather arrests it, and studies it, and then lets it go by."7 It is in this method of arresting the action of his story and of explaining its moral significance that Hawthorne reveals his kinship with the Renaissance emblem makers. Hawthorne's method is in fact emblematic in its most technical aspect; by understanding that method one perceives a closer conjunction of theme and form in his work. That Hawthorne was committed to the emblematic method throughout his fiction is evident from those scenes from his best stories. The "practical allegory" formed by Dorothy, Catharine, and IIbrahim ; the Reverend Mr. Hooper's deathbed vision of a black veil on every face; Edith and Edgar under the falling rose petals of the Maypole; Miriam's criticism of Guido's painting of Michael slaying the Studies in American Fiction155 dragon, all crucial scenes in Hawthorne's fiction, are also emblems. But his most extensive use of the emblem tradition appears in his novels, particularly The Marble Faun and The Scarlet Letter. In his commentary on The Scarlet Letter, Hyatt Howe Waggoner notes that "the novel is structured around the metaphor of bringing the guilty secret from the black depths of the heart out into the light."8 Given the number of emblems concerned with the revelation of guilt in the novel, Waggoner's reading underlines the emblematic quality of the work. Nowhere is this more...