THE SCARLET LETTERS ROMANTIC MEDICINE Jane F. Thrailkill University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Sin, like disease, is a vital process. . . . Spiritual pathology is a proper subject for direct observation and analysis. —Oliver Wendell Holmes Henry James, in his early evaluation of The Scarlet Letter, astutely noted that the novel's dramatic center lay not with the chastened Hester Prynne—who "becomes, really, after the first scene, an accessory figure"—but with the two men who had shared her bed: "The story," James observed, "goes on for the most part between the lover and the husband." James's emphasis on the intensity ofthe men's bond, and his description of the doubleness of Roger Chillingworth's attentiveness to Arthur Dimmesdale, calls attention to the novelty of Hawthorne's portrayal, in which Chillingworth appears (in James's words) "to minister to his [Dimmesdale's] hidden ailment and to sympathise with his pain" while "revelfing] in his unsuspected knowledge of these things and stimulating] them by malignant arts."1 The ersatz physician does not merely attend to his patient's symptoms but also reads them, testing and modulating his evolving interpretation of their significance by eliciting from the preacher telltale spasms and winces. Dimmesdale, in short, offers up to his observant companion a literal body of evidence, a set of physiological and affective traces of actions past. As historian Henri Ellenberger has observed, Chillingworth's corporeal epistemology is predicated on eliciting his patient's "pathogenic secret," that which the sufferer will not, or cannot , express, but which is the hidden source of his bodily ills.2 In the words of one late-nineteenth-century surgeon, a canny physician knows that the involuntary motion of the body—such as a patient's pulse—"tells its own tale."3 A number oftwentieth-century readers have, like James, discerned that the imbrication of medicine and detective work in the elaborate, evocative interactions of The Scarlet Letters fictional doctor and patient was indeed one of "the highly original elements in the situation that Hawthorne so ingeniously treats."4 Yet there has been an instructive discrepancy in the critical interpretation ofChillingworth's hermeneutic practice. For the psychoanalytic critic Frederick Crews, Chillingworth's pursuit of somatic clues cast him as "the psychoana- 4 Jane F. Thrailkill lyst manqué."5 Chillingworth, in Crews's psychoanalytic account, is alert to the symbolic significance of his patient's symptoms, a reading that modulates the character's malevolence. The psychoanalyst is attentive to the body's gothic eloquence, as an astonished Sigmund Freud discovered when the "painful legs" of his early patient Fraulein Elisabeth von. R. "began to 'join in the conversation' during our analysis ."6 From a psychoanalytic perspective, even as Chillingworth exacerbates his patient's pain he nonetheless prods the minister toward the cathartic acknowledgement of his pathogenic secret that marks the end—in the dual sense of goal and conclusion—of a psychoanalytic encounter. Chillingworth anticipates the twinned interpretive and therapeutic force of the method Freud would develop a half century later: as Freud wrote of his patients' quirks and odd comments, "it is difficult to attribute too much sense ... to these details."7 For the historicist critic Stephanie Browner, however, the attentions ofChillingworth possess neithertherapeutic potential nor hermeneutic density. Rather, in Browner's account, Hester's husband fixes the object of his scrutiny with the "blank, unassuming, and yet knowing gaze of the new [scientific] medicine."8 Browner argues that Chillingworth, embodying what Michel Foucault has termed the "clinical gaze," reduces the dynamic intricacy of his patient's distress to a singular source—an act of adultery—just as modernizing medicine at mid-nineteenth century was challenging an earlier holistic paradigm of illness by affirming a materialistic, lesion-based account of health and disease. Whereas Crews discerned in the relationship between Chillingworth and Dimmesdale the (admittedly twisted) elements of a dynamic therapeutic encounter, Browner suggests that "the obviously demonic figure" in essence performs a premature autopsy on the agonized minister. In the psychoanalytic account, the human body is understood to speak multivalent, nuanced, potentially therapeutic truths elusive to both doctor and patient and discernible only through collaborative acts of imagination and interpretation; by contrast, in the biomedical...
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Dec 9, 2022
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