Truth Floats like Witches

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s extensive writings are like the lumbar spine in the body of American (and, for that matter, global) fiction that was still very much in utero when he first placed paper under his quill: essential supports to the increasing weighty system of nerves and nodes and cerebration that grows above it, and locus of countless brittle bones and supple sinews that populate the extremities in this imaginary body. The synthetic whole would perhaps never have evolved into the gorgeous androgynist creature that it is today, one that is capable of slipping into sensual or stern aspects depending on who’s looking, were it not for his strange and pioneering writings. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne documents the profound convulsions of a culture (and, most particularly, a woman) tangled in incompatible discourses that have warped the meanings of life, death, and love beyond all sense; and as he unfurls the tale of Hester Prynne, a challenge is given unto the reader: Will you embrace humanity despite the mark of sin? Will you stand placidly in a society that dominates the female body so throughly? Through whose eyes do you see?

Willy Ronis
Devant Chez Mestre, 1947
(CC License)

Even on the page, the story is related to us through many layers. Our narrator first identifies himself as scion of the stern-faced persecutors, and relates with shame that “I know not whether these ancestors of mine bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of Heaven for their cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the heavy consequences of them in another state of being,” and goes on to say that these events out which he constructs the novel came to him only by a coincidental snoop through the sequestered records of the Customs’ House where he works. “I have allowed myself,” he declares, “as to such points, nearly, or altogether, as much license as if the facts had been entirely of my own invention. What I contend for is the authenticity of the outline.” The advertised subjectivity of this narrator reveals near as much about the story as do the goings-on in the text itself: in framing the story through such a foggy lens, Hawthorne disavows the presumption of objectivity that justifies a moralizing system that enables the scarlet letter to be sown upon Hester’s breast in the first place.

And once the narrative commences Hawthorne does not desist in emphasizing the fluid nature of truth and falsehood, guilt and innocence, sinner and saint. It is this move that earns him his plaudits as a pioneer of the novel, and, in its way, opens onto a new notion of the American undertaking– which is the same mantle that any of our nation’s novelists must take up if they wish to write ‘the great one’. Though Hester stands accused and subjugated by the repressive laws of the Puritan fathers (and the all-too-fallible men tasked to embody it), she emerges on our side of the glass as anything but a crass criminal deserving of her punishment. In her ‘sin,’ and the child Pearl who is a born out of it, lies the truth of her humanity, the irrepressible force of life, bio-power bursting through spaces between the lines of every law or codex. As he weaves this tale of womanhood challenged and reclaimed, Hawthorne’s novel literary formula stitched a whole new strand of discourse into the quilt of American society and sex.

Tags: Hester Prynne, Literature, Subjectivity, The Great American Novel, The Scarlet Letter

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2013 at 2:52 am and is filed under February 19, Sam Barnes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.