The Scarlet Letter (A) as a symbol

The Scarlet Letter (A) as a symbol Order Description In the novel "Scarlet letter" and how (A) works as a symbol in the novel, with little draw on Saussure theory on the signifier and signified. The Massachusetts Review, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Massachusetts Review. http://www.jstor.org The Massachusetts Review, Inc. The Obliquity of Signs: "The Scarlet Letter" Author(s): Millicent Bell Source: The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Spring, 1982), pp. 9-26 Published by: The Massachusetts Review, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25089237 Accessed: 20-09-2015 12:57 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 137.148.11.31 on Sun, 20 Sep 2015 12:57:45 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Millicent Bell The Obliquity of Signs: The Scarlet Letter It is not wrong to identify in this famous short novel the subjects that lie so clearly upon its surface?the effect of concealed and admitted sin, or the opposed conditions of isola tion and community, or the antithetic viewpoints of romantic individualism and puritan moral pessimism or the dictates of nature and law. But?and perhaps it is the current self-con sciousness of literature that makes this so?it may now be pos sible to find in this work a primary preoccupation with the rendering of reality into a system of signs. Hawthorne may have had similar reasons to our own for questioning?while performing?the interpretation of experience as a species of message. It is a general human impulse to seek coherence?a syntax?in life, but it is the artist above all who does so most heroically, who is the champion of our general endeavor. When that endeavor becomes dubious, art itself becomes questionable. Like ourselves, Hawthorne may have come to feel that the universe at large speaks an incomprehensible babble in which it merely amuses us to suppose we hear communicating voices, explanation?even consolation. The very title of the book is a sign, the smallest of literary units, the character "standing for" no more than a speech sound. The letter "A" is the first letter, moreover, of the alphabet, which Pearl recognizes as having seen in her horn book, and represents the beginning, therefore, of literacy. Reading will be given the broadest meaning in this novel. It will become a trope for the decipherment of the world as a text. The Scarlet Letter, then, is, as much as any work of fiction can be, an essay in semiology. Its theme is the obliquity or indeterminacy of signs. From this source comes an energy 9 This content downloaded from 137.148.11.31 on Sun, 20 Sep 2015 12:57:45 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Massachusetts Review present in every part of the book$ from it derives the peculiar life of those other themes which might otherwise seem lacking in modern interest. That the status of signs is especially important to Hawthorne is evident in a peculiar stylistic feature of The Scarlet Letter. Though the reader has the impression of a constant encourage ment to symbolic interpretation, it turns out, upon examina tion, that Hawthorne's prose contains only occasional metaphor or simile and no true allegorical cohesion. What in fact hap pens is something else: we are frequently asked to consider things as symbolic5 objects, persons and events are called signs rather than being silently presented as such. Hawthorne under takes a narrative putatively historical, to begin with, introducing it in the Custom House Preface as a redaction from a docu mentary record, to reinforce the sense of a reconstructed literal past. But again and again he deliberately declares that the actualities of his tale are or may be taken as signs, and he uses repeatedly such words as "type," "emblem," "token," or "hieroglyph." All these words are used in a sense roughly synonymous. "Type" is almost invariably employed to mean "that by which something is symbolized or figured; anything having a symbolic signification3 a symbol, emblem" (oed), a sense which had been current already in English during the Renais sance and can be found in one of Hawthorne's favorite older writers, Spenser. The word was still used in this way in the mid-nineteenth century when the meaning more common with us, of a general form or of a kind or class, arose, and Haw thorne, who is conservative in language, almost always seems to be employing the older rather than the newer of these two senses. He even occasionally hints the special theological usage which identifies in the Old Testament events in the New of which they are "types"?or rather he employs a reversed adap tation of this which labels something in his story a "type" of a Bible element?as when Hester Prynne is called "a scarlet woman and a worthy type of her of Babylon." But it should be observed that this particular description comes not from the 10 This content downloaded from 137.148.11.31 on Sun, 20 Sep 2015 12:57:45 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Obliquity of Signs narrator but from one of the tale's seventeenth century Puri tans who might be expected to typologize in this way, just as it is the Puritan authority that has affixed upon Hester the signifying letter which is invariably described as being not red but scarlet. She is called a "type" in a non-scriptural sense by the Hawthorne-narrator. At such times she can be associated with traditional figures of moral personification when he com ments, "It may seem marvellous that this woman should call that place her home, where, and where only, she must needs be the type of shame"?which still implicitly refers to the viewpoint of the Boston community or, again, when Chilling worth is said to have come home to behold "the woman, in whom he hoped to find embodied the warmth and cheerfulness of home, set up as a type of sin before the people." Other occurrences of the term, however, are closer to the simpler meaning of a symbol. Such is the early designation of the infant Pearl as "a forcible type, in its little frame, of the moral agony which Hester Prynne had borne throughout the day." "Token," i.e., "something that serves to indicate a fact, event, object, feeling, etc. 5 a sign, a symbol" (oed) also serves to indicate a sign, with the added implication that the sign is an evidence, even a consequence of the signified. Dimmesdale's distaste for Chillingworth's appearance is "a token, implicitly to be relied on, of a deeper antipathy in the breast of the latter." "Emblem" is another name for a symbolic signifier, more exclusively visual, deriving from the seventeenth cen tury taste for expressing abstractions by means of objects or pictured objects, but since used as another synonym for symbol as well as for an armorial device or even for a badge that might be worn on clothing. Hester's "A" is all these?a badge she wears, a device for the escutcheon on her tombstone?"On a field sable, the letter A, gules" and the "emblem of her guilt." Finally, there is "hieroglyph," which more than any of the terms just glanced at suggests the art of writing at the same time that it suggests the pictorial figure, in the reference to the picture-writing of the Egyptians. By extension, too, a hiero glyph is "a figure, device, or sign, having some hidden mean 11 This content downloaded from 137.148.11.31 on Sun, 20 Sep 2015 12:57:45 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Massachusetts Review ingj a secret or enigmatical symbol" (oed), and so more than any of the others expresses Hawthorne's feelings about the signifiers he has marked out in his tale. Such a mystery is the child Pearl, as we shall shortly consider. As Hester and Dim mesdale watch her in the forest, it is observed, "She had been offered to the world, these seven years past, as the living hiero glyphic, in which was revealed the secret they so darkly sought to hide,?all written in this symbol,?all plainly manifest,? had there been a prophet or magician skilled to read the char acter of flame." Pearl, the animate letter or character, is truly the hieroglyphic figure which hides an elusive meaning. Like a rhetorician, Hawthorne has, in the examples I have given, labelled his subjects as though they were figures of speech in a spoken or written text. But, of course, these types, emblems, tokens, and hieroglyphs are not really supposed to be products of the human imagination. They belong to the category of privileged signs deriving from a transcendent pres ence. They are "written" by a spiritual force which expresses itself in the secret language of appearances. To read such texts one must be gifted with a prophet's or a magician's power to see beyond actuality. As Chillingworth says of the "riddle" ("a question or statement intentionally worded in a dark or puzzling manner" [oed]) of the identity of Hester's lover, "the Daniel who shall expound it is yet a-wanting." The sur face of life which he beholds is thus compared to the most famous of dark texts, the writing on the wall at Belshazzar's feast. For us, there may no longer be a center, as Jacques Derrida would call it, to assure to such?or any?appearances the status of signs. With our loss of confidence in the sacred grounding of signs we have lost confidence in their objectivity, and see them only as games of the mind. Hawthorne may have been at the threshold of our condition, though he was still formally committed to older views. The Puritan ontology as well as the Puritan morality haunted the American mind in Hawthorne's day, and haunted his in particular. We think more usually of the moral imperatives of Puritanism as a lingering presence 12 This content downloaded from 137.148.11.31 on Sun, 20 Sep 2015 12:57:45 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Obliquity of Signs in Hawthorne's writing?and where more than in this tale of transgression and penance? But it is the Puritan understanding of the relation of natural to divine reality that was more im portant to him. The Puritans regarded reality textually; a long tradition of Christian thought which spoke through them analogized the world as a book which might be compared to scripture as an act of divine writing. What God had written in the creation was a cryptic language, yet one could be con fident nonetheless that no phenomenon but had its sacred sense. Such a viewpoint was older than Christianity, having its roots in platonism. It was, too, enjoying a new life in the secularized religion of romantic transcendentalism of which Hawthorne was aware at close hand. Hawthorne knew perfectly well his difference and distance from the Puritans though "strong traits of their nature," he said, had "intertwined themselves" with his. He was skeptical as well about the convictions of his Concord neighbors, Emer son and Thoreau. His temperamental nominalism, which is so visible in the determined abstention from all interpretation practiced in his Notebooks with their tireless recording of triv ial realities, made him a man for whom the world is exactly what it is and no more. Yet, as for so many mid-nineteenth century minds the loss of the visionary sense, the draining of significance from the mundane, was felt with a certain anguish, at best a wry humor, and the viewpoint of science seemed to him pitiably meager and even morally dangerous. In The Scarlet Letter he gives play to all of his mingled feelings? his tenderness for the poetry of a lost faith in essences, his ironic detachment and disbelief, and his fear of such disbelief in himself or others. The agency of these complex feelings is, in the novel, a per sona about whom too little has been said. His divided attitudes are made clear in the Custom House Preface?making the Preface a necssary part of the fictional whole, giving a char acter to the narrating voice. This narrator appears to us in the Preface as a man undecided in his view of reality between the Puritan-transcendental conviction that the invisible speaks 13 This content downloaded from 137.148.11.31 on Sun, 20 Sep 2015 12:57:45 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Massachusetts Review ceaselessly behind the visible and the materialism that finds the explanation of things merely in accident and physical laws. He admits his deviation from the beliefs of his "grave-bearded, sable-cloaked and steeple-crowned" progenitors, yet declares a legitimate descent from them. He values his experiences at the Custom House as an antidote to transcendental associations and inclinations. Even the old inspector, a personality of un illumined materiality, was, he tells us, "desirable as a change of diet, to a man who had known Alcott." Yet his final and most moving words are a tribute to the art that discerns the spirit essence in the quotidian. In this well-known section of the Preface he discusses his aesthetic problems while striving, in the Custom House, to overcome his creative torpor. But it should be noted that his problem is as much ontological as aesthetic: it involves his unsuccessful struggle to attain the transcendental sense. In the nighttime vigil in the parlor of his Salem house, the moonlight "making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a morn ing or noontide visibility," the homely details of the room were completely seen, he recalls, "yet spiritualized by the un usual light." The room became a neutral territory where "the Actual and the Imaginary may meet." It was the sort of meet ing he would have liked to bring about in his writing yet could not, though the "wiser effort would have been, to diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance of to day ... to seek, resolutely, the true and indestructible value that lay hidden in the petty and wearisome incidents, and ordi nary characters." His failure was no matter merely of skill or of artistic imagination, as it has seemed to most readers. The requisite imagination that he lacked was the prophet or magi cian's?or if the poet's, then the romantic poet's seer-like power to discern higher truth. Unable to find essence in his surround ings he could only retreat to the unsubstantiality of the past or the fanciful, in which one might play with the idea of sig nificance in the mode of romance. Nevertheless, nothing is more serious than The Scarlet Letter, despite the charge of Henry James that its faults are 14 This content downloaded from 137.148.11.31 on Sun, 20 Sep 2015 12:57:45 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Obliquity of Signs "a want of reality and an abuse of the fanciful element?of a certain superficial symbolism" which "grazes triviality." James did not see that Hawthorne's method in the book was to ex press his own profoundest problem. In a way that is seldom understood and seems sometimes merely coy, he offers and withdraws, denies and provides the sense of the spirituality of life?and so suggests the opacity or unreliability of its signs. Many a reader has been irritated by the narrator's reluctance to decide what, if anything, Chillingworth saw on Dimmes dale's bosom, or what, if anything, was seen in the sky during the night-scaffold scene in Chapter XII or what, if anything, was seen on Dimmesdale's bosom, again, by the assembled multitude in the final scaffold scene. These are only the most memorable instances of Hawthorne's reluctance to settle a sim ple question of appearances. More important, however, is his refusal to help us to assign final significance to these phe nomena, even if granted. Repeatedly, he seems only willing to say, as at the conclusion of the final scene after summarizing the conflicting reports of witnesses, "The reader may choose among these theories." Nowhere is this insistent ambiguity more conspicuous than in the central scaffold scene?which James, it may be noted, particularly disliked. Here are duplicated the conditions of the moonlit chamber of the Preface $ the scene is bathed in a supernal light which makes each detail both completely visible and radiant with meaning. In the light cast from the sky dur ing the minister's night-vigil, he sees for the first time that Roger Chillingworth is no friend, he pierces the veil. Yet this is also the occasion for the narrator's most skeptical discussion of the delusiveness of signs. He comments upon the "mes sages" read into nature by man and the egotism of the assump tion that they are addressed to our particular selves. "We impute it, therefore, solely to the disease in his own eye and heart that the minister, looking upward toward the zenith, beheld there the appearance of an immense letter,?the letter A," he seems to conclude. But, immediately after, we hear that the sexton reported the next day that "a great red letter in the 15 This content downloaded from 137.148.11.31 on Sun, 20 Sep 2015 12:57:45 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Massachusetts Review sky,?the letter A," was seen by others also, and by them taken to stand for Angel, to signify the governor's passing. So, what are we to make of the reading of signs? The sexton, who has found Dimmesdale's glove on the scaffold, says that Satan must have dropped it there, intending?falsely?to impute that Dimmesdale belongs where evil-doers are set up to public shame. Signs may be only the mischief-making of Satan, then, and no true tokens? Except, of course, that this token is well placed! Hester's letter is the central example of the almost infinite potentialities of semantic variety. A material object, a piece of embroidered cloth held in the finder's hand, it is the one irre ducible reality which connects the intangible historic past with the narrator's present sensation -y it authenticates, is an evidence of its vanished substantiality. As an abstract sign on Hester's bosom, it purports to speak both for the nature of her past and for the present condition of the wearer. It is a letter of the alphabet, but also, presumably, an initial, a sign of a sign, since it represents a word, the next larger linguistic unit after the letter. But "adultery" is never "spelled out." The word, like the act it designates, is invisible in the text?the act held inac cessibly out of the reader's sight while the word only hovers in his mind. The merely implied word becomes somehow less explicit, and when we are told that the letter is a "talisman" (a magic object generally engraved with figures or characters) of the Fiend, we suspect a more generalized significance. It is said to throb in sympathy with all sin of whatever kind beheld by Hester. It seems to represent an absolute and undenotable evil. The letter may indicate the presence in Hester of Original Sin, and refer to a common corruption which requires no out ward demonstration, which does not manifest itself in true signs, which even the most virtuous in deed must share. The old Calvinist mystery is really the mystery of signs?there is an inner reality that cannot be signified by deed, while deeds, good works or the reverse, are without inner meaning. Trapped in this disjunction the Puritans themselves forget the original 16 This content downloaded from 137.148.11.31 on Sun, 20 Sep 2015 12:57:45 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Obliquity of Signs significance of Hester's letter and take it to stand for "able" ?which is, unlike "adultery," enunciated in the text?because of her good works. But Hester, when the magistrates consider removing the stigma, says, "were I worthy to be quit of it, it would fall away of its own nature, or be transformed into something that should speak a different purport." She seems, still, to insist upon its relation to her inner self. Yet she will try to comfort Dimmesdale by pointing out his good works? "Is there no reality in the penitence thus sealed and witnessed by good works?"?until he tells her that his scarlet letter still "burns in secret." On Dimmesdale, where the letter may be guessed to have appeared for a similar signifying function as on Hester, it is, however, as invisible as the act or condition it refers to. Society has placed no token upon him and when Chillingworth opens the sleeping minister's vestment he sees "something" which is not pictured or named for the reader. Even in the final scene when he tears his own garment from his chest we are told only, "It was revealed! But it were irreverent to describe that reve lation," and the reader is cheated again of the confirming spec tacle. Although some spectators testified to having seen that the minister did bear a letter like Hester's, others saw nothing. And the sign, if it had really been there, might, anyhow, our narrator remarks, have been only the medical symptom of Dimmesdale's psychic distress, "the effect of the ever active tooth of remorse gnawing from the inmost heart outwardly," an instance of psychosomatic symptomology (another sign theory which greatly interested Hawthorne, as we shall see in a moment). Pearl, the asker of so many preternaturally pertinent ques tions, asks her mother to explain the meaning of the sign she wears and is not answered?plausibly because the answer would be beyond her grasp but also so that the reader may still not hear the signified, the unutterable. When she asks, "What does the letter mean, mother," Hester says evasively, "I wear it for the sake of its gold thread." Pearl says that she has been told that the scarlet letter is the Black Man's mark, an expression 17 This content downloaded from 137.148.11.31 on Sun, 20 Sep 2015 12:57:45 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Massachusetts Review she repeats when she asks if the minister holds his hand upon his bosom because the Black Man has "set his mark" there. "Mark," for which the root sense is, once again, token or sign, implies here, as a special meaning, a signature, the personal sign of a signer set in stead of his name. As such it signifies not the wearer but the writer, the author of all sin. Pearl connects this guessed-at sign with Hester's A when she asks, "Is this his mark?" and extracts from her mother the acknowledge ment, "Once in my life I met the Black Man! This scarlet letter is his mark!" And Pearl then guesses, when she sees the minister's hand over his heart, "Is it because, when the minister wrote his name in the book, the Black Man set his mark in that place?" Both symbol and consequence of Hester's and Dimmesdale's sin, Pearl is herself an instance of the ambiguity of signs. She is the animate letter, the child dressed in gold-embroidered scarlet, "the scarlet letter in another form, the scarlet letter endowed with life." Yet when she dances about in the final scene in the city square, "her dress, so proper was it to little Pearl, seemed an effluence or inevitable development and out ward manifestation of her character, no more to be separated from her than the many-hued brilliancy from a butterfly's wing, or the painted glory from the leaf of a bright flower." Her appearance, once the sign, the "effluence" of her parents' sin, is now an exterior organically developed from her own airy nature, as the rest of nature's signs emanate from tran scendent being. Earlier, she reverses or nullifies Hester's sign when she places it, made of eel grass, upon herself. It is the color of nature, green, the eidetic image of her mother's token, and Pearl waggishly reflects as though to mock the meaning searcher, "I wonder if mother will ask me what it means!" But Hester refuses to see it as a sign, and says, "The green letter on thy childish bosom has no purport." The mystery of meaning is expressed in the obliquity of Pearl's own answers to the question of what she is. Hester wonders, "Child, what are thou?" and is answered, "O, I am your little Pearl," which is no answer for her name is her sign 18 This content downloaded from 137.148.11.31 on Sun, 20 Sep 2015 12:57:45 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Obliquity of Signs not her significance. Hester asks, "Tell me, then what thou art and who sent thee hither?" and then answers this question herself, but Pearl demurs, "I have no Heavenly Father," the animate sign denying its source in the divine. A little later, the Reverend Wilson asks again, "Who made thee?" and Pearl's answer is that she has not been made but plucked from the prison rose-bush, an answer at once improbably arch and in formed with a pantheistic view of nature, dispensing with the myth of express creation. Hawthorne's ironic dubeity can be felt in his presentation of the Governor's shocked, "a child of three years old, and she cannot tell who made her!"?for how many among his readers would have had perfect confidence in the catechism reply? Of course, all the while that we have had this play of alternative semiologies, of Puritan and tran scendental explanations of origin, it is obvious that Pearl's pert remarks are naturalistically explicable; she has just seen the roses in the governor's garden, has already been called "red rose" by Wilson himself, who also calls her "little bird of scarlet plumage," the natural creature she will be likened to in the last scene. Our first view of Hester and her child occurs, nevertheless, when they emerge from the prison door passing the rose-bush and the weeds "which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison." Weeds and prison are linked by a resem blance that is not merely metaphor but attributable to the generative force of which they are both products. Nearby, the rose-bush holds up "delicate gems" which "might be imagined to offer" sweetness to the condemned "in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him." Nature, the symbolizer, proffers a token from the realm of spirit in the same way as the Christian godhead has sent Pearl as "emblem and product of sin." But Hawthorne does not assert either source of signification uncontrovertibly: his weak copula, "might be imagined," is a reminder that such symbolizing may be only the result of the human imagination. It is quite "significant," therefore, that the artistic imagina tion appears centrally in Hester herself who is an artist of 19 This content downloaded from 137.148.11.31 on Sun, 20 Sep 2015 12:57:45 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Massachusetts Review needlework, the only medium available to a woman in her day. Her works are distinguished by their power of symbolic ex hibition, her first oeuvre of note having been her letter. She is afterwards called upon to show the meaning of other human situations, the pomp of public ceremonies, the sorrow of funer als which she would "typify by manifold emblematic devices." Her art is also ^//-expressive, "a mode of expressing and therefore soothing the passion of her life." Pearl has some thing of her mother's instinct: her creativity operates upon "a stick, a bunch of rags, a flower," adapting them to her inner drama. Her art is harmless play. But Hester collaborates with Puritan society in converting Pearl herself into a symbol by clothing her in her symbolizing, signifying costume. She thus does violence to the irreducible being of the child who is shown repeatedly to be a natural phenomenon, a whimsical child and nothing else. All art, all symbolizing, is reductive. In the mirror of art the truth is distorted from its natural proportions, as Hester's own image is when she sees herself in the polished armor in the Governor's house. The monstrous ly enlarged "A" upon her breast, her face reduced to insignifi cance by the convex surface of the breastplate, represent her reduction as the woman behind the scarlet letter. And in time, "all the light and graceful foliage of her character had been withered by this red hot brand, and had long fallen away, leav ing a bare and harsh outline," the person becoming the symbol. Yet the narrative shows at the same time that Hester resists this simplification, remaining a complex, developing personal ity. An opposite process takes place in the case of Chillingworth who, as his history advances, becomes more and more an ab stract symbol of infernal malice until at the end he simply shrivels to nothing, all his humanity gone. But Hawthorne does not dismiss or disparage the reading of signs altogether. He continues throughout the narrative to find ways of exploring the relation of phenomenon and meaning, of outerness and inwardness; his narrative discovers and tests other pairs of terms that represent signifier and signified. One example is the theory of disease by which he anticipates psycho 20 This content downloaded from 137.148.11.31 on Sun, 20 Sep 2015 12:57:45 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Obliquity of Signs somatic medicine. Chillingworth, it will be recalled, ascribes his patient's malady to a spiritual cause. "He to whom only the outward and physical evil is laid open knoweth, oftentimes, but half the evil which he is called upon to cure. A bodily dis ease, which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiri tual part ... a sickness, a sore place, if we may so call it, in your spirit, hath immediately its appropriate manifestation in your bodily frame." Bodily disease, then, is a "manifestation" of spirit, another instance of the sign language of all phe nomena. Hawthorne's interest in the general science of signs, extends, logically, to the branch of medicine having to do with symptoms, which is also called semiology. Older medical con cepts and even modern ones, of course, imply a dualism in the patient whose disease is defined as a manifestation of some hidden meaning?and a meaning that was truly inaccessible, for the most part, before the germ theory and modern knowl edge of physiology. And so the source of disease, though pre sumed to be spiritual in Dimmesdale's case, will not, after all, be accessible to the probing of his physician-enemy. Dimmesdale himself subscribes to his physicians' theories when he attributes his own distrust of Chillingworth to his inner spiritual disorder?"the poison of one morbid spot was infecting his heart's entire substance." In fact, his perceptions are accurate. But his inner condition does produce hallucina tions, delusive signs. These seem to demonstrate, again, Haw thorne's view of the effects of the Puritan-transcendental view of a superior spiritual reality, his preference for the matter of-fact: "It is the unspeakable misery of a life so false as his, that it steals the pith and substance out of whatever realities there are around us . . . To the untrue man, the whole uni verse is false,?and it is impalpable,?it shrinks to nothing within his grasp." All things hidden and all things exposed become antonyms in the novel to reflect the opposition of outer and inner. The forest, where the lovers meet alone save for little Pearl who does not understand what she sees except by occult instinct, is 21 This content downloaded from 137.148.11.31 on Sun, 20 Sep 2015 12:57:45 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Massachusetts Review the place of a seclusive truth, difficult to read; the forest path, like a hard text, is "obscure." The public scenes in which Hester and Dimmesdale are together are the locus of communal truth, that which is perceived by all. "We must not talk in the mar ket-place of what happens to us in the forest," Hester warns Pearl, distinguishing between the unutterable inner world and the world of speech. Hester's "A", Mistress Hibbins says, is a "token" that Hester has been to the forest many times, but the minister's visit is ultimately incommunicable. His election ser mon is best understood when, in fact, its words are indistin guishable and only the mournful tone of his voice conveys his state to Hester as she stands outside. Language, by implication, misleads us, tells us nothing of the heart, which has no lan guage. Dimmesdale's unintelligible murmur is like Pearl's babble or the gibberish she speaks in his ear in the night scaf fold scene?perhaps a sacred speaking in tongues, perhaps the non-sense of a message-less world. Nature, too, only babbles. The forest keeps its secrets though the babbling brook would seem to want to "speak" them: "All these giant trees and boulders of granite seemed intent on mak ing a mystery of the course of this small brook: fearing, per haps, that, within its never-ceasing loquacity, it should whisper tales out of the heart of the old forest whence it flowed, or mirror its revelations on the smooth surface of a pool." Pearl asks what the brook says, but Hester replies that if she had a sorrow of her own the brook would tell her of it, "even as it is telling me of mine!" implying that she has understood the brook as the brook has understood her, but also that one hears in Nature's babble what one's own experience suggests. And as Pearl continues to play by the side of the brook her own cheerful babble mingles with its melancholy one, we are told, and "the little stream would not be comforted and still kept telling its unintelligible secret of some mournful mystery." Hawthorne's antithesis between the solitary soul and society is a variation upon the theme of an inexpressible inner reality. Hester is one of the great American isolatoes, who cannot speak the language of community. At his extremest, this loner is 22 This content downloaded from 137.148.11.31 on Sun, 20 Sep 2015 12:57:45 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Obliquity of Signs Melville's Bartleby, who withdraws from language altogether. By embracing silence he acknowledges the lapse of a common truth which unites not only men with one another but which, by a language of signs, unites the universe to mankind. Hester's sin is not only unutterable but involves a name, that of her partner, which she refuses to utter. Her sexual history is so private that it cannot be imagined when we gaze at her in the chaste aftermath of Hawthorne's novel. And yet that privacy has its public manifestation, the child Pearl. And Hester's sin is outrageously publicized by her exposure in the most public of places, the town pillory. The opening scene of the novel draws thrilling intensity from this paradox. From the hidden interior of her prison cell, from the secrecy of her own heart, Hester emerges with the child upon her arm, isolated and silent, to stand upon the most public site in Boston. A special piece of cruel machinery, a vise to hold the head upright, is available on the scaffold so that the condemned may be forced to face those who look upon him, and Hawthorne comments, "There is no outrage more flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his face for shame." But Hester voluntarily faces her viewers. Nevertheless, her exposure reveals nothing. Indeed, the spectator is prompted to find her an "image of Divine Maternity," to read the scarlet woman as her opposite. "Secret" is a key word in The Scarlet Letter. All the princi pal personages have secrets?Hester, the identity of her lover, Dimmesdale his sin, Chillingworth his own identity and motive. Chillingworth's name is like Hester's sin in never being enunci ated in the text?though we may guess that it is Prynne. Per haps the most important of these secrets, in terms of the pro gressive tension of the plot is Dimmesdale's. Chillingworth's struggle to bring to the surface what lies hidden in the mini ster's heart is the primary conflict of the story (James was right in saying that the essential drama is there, between the two men, and not in Hester). This is also because more is in volved in their struggle than the story tells: theirs is the con test between two views of the communicability of meaning. Chillingworth had asked Hester to name her lover and she had 23 This content downloaded from 137.148.11.31 on Sun, 20 Sep 2015 12:57:45 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Massachusetts Review refused, eliciting from him the comment, "there are few things,?whether in the outward world, or the invisible sphere of thought?few things hidden from the man, who devotes himself earnestly and unreservedly to the solution of a mys tery." By profession a scientist, an investigator of nature and mankind, he is confident that he can compel all mysteries to yield to him. From the "prying multitude," from even the magistrates and ministers, Hester's secret may be hidden, but, Chillingworth declares, "I come to the inquest with other senses than they possess. I shall seek this man as I have sought truth in books, as I have sought gold in alchemy." Chillingworth is defined as a materialist, one of a species of men who have lost the sense of spiritual meanings. "In their researches into the human frame, it may be that the higher and more subtle faculties of such men were materialized, and that they lost the spiritual view of existence amid the intricacies of that wondrous mechanism which seemed to involve art enough to comprise all of life within itself." The newcomer becomes the community physician, replacing the aged deacon and apothecary, "whose piety and deportment were stronger testimonials in his favor" than a medical diploma, for he is learned in both "antique physic" and the Indians' homeopathic medicine. He believes, consequently, that the inner condition of his patient, the meaning of his disease can be understood. The narrator seems to agree: "Few secrets can escape an investigator who has opportunity and license to undertake such a quest." Like a researcher into a difficult scientific problem he is de scribed "prying into his patient's bosom, delving among his principles, prying into his recollections, proving everything with a cautious touch, like a treasure-seeker in a dark cavern." Hawthorne even goes on to say, "A man burdened with a secret should especially avoid the intimacy of his physician" for "at some inevitable moment, will the soul of the sufferer be dis solved, and flow forth in a dark and transparent stream, bring ing all its mysteries into the daylight." The doctor?more in vestigator than therapist, is said to be "desirous only of truth, 24 This content downloaded from 137.148.11.31 on Sun, 20 Sep 2015 12:57:45 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Obliquity of Signs even as if the question involved no more than the air-drawn lines and figures of a geometrical problem, instead of human passions, and wrongs inflicted on himself." His contest with Dimmesdale, who steadfastly protects his secret, is dramatically illustrated in their conversation in the graveyard in Chapter Ten. Upon a grave without identifying tombstone the physician finds weeds that "grew out of the [buried man's] heart and "typify, it may be, some hideous secret that was buried with him." They have sprung up there, Chillingworth declares, "to make manifest an unspoken crime." Dimmesdale, however, insists upon the inaccessibility and sacredness of the dead man's secrets. "There can be ... no power, short of the Divine mercy, to disclose, whether by uttered words, or by type or emblem, the secrets that may be buried with a human heart. The heart . . . must perforce hold them, until the day when all hidden things shall be revealed. . . . These revelations . . . are meant merely to promote the intellectual satisfaction of all intelligent beings, who will stand waiting, on that day, to see the dark problem of this life made plain." Not merely, then, does he not choose to tell his secret; it cannot ever be revealed to men until Judgment Day. It is a mystery too profound for us before that. And, Hawthorne's language seems to suggest, it is a mystery which is only part of the general mystery of "hidden things" for which "type or emblem"?the language of appearances?provide no clue. As the methodical indeterminacy of The Scarlet Letter suggests, there is no present disclosure of "the dark problem of this life." To presume otherwise by trying to penetrate the mystery of another soul is Chillingworth's sin, as Dimmesdale tells Hester. He "violated in cold blood the sanctity of a human heart." This statement is not usually understood, though in variably quoted in discussions of the novel. We tend to think that Chillingworth has sinned because he has criminally used the knowledge he has gained in order to manipulate and de stroy the minister. But this is not what the words say. The insistence upon illicit discovery, the assault by Chillingworth upon sacred knowledge, is itself illegitimate. 25 This content downloaded from 137.148.11.31 on Sun, 20 Sep 2015 12:57:45 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Massachusetts Review Here perhaps is the pious man's reply to the problem of the obliquity of signs. Hawthorne may have felt that it was his only stay against skepticism to believe in an ultimate revelation, an ultimate deciphering of what is beyond our comprehension in this life. But he may also have entertained the suspicion that no ultimate meanings exist. Perhaps he sometimes felt bold enough to share the thought expressed by Melville in a letter he got from him only a year after The Scarlet Letter was pub lished: "If any of those other Powers choose to withhold cer tain secrets, let them; that does not impair my sovereignty in myself; that does not make me tributary. And perhaps after all, there is no secret."