180 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865territory, somewhere between the real world and fairyland, where the Actual and the
Imaginary may meet.” The ordinary is transfigured, assuming some of the qualities
of the legendary. So the four major characters of the story, for example, approach the
condition of figures out of folktale. Hester Prynne resembles the biblical figure of
Eve, or the scarlet woman of folklore; Dimmesdale recalls the false priest, Chillingworth
the wicked wise man, and Pearl the wise child, a presocial creature who can evidently
see things hidden from the adult eye. To the moonlight, in this passage, Hawthorne
then adds the figurative presence of the mirror: seen “deep within its haunted verge,”
the moonlit room, he observes, gravitates “one remove further from the actual, and
nearer to the imaginative.” What we are being prepared for here is that quality of
imaginative removal that also characterizes The Scarlet Letter: the action is not only
transformed by the beams of the imagination, it is also subtly distanced and framed.
The story begins, after all, in the fifth act, after the pivotal event, the adulterous liai-
son of Hester and Dimmesdale, has taken place. We, the readers, are invited not so
much to involve ourselves in a narrative action, as to contemplate the consequences
of that action. And then those consequences are themselves set at a remove from us,
and in a contained series of perspectives, by being presented in a basically pictorial,
emblematic way. Each episode is built around a particular object or event: the prison,
say, the scaffold, the forest, the governor’s mansion, Hester’s embroidery work. The
narrator then mediates the episode for the reader, working through the possible
meanings of the object or event in a tentative, equivocal way. As he does so, he tries to
learn something about the truths of the human heart, which brings us to the third
element Hawthorne adds in this passage, to the moonlight and the mirror. In this
“familiar room,” Hawthorne tells us, where the writer of romance goes about his
business, there is a “somewhat dim coal fire” casting “a faint ruddiness” over every-
thing; giving “as it were, a heart and sensibilities of human tenderness to the forms
which fancy summons up.” It is Hawthorne’s way of reminding the reader that all his
maneuvers, the imaginative transfiguration and narrative distancing, are there for a
distinctly passionate purpose; his aim as a romance writer is nothing less than to
search out the secrets of the inner life, to discover and disclose the torments and ten-
sions, those fires that lie hidden within every human being.
The major tensions that Hawthorne searches out in The Scarlet Letter are related
to his own ambivalent relationship to Puritanism, and his own Puritan ancestors in
particular. As he intimates in the introductory essay to his story, he felt haunted by
his ancestors yet different from them. He could experience what he calls there “a sort
of home-feeling with the past,” but he also suspected that his Puritan founding
father might find it “quite a sufficient retribution for his sins” that one of his
descendants had become a writer, “an idler” and a dabbler in fancy. The Scarlet Letter
rehearses the central debate in nineteenth-century American literature: between the
demands of society and the needs of the individual, communal obligation and self-
reliance. The Puritan settlement in which the story is set is a powerful instance of
community. Hester Prynne, in turn, is a supreme individualist: “What we did had a
consecration of its own,” she tells her lover. The conflict between the two is also a
conflict between the symbolic territories that occur in so many American texts: theGGray_c02.indd 180ray_c 02 .indd 180 8 8/1/2011 7:54:42 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 42 AM