Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 181clearing and the wilderness, life conducted inside the social domain and life pursued
outside it. And the main characteristic of Hawthorne’s portrait of this conflict is its
doubleness: quite simply, he is tentative, equivocal, drawing out the arguments for
and against both law and freedom. As a result, the symbolic territories of The Scarlet
Letter become complex centers of gravity: clustering around them are all kinds
of often conflicting moral implications. The forest, for example, may be a site of
freedom, the only place where Hester and Dimmesdale feel at liberty to acknowledge
each other. But it is also a moral wilderness, where characters go to indulge in their
darkest fantasies – or, as they see it, to commune with the devil. The settlement may
be a place of security, but it is also one of constriction, even repression, its moral
boundaries marked out by the prison and the scaffold. Simple allegory becomes rich
and puzzling symbol, not only in the mapping of the opposing territories of forest
and settlement, clearing and wilderness, but in such crucial, figurative presences as
the scarlet letter “A” that gives the book its title. To the Puritans who force Hester to
wear the scarlet letter, it may be an allegorical emblem. In the course of the story,
however, it accumulates many meanings other than “adultress.” It might mean that,
of course, and so act as a severe judgment on Hester’s individualism; then again, as
the narrator indicates, it might signify “able,” “admirable,” or even “angel.”
The major characters of The Scarlet Letter, too, become centers of conflict, the
debate become flesh, turned into complex imaginative action. Hester, for example,
may be a rebel, modeled on the historical figure of Anne Hutchinson as well as the
mythical figure of Eve. But she cannot live outside of society altogether. She is a
conflicted figure, unable to find complete satisfaction in either the clearing or the
wilderness; and her eventual home, a house on the edge of the forest, in a kind of
border territory between the two, is a powerful illustration of this. Dimmesdale is
conflicted too, but in a more spiritually corrosive way. “No man,” the narrator
observes of him, “for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and
another to the multitude without finally getting bewildered as to which may be
true.” Torn between the image he offers to others and the one he presents to himself,
his public role as a revered minister and his private one as Hester’s lover and Pearl’s
father, Dimmesdale is fatally weakened for much of the action. In his case, the central
conflict of the story finds its issue in severe emotional disjunction. And Chillingworth
is there to feed on that weakness, becoming Dimmesdale’s “leech” in more ways than
one – apparently his doctor but actually drawing sustenance from Dimmesdale’s
guilt and his own secret satisfying of the need for revenge. Roger Chillingworth, in
turn, is more than just a figure of retribution and a possible projection of Hawthorne’s
own uneasy feeling that, as a writer, he was just a parasite, an observer of life. “It is a
curious observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same at
bottom,” the narrator comments, after describing how Chillingworth declined once
Dimmesdale died. The link is passion. “The passionate lover” and “the no less
passionate hater” each sups voraciously on “the food of his affection”; and the hater,
rather more than the lover, reminds us that laws may well be required to curb the
individual appetite. Hawthorne was enough of a son of his Puritan forefathers to
believe that, as he put it in his journals, “there is evil lurking in every human heart.”GGray_c02.indd 181ray_c 02 .indd 181 8 8/1/2011 7:54:42 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 42 AM