182 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865Knowledge of evil, after all, and of her origins, is the means by which Pearl eventually
ceases to be a child – a creature of the wilderness, associated with its streams, plants,
and animals – and starts to become an adult, a woman in the world. And knowledge
of evil renders each of the major characters even more vacillating and conflicted,
ensuring that the debate between self and society that The Scarlet Letter rehearses
remains open, for the narrator and for us, his readers.
This, perhaps, is the secret of the mysterious power of Hawthorne’s major novel:
it is an open text. The story explores many issues. They include, along with the
central problem of law and freedom, what the narrator calls the “dark question” of
womanhood. Among many other things, The Scarlet Letter consider the condition of
woman in and through the story of its heroine, speculating that “the whole system
of society” may have “to be torn down and built up anew” and woman herself
reconstructed, freed from a “long hereditary habit” – behavior instilled by social
separation and subjection – before women like Hester can assume “a fair and suitable
position.” On none of these issues, however, and least of all on the central one, does
the narrator claim to be authoritative or the narrative move toward closure. The
subtle maneuvering of character, the equivocal commentary and symbolism, ensure
that meaning is not imposed on the reader. On the contrary, the reader has to
collaborate with the narrator in the construction of possible meanings, every time
the book is read. To this extent, for all Hawthorne’s profound debt to Puritanism,
The Scarlet Letter is an extraordinarily modern book, expressing a relativist sense of
experience in a form that is more fluid process than finished product. What it offers
is not, in the manner of a traditional classic text, an answer issuing out of a belief in
some absolute, unalterable truth, but something more like a modern classic – a
shifting, disconcerting, and almost endless series of questions.
The Scarlet Letter ushered in the most productive period of Hawthorne’s life. In the
next three years he was to publish, not only the two further novels, The House of the
Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance, but another collection of stories, The Snow
Image and Other Tales (1851), and two volumes of stories for children, A Wonder
Book (1852) and Tanglewood Tales (1853). He lived in England for a while as US
consul, and then in Rome, returning to America in 1860. The years in Europe supplied
him with the material for a novel set in Rome and dealing with the international
theme that Henry James was to make his own, The Marble Faun (1860). They also
resulted in a series of shrewd essays drawn from his observations in England, called
Our Old Home (1863). But, back in the United States, he found it increasingly difficult
to write. Four novels were started and never finished, based on the themes of the
elixir of life and an American claimant to an English estate: Septimius Felton; or, The
Elixir of Life (1872), The Dolliver Romance (1876), Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret (1882), and
The Ancestral Footstep (1883). He would begin a scene and then write “What
meaning?” or “What does this mean?” in the margins. The writer who had once been
inspired by the multiplicity of possible meanings that lay beneath the surface of
things was stuck, frustrated by an apparent absence of meaning, his evident inability
to strike through the surface. The cat-like faculty that Henry James was later to
attribute to him had, Hawthorne felt, now deserted him. “Say to the public,” he wroteGGray_c02.indd 182ray_c 02 .indd 182 8 8/1/2011 7:54:42 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 42 AM