Detailed Analysis of The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne and the Book of Esther - Research Paper Example

Hester names Pearl with reference to the gospel of Matthew: "But she named the infant Pearl, as being of great price, - purchased with all she had, - her mothers only treasure!" (1:89).(1) The romances central symbol, on the other hand, the scarlet letter A, resists the sort of hermeneutic rigidity that naming entails. As an initial letter, or simply as an initial, the A notoriously hints at all sorts of names while claiming none. As a great orchestrator of meanings, Hawthorne is aware that names are full and even overfull of meanings, and he could in no way be said to arrive at his characters names casually.

It is surprising, then, that critics of Hawthorne have not carefully considered the question of Hester's name.In "The Custom-House" Hawthorne calls up "the figure of that first ancestor," the Puritan "who came so early, with his Bible and his sword" (1:9), and The Scarlet Letter participates deeply in Puritan biblicism. Chillingworth identifies himself as "the Daniel who shall expound" (1:62) the middle of the identity of Pearl's father; on another biblical - or perhaps rather Miltonic - the level he is a version of Satan.

Dimmesdale, when in the final scaffold scene he declares himself "the one sinner of the world" (1:254), becomes a Christ figure. Hester, exposed to the eyes of the multitude, is likened to "the image of Divine Maternity" (1:56); in the "Conclusion" Hawthorne plays with the idea of Hester as a prophetess. D. H. Lawrence found in Hester's seduction of Dimmesdale the story of Eves temptation of Adam to eat the forbidden fruit. (2) The tapestry of the chamber shared by Dimmesdale and Chillingworth depicts "the Scriptural story of David and Bathsheba, and Nathan the Prophet" (1:126).

The multiplicity of biblical intertexts may reflect Hawthorne's desire to write a story of new world Puritanism that would acknowledge and, moreover, incorporate the extreme textualization of that society. The Puritans could perhaps only be brought back to life in fiction if the fiction were as saturated in the Bible as the Puritans were themselves.