In search of new Hawthornes : four approaches to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The scarlet letter”

Abstract

This dissertation sets out to demonstrate Jonathan Culler’s statement that insights from disciplines other than English literature are useful in the interpretation of literary texts. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter has been selected to test this hypothesis because it is believed that it is sufficiently complex to sustain in-depth analysis on many different levels. Chapter I examines the philosophy of Michel Foucault and demonstrates how New Historicism reveals the nineteenth-century aspects of Hawthorne’s text. Chapter II adopts a psychoanalytical approach in order to access the workings of the Unconscious in Hawthorne’s characters according to the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Chapter III presents Judith Fetterley’s suggestion that feminist readers of The Scarlet Letter must be ‘resisting readers’ so as not to be influenced by Hawthorne’s misogynistic appropriation of nineteenth-century stereotypes. Finally, Chapter IV uses the work of a number of linguists such as Ferdinand de Saussure, C. S. Peirce, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida in order to examine the behaviour of Hawthorne’s capital ‘A’ as a linguistic sign. The thesis also demonstrates that a multiple approach provides the reader with four distinct facets to Hawthorne’s legendary ambiguity. Firstly, history is as much an act of interpretation as literary criticism. The events of the plot are often reported as having a variety of interpretations. Secondly, the Unconscious is a slippery customer and manifests itself in symbolic ways. Thirdly, misogyny is often at pains to disguise itself with layers of conventional gallantry and finally, linguistic signs are notoriously polysemous and resist any single interpretation. The study concludes by showing how these readings bring us to the threshold of a new era in Hawthorne criticism. Hawthorne may have lost the place he once had at the centre of American literature but the text of The Scarlet Letter will continue to reflect the social concerns of a new set of readers.