The Office of Scarlet Letter by Bercovitch Sacvan

Author:Bercovitch, Sacvan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-07-04T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Three

The Red Badge of Compromise

“THE SCARLET LETTER had not done its office”: Hawthorne’s devious, multivalent directive has behind it the authority of all the cultural forces that were mobilizing to meet the mid-century crisis at home and abroad. In suggesting that he did more than write the romance that Choate had called for, I had in mind not only Hawthorne’s uses of the past but also his engagement with the anxieties of the moment. For present purposes, they may be described through two far-reaching events—one external, the European Forty-eight, and the other internal, the compromise through which North and South hoped to avoid civil war. Both events gathered momentum through the previous decade (in America a period of widening regional divisions, in Europe the dawn of revolutionary socialism); both events seemed to be resolved by 1852 (with the election of Franklin Pierce and the restoration of European monarchy); and both are implicit in the letter’s office. Once again Hawthorne himself suggests the connection—this time in the poignant passage in “The Custom-House” when he takes up the “rag of scarlet cloth,” places it on his breast, feels its “burning heat,” and “shuddering,” drops it to the floor (145-46). It amounts to an emblem play of authorial identification, balancing distance and empathy, pointing backward from Hawthorne to Hester and forward from her cottage threshold to his customshouse office. Hawthorne uses the moment of contact to assert his sense of difference, even as he returns with Hester to colonial Boston and transforms himself—as writer, as victim of party politics, and as a son of the Puritans—into a symbol of continuity. Ideologically, that symbol joins the novel’s two time frames: first, the fictional time frame, 1642-49, with its implied contrast between models of revolt (recurrent violence in the Old World, organic progress in the New); and second, the authorial time frame, 1848-52, with its ominous explosion of conflict at home and abroad.

The “red year Forty-eight,” as Melville recalled it in Ciarei, brought “the portent and the fact of war, / And terror that into hate subsides.” He was referring to the series of revolutions from which Europe’s kings “fled like the gods” (although by 1852 “even as the gods / . . . return they made; and sate / And fortified their strong abodes”). But he might have been referring as well to what New England conservatives considered an ominous tendency toward confrontation following the victory of the Whigs. The presidency of James Polk (1844-48) was a high point of antebellum chauvinism. Mexico had been defeated (yielding the spoils of California, Texas, and New Mexico); the Oregon Territory appropriated (along with Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, and parts of Utah); record waves of immigrants absorbed; gold discovered in the West; the entire Great Lakes region (including several million acres of “open” land “confiscated from the Indians”); Florida, Texas, Iowa, and Wisconsin admitted to the Union; and plans devised to extend “commercial and territorial advantages beyond the continent” to Yucatan, Cuba, Hawaii, China.1

Then in 1848 Polk’s unexpected defeat called attention to long-festering internal divisions.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.