Thoughts Painfully Intense by Mancall James;

Author:Mancall, James; [Mancall, James N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

But Pearl’s creative work is not safely domestic. It is “witchcraft,” openly angry and destructive. “She never created a friend, but seemed always to be sowing broadcast the dragon’s teeth, whence sprung a harvest of armed enemies, against whom she rushed to battle” (95). This is the romancer’s revenge, openly rushing into battles against his enemies–the politicians, the Jack Cades, the slang-whangers. In these moods, we are told, Pearl resembled “an infant pestilence,–the scarlet fever … whose mission was to punish the sins of the rising generation” (102–3). Pearl, as “scarlet fever,” like Oberon’s fire, reflects the romancer’s contaminating potential; the desire to spread a pestilence of “pervasive and penetrating mischief,” the desire to create an apocalyptic disorder.

However, even as the text gives expression to these violent urges, it effaces them. By the end of the novel, Pearl gives up her witchcraft and pledges to “grow up amid human joy and sorrow, nor for ever to do battle with the world, but be a woman in it” (256). Pearl appears to be cured of her rage; her acts of hostility are effaced by the comfortable conventions of fairy tale: she marries a handsome, wealthy prince. Again, in its portrait of Pearl, the work gestures toward the enactment of violent revenge fantasies, but veers away from them into more publicly acceptable forms of reconciliation.

There are a number of possible motives for this narrative strategy. Pearl’s marriage, as some readers have argued, may be representative of Hawthorne’s own conservatism, his own filiopiety. It may also, as Bercovitch suggests, signal Hawthorne’s desire for consensus rather than conflict. But it is also precisely this kind of self-effacement that allows Hawthorne to conceal an “undertide of filth” within a “wholesome” moral. Pearl is, after all, “the scarlet letter endowed with life,” and like the novel, her pestilent potential is carefully balanced by a lofty severity and purity. Hawthorne’s private correspondence reflects his split conception of the novel. On the one hand, he found the novel to be, as he told Bridge, “positively a h-ll-fired story,” once again invoking the figure of the devil in the manuscript (C16:311–12). At the same time, he wrote to James T. Fields that adultery was “a rather delicate subject to write upon, but in the way in which I have treated it, it appears to me there can be no objections on that score.” Hell-fire was carefully balanced by delicacy.

This same duplicity, I would suggest, informs Hester’s return at the end of the novel. Many readers have argued that Hester’s role as feminist prophetess is sacrificed for the conventions of domesticity.5 However, I think Hester’s return at the end of the novel is more complicated. Taking up the scarlet letter, Hester does appear to surrender her revolutionary potential. She still imagines that “a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness,” but she will no longer be the prophetess. “The angel and the apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure, and beautiful; and wise”(263).

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