the scarlet letter chain link references

However, a comparison of the novel’s primary signum of material and immaterial A-signification to the talismanic “cross on a nun’s bosom” – made in a central chapter titled “Another View of Hester” (128) – opens A radically different reading here.ġ.

Since in the end the clandestinely arranged transatlantic voyage of the principal characters, or “actors” (197), turns out all of a sudden incomprehensibly overbooked and then it gets altogether fatally thwarted, the sailors’ contribution to the story is their boisterous presence and exploits on the ground in Boston, rather than their nominal functional performance at sea.Īs the narrative is nearing its long-awaited peripatetic high point, the unexpected arrival of a bunch of mariners may seem no more than a conventional compositional ploy to interpose a moment of playful or comic relief. Indeed, the men step ashore in perfectly robust, sun-tanned health, good humor, and general contentment. The reader will actually learn that the crew had not only ample apothecary provisions but also the benefit of a surgeon’s attention aboard. While Hester’s usual protégés are the poor, the sick and the afflicted, there is no advance intelligence and later no evidence – in fact, no mention ever – of any calamity or mishap the Spanish watercraft may have suffered en route to New England. Realistically considered, though, there is a rub at this juncture in that the Spanish sailors are hardly in any need of humanitarian assistance or spiritual help from a curandera. As we know, charity and good works become a public vocational identity with Hawthorne’s heroine early on in the story (and we will have more to say about it later).

Prima facie, it is possible to accept that Hester Prynne establishes communication with the party “from the Spanish Main” (167) as a matter of course, in her secondary capacity as a local care-provider and social worker of sorts, i.e., before she realizes she will want to procure oceanic passage for Dimmesdale, Pearl and herself. The larger objective is to promote along these lines a selective quasi-Calvinist eisegesis of, which is to say an active and presuppositional reading into, the Book of Revelation as an interpretive tool with which to throw new light on the story and on its much-discussed ending. Reflecting as well as confirming the allegorical spectrum from the naïve to the paradoxical, the paper naturalizes Hawthorne’s text as a kind of post-Reformation morality play, a dramatic spectacle in costume and dance, complete with eye-catching drapery, marks and brands. Allegory is entertained here as a discourse combining emblem with narrative and abstraction with history (cf., Anderson 2008). My practical register is broadly literary-analytical and my conceptual approach is broadly allegorical. The organizing scheme of this essay is to map out the quixotic Spanish connection and to explore in some detail its implications for the appreciation of the whole novel.

The scarlet letter chain link references