8 - Love and politics, sympathy and justice in The Scarlet Letter

Summary

Describing the forest scene in The Scarlet Letter in which Hester and Dimmesdale “recognize that, in spite of all their open and secret misery, they are still lovers, and capable of claiming for the very body of their sin a species of justification,” novelist William Dean Howells writes, “There is greatness in this scene unmatched, I think, in the book, and I was almost ready to say, out of it.”The emotional climax in a book of many memorable scenes, Hester's and Dimmesdale's reunion in the forest has captured readers' imaginations for generations. Despite the importance of the love story of which that scene is a part, however, some of the best recent political readings of the novel have diverted our attention from or downplayed its significance.

For instance, in “The Politics of The Scarlet Letter” Jonathan Arac argues that the novel’s famous ambiguity needs to be understood in relation to the politics of inaction on the issue of slavery as expressed in Hawthorne’s campaign biography of President Franklin Pierce. As groundbreaking as this essay was, its major mention of the love story comes when Arac notes that “ ‘adulterer’ (or ‘adultery’?) is nowhere spelled out in Hawthorne’s text, just as ‘slavery’ is nowhere present in the Declaration or the Constitution.” Similarly, Sacvan Bercovitch asserts that the love scene Howells praises “is a lovers’ reunion, a pledge of mutual dependence, and no doubt readers have sometimes responded in these terms, if only by association with other texts. But in this text the focus of our response is the individual, not the couple (or the family).”