The Scarlet Letter and the art of reading

The recent emphasis in contemporary criticism upon readers and their role reflects a growing interest in the nature of the reading process. While philosophy and psychology offer certain ready-made paradigms for understanding the activity of reading, a largely untapped source of insight into this topic is literature itself, particularly literature which focuses upon the phenomenon of its own existence and its relation to its audience. The present study examines Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter as an allegory of the reading process. The characters of the romance are viewed as personifications of a family of reading modes which operate over the course of the plot to bring about within a single reading mind, i.e., that of the Surveyor-Narrator, a holistic, multi-faceted experience of the scarlet letter—the text.

The presence of the text as an autonomous subjective center within the reader is shown in the existence of Pearl, a character whose birth demonstrates the principle that the text comes to life for the reader when the aesthetic and phenomenological dimensions of literary experience miraculously intersect in the absence of intellectual analysis, even as the sensuous Hester and the eloquent minister unite with one another while Hester's scholarly husband is lost somewhere in the wilderness. Though the romance is deeply concerned with the analytic impulse toward interpretation, it shows that the efficacy of this impulse depends upon its interaction with more immediate responses to the text. In particular, the novel shows that it is when the reading intellect, caught up in the fatalistic design of the text, ceases to function as a cool, rational agent that it discovers the archetype upon which the text's meaning is based. Finding words in which to convey this archetype is not, however, the province of the hermeneutic mind. This task is taken up by the "Tongue of Flame," Arthur Dimmesdale. Guided and supported by Hester's concrete vision of the personal relevance of the text, the minister succeeds, ultimately, in creating a myth of meaning which makes the private experience of the letter universally available.