The Latin poet Catullus, contradicting the mythology that did not want the union between Helen and Paris to be fruitful, surprisingly called adultery a “fruitful seed.” It will be difficult to find in literature a more suitable thought to introduce the difficult treatment of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter.
Its plot revolves around the doubly adulterous relationship between a priest, Arthur Dimmesdale, and a previously married woman, Hester Prynne, with the consequences that this relationship entails in the puritanical climate of 17th century America. The fruit of this relationship is the little girl Pearl, in whom “the bond that united them was visible”1: a little girl who is “a lovely and immortal flower,” blossomed “from the shameful lust of a guilty passion.”2
Yet “the little girl was worthy of being born in the Garden of Eden; she deserves to be left there, to play with the angels, after the first progenitors of the world were driven out of it.”3
The animals of the forest bow to her, children and adult men alike are amazed and fear her, in short, her nature is evidently extraordinary in the eyes of everyone, and perhaps, if one could say so, of everything.
On the other hand, the little girl “resembled nothing more than the phantasmagoric play of the Nordic lights,”4 and her nature, or at least her appearance, of being supernatural is reiterated several times: beyond the obvious rumors of fellow citizens who they cannot help but see her as a creature of the devil, she is defined by the narrator and the various characters as a being of elven nature a truly remarkable number of times,5 not to mention other similar characterizations such as sprite,6 elf,7 nymph or dryad.8
The reverend does not confess to being the child’s father until at the end of the novel on his deathbed, but Hester is immediately discovered due to her motherhood and punished with the obligation of having to perpetually wear that same scarlet letter, the A, sewn to her chest, of Adultery, which gives the work its title. Well, her daughter Pearl is “the scarlet letter come to life!”9
And, indeed, “there was fire in her, in every part of her; it seemed like the involuntary bud of a moment of passion.”
Another comparison that comes naturally, due to its aerial and fiery nature, is to a bird with fiery plumage: “little bird with scarlet plumage,”10 the governor calls it, and it is also called “wild tropical bird with colorful plumage.”11
Wild is in fact an adjective that often occurs when talking about Pearl, and on the one hand it obviously connects her to flora and fauna, which she shows she loves so much that she is reluctant to pick flowers or cry for having inadvertently hurt a bird during her games, it is also true that the forest is explicitly connected by the witch, Mrs. Hibbins, to the witches’ sabbats that would be held there. And, in fact, there is no shortage of those who say of Pearl: “This little girl has witchcraft in her, I assure you!” And the accuser doesn’t say that it in a joking or endearing tone, at all, certainly not in a context in which being accused of trafficking in similar arts could end in a summary trial that would capitulate in a fire in the public square. After all, there cannot be anyone who knew it better than Nathaniel Hawthorne, born and raised in Salem, the city sadly famous for the disproportionate number of witchcraft convictions issued during the seventeenth century.
And yet, the image of Hester Prynne on the gallows stage, showing off for the first time that same scarlet letter which later turns out to be imprinted directly on the flesh of Pastor Dimmesdale, is expressly compared to “divine motherhood.” What does this mean?
If on the one hand the Levinassian concept of eternal female virginity comes to mind not because it is physically intact, but because of the continuous evasion of the feminine from a precise definition and control, on the other hand the ending of the novel reveals to us that the ideal of Hester is nothing less than that of a new messiah, a female incarnation this time, who repairs the fracture created between the sexes and symbolized in the Old Testament by the expulsion of man and woman from that same Earthly Paradise where Pearl is still said to be worthy to stay.
Is Pearl the second coming of Christ? The hypothesis should not be underestimated.
Sacred love and profane love therefore reveal themselves to be one and the same thing in this extraordinary novel with an effectiveness whose only point of comparison we can think of is probably Bernini’s sculpture Ecstasy of Saint Teresa of Avila, which depicts the mystical passion of the saint in an expression of poignant bliss indistinguishable from carnal pleasure, as many scholars have duly pointed out.
But in other ways we seem to see a possible androgyny of Christ mentioned.
Without wanting to incur blasphemy, it can be therefore necessary in this context to ask ourselves: but if from a theological perspective the incarnation of God in a male man was not an absolute necessity, but a contingency, perhaps due to the specific receptivity of a specific culture in a specific historical period, what should prevent the possibility of thinking that the second coming takes on the body of a woman? And this time she is not born of an immaculate virgin to die on a cross, but on the contrary is born in the most murky of infamous sins to never die again? Or that it is the Father who suffers and dies terribly, without even being resurrected, for the sole glorification of being duly and splendidly buried? This is exactly what happens to Arthut Dimmesdale.
And, as little Pearl says in a perhaps revealing moment of tantrum: “I don’t have a heavenly Father!”12
Which, if my interpretation is correct, would be perfectly truthful, since the God would, if anything, be his grandfather or would be placed even further back in the ramifications of the family tree.
On the other hand, my considerations on the androgyny of Jesus arose from an observation, once again bordering on the blasphemous, on the possible meaning of the Eucharist. Donating one’s body as Christ does and “giving one’s body” as women do with men (or men with women, one could also say, but traditionally it is the woman who gives herself).
And isn’t Arthur Dimmesdale himself tempted, returning from the long-awaited reunion with his lover and daughter in the woods, to report to an “innocent” sheep in his flock “certain blasphemous suggestions that came to mind regarding the Eucharist?”13 It’s curious to compare this reference to the thought, slightly earlier, according to which “love, whether it is just born or awakens from a torpor similar to death, must always create a solar light, which fills the heart so much that it overflows into the surrounding world.”14
The little girl, moreover, loves her mother because she carries the scarlet letter and her father because he holds his hand on his chest where the same letter is burned, and seems to know no other communion with them other than mockery other than that of shame and suffering, of which he heartily participates in the most unexpected ways.
Speaking of her father’s suffering, it must also be said that his remorse and his sense of guilt and heartbreaking contradiction is due on the one hand to the state of adoration equal to a saint in which he is already kept alive by the community unaware, and unaware not only of the reverend’s misdeeds but of the very nature of their own veneration; on the other, by the evil care that Hester’s ex-husband, the nefarious doctor and scientist who also has a smell of witchcraft about him, the one whose real name remains unknown but who calls himself very appropriately Roger Chillingworth.
Speaking of the latter, it must be said that he is a truly sad character, it seems that Hester had married him out of the simple pity he had aroused in her (“Let those tremble who win the hand of a woman, if they do not win her together with the deepest passion of his heart!15); after discovering the adultery he returns to the city where for two years he had abandoned his wife to her fate and makes his sole aim in life the mission of Dimmesdale’s dripping, only to then discover that his action has caused the triumph, although mortal, of the latter, a moral triumph that he will never be able to aspire to, and so he dies alone in pain and in the awareness of the vanity of his actions.
Yet there had even been a sort of friendship between the two before the reverend discovered the other’s intentions and identity! As the author notes, love and hate perhaps share the same nature.16 Both are sincere, first and foremost, and both address a person as he or she truly is.
As regards the ignorant condition of the fellow citizens who venerated Dimmesdale, it is enough to quote a passage: “The virgins of his parish turned pale in his presence, victims of a passion so imbued with religious feeling that it made them think that nothing else was other than religion.”17
And, on the other hand, instead, as Hester reminds him, both have accomplished what they have accomplished and have been guilty of what they have been guilty of in the shared awareness and mutual agreement that: “What we have done had its own consecration.”18
It should therefore be said of the novel as of the author who, as he himself says of the reverend, possesses “the gift that descends on the chosen disciples on the day of Pentecost, in the form of tongues of fire, which would symbolize not the ability to speak in tongues foreign and unknown, but that of addressing the entire human brotherhood in the native language of the heart.”19