my laptop is being ridiculous.

Dakota Rudick
AP English / Period 4
April 26, 2010
The Scarlet Letter Essay Topic: A Critical Response One
Overuse of Symbolism in The Scarlet Letter
While some, such as author and lawyer Nancy Stade, find Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and its themes “timeless and universal” (Stade “Introduction”). The famous American novelist Henry James, however, believes that Hawthorne utilized symbolism to the point of absurdity. The clash of opinions brings the reader to question if Hawthorne overused symbols or if each image he included was necessary to lead the reader to the theme. James’ criticism illuminates the fatal flaw in Hawthorn’s eminent novel, exposing the overload of symbols and representational imagery.
One first recognizes Hawthorne’s enthusiasm for images in the introduction “The Custom-House.” Through light and grass motifs, he expresses details about the characters and settings. For example, he says that the pavement around the Custom-House possessed “grass enough growing in its chinks to show that it has not, of late days, been worn by any multitudinous resort of business” to demonstrate the lack of activity at the Salem port (Hawthorne 7). On its own, it would prove an effective description of the wharf. In spite of this, the author includes a surplus of disease imagery to further elucidate his point. Over the course of four pages, he uses words like “discharging,” “dilapidated,” and “tarnished,” to describe the area filled with “decayed wooden warehouses,” and wharves “crumbled to ruin” (Hawthorne 6-9). The words, meant to bring to the reader’s mind a picture of the port as an ailing person, instead drag out the chapter unnecessarily and take away from the effect of his other symbolism.
Another major instance where Hawthorne wrecks his symbolic meaning is in the fifteenth chapter, “Hester and Pearl.” He effectively utilizes symbolism when he describes Roger Chillingworth. He says, “Hester gazed after him a little while, looking with a half-fantastic curiosity to see whether the tender grass of early spring would not be blighted beneath him, and show the wavering track of his footsteps, sere and brown” (Hawthorne 145). This demonstrates how dangerous Chillingworth is and the threat he may pose in the future to Hester’s happiness. However, the author mars the emphasis in Hester’s lament of fear with Pearl and her green scarlet letter. During Hester’s scene with Chillingworth, Pearl had been playing. “Her final employment was to gather sea-weed, of various kinds, and make herself a scarf, or mantle, and a head-dress, and thus assume the aspect of a little mermaid,” but instead of pretending to be a regular mermaid, she adds to her costume a green “A” on her bosom to match her mother’s (Hawthorne 147). While it successfully leads to Pearl questioning Hester as to the meaning of the letter, its obscure symbolism is lost on the reader and causes one to lose the image of Chillingworth and his wickedness.
Finally, in the most emphatic part of the book, Hawthorne’s symbolism takes a turn to absurdity. In chapter twenty-three, “The Revelation of the Scarlet Letter,” Reverend Dimmsdale finishes his election day sermon. Hawthorne utilizes irony and rhetoric when he then describes Dimmsdale: “How fared it with him then? Were there not the brilliant particles of a halo in the air about his head? So etherealized by spirit as he was, and so apotheosized by worshipping admirers, did his footsteps in the procession really tread upon the dust of earth?” The irony lies with the fact that Dimmsdale has portrayed himself to the town as more heavenly than he actually is. Then, suddenly, Dimmsdale confesses his involvement with Hester, and “With a convulsive motion he tore away the ministerial band from before his breast. It was revealed! But it were irreverent to describe that revelation.” The “it,” being his own scarlet letter, and Hawthorne’s greatest failing with the book, for all his excess disease imagery to the point where Dimmsdale’s exposure “ceases to be impressive, and grazes triviality” (James).
While influential critics of his time such as Evert A. Duyckinck call his book a “phsychological romance, a study of character in which the human heart is anatomized, carefully, elaborately, and with striking poetic and dramatic power,” they overlooked the high potency of the symbolism like a man on his twenty-first birthday wouldn’t realize how jello shots can add up. Those same critics say that Hawthorne differed from other literary works at the time by displaying “nature and ease” over “artifice and effort,” one wonders how ludicrously in-depth the other works were. For if the Scarlet Letter was “condensed in style,” Henry James’ opinion that the novel had too much could only be justified by the other books of its time.

Works Cited
http://www.answers.com/topic/the-scarlet-letter-novel-6
Barnes and Noble Classics Scarlet Letter
Nancy Stade, “Introduction” Barnes and Noble Classics Scarlet Letter