shertvood anderson and joyce 249 -...

Shertvood Anderson and Joyce 249

remarkably similar works. Despite the fact that, at the time of com-position, neither author knew the other or his work, the two bookswere written only ten years and published only five years apart. Thesetwo books are also the first examples in English of modern short storycycles. Furthermore, although Joyce's book depicts the lives of ordi-nary men and women who inhabit one of Europe's capitals andAnderson's depicts the lives of ordinary people of a small Mid-western town in the United States, both books provide modern manwith a vivid revelation of his frustration, isolation, and paralysis.

Narrative Techniques and the Oral Traditionin The Scarlet Letter

H

JOHN G. BAYER

Saint Louis University

AWTHORNE'S preface to the second edition of The Scarlet Letter,dated March 30,1850, is a brief defense of "The Custom-House"

in which he refuses to recant for allegedly indiscreet portrayals ofhis political enemies. Yet his rebuttal is by no means vociferous; withthe first line of the preface, he sets the same disarmingly humbletone that permeates the Custom-House sketch itself:

Much to the author's surprise, and (if he may say so without additionaloffence) considerably to his amusement, he finds that his sketch of officiallife, introductory to THE SCARLET LETTER, has created an unprecedentedexcitement in the respectable community immediately around him.*

Tonal ambiguity is but one enigma in "The Custom-House." Exceptfor the now classic definition of the romance, the intent of TheScarlet Letter "Introductory" has troubled critics, and the tendencyhas been to ignore the remainder—primarily, it would seem, becauseHawthorne himself encourages such a dismissal.^ In the secondedition preface he remarks: "The sketch might, perhaps, have beenwholly omitted, without loss to the public, or detriment to thebook . . ." ( i ) . But if the personal essay format surrounding thetheory of the romance adds little to our understanding of The ScarletLetter itself, it promises much concerning Hawthorne's sensitivityto an assumed audience. In the Custom-House sketch he "speaks"directly to his reader in a familiar, at times jocular, manner as if

American Literature, Volume LII, Number ?, May 1980. Copyright © 1980 by DukeUniversity Press.

^ Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, Vol. I of The Centenary Edition of theWorlds of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat et al. (Columbus: Ohio State Univ.Press, 1962), p. I. All subsequent references are to this edition and are includedparenthetically in the text.

2 Critics who have questioned the importance of "The Custom-House" to The ScarletLetter are identified in Sam S. Baskett, "The (Complete) Scarlet Letter," College English,22 (1961), 321. Baskett argues for the relevance of "The Custom-House," as does JohnE. Becker in Hawthorne's Historical Allegory (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press,197O. pp. 61-87.

Oral Tradition in The Scarlet Letter 251

he were conversing with a friend and confidant.^ That such familiar-ity is mere pose has been observed, for one, by Jesse Bier, who con-cludes that Hawthorne's "soft-spoken and unassuming tone" is"deceptive."* This view is borne out by Hawthorne's own commentsduring the preparations for publishing The Scarlet Letter. In a letterto his publisher, James T. Fields, he betrays his lack of confidence inthe book by proposing that its title be printed in red ink. This, hehoped, would be "attractive to the great gull we are endeavoring tocircumvent" (xxii). While writing "The Custom-House" Hawthornefound himself in the awkward position of having to court an audi-ence that he assumed to be hostile and for whom he felt contempt.The combative tenor of his comment to Fields seems to be reflectedin the decidedly oral-aural cast of the beginning of "The Custom-House," in that oral-rhetorical prescriptions derived from the ancientsare polemically oriented, directed toward persuasion. Hawthornerefers to himself as a "speaker" and to his reader as a "listener," withwhom he must "stand in some true relation" lest "thoughts arefrozen and utterance benumbed" (4). He conceives of his audienceas an adversary that must be won over and commits himself to find-ing the proper rhetorical tools of persuasion to render his audiencesympathetic. The confusion over the purpose of the Custom-Housesketch in toto can be allayed once it is understood as an exordiumfor the romance proper, an atavistic reminder of oral modes ofcomposition.

In the corpus of critical work on Hawthorne, his ties with theoral tradition have received little attention, perhaps because literaryromanticism in America has often been defined as a movement pittedagainst the eighteenth century's preoccupation with classifying theoral-rhetorical prescriptions of antiquity. Hawthorne is rankedamong our first great writers precisely because the vision and shapeof his works abandoned the static conventionality of the neo-classicalperiod in favor of an original treatment of the short story and thenovel-romance. During the first few decades of the nineteenth

^ Malcolm Cowley, in his introduction to The Portahle Hawthorne (New York:Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 6-7, suggests that Hawthorne carried on an "inner monologue"when he conceived his romances, and projected a second part of himself as a par-ticipating audience.

* "Hawthorne on the Romance: His Prefaces Related and Examined," Modern Philology,53 (1955),

252 American Literature

century, as advances in print technology enabled publishers to widendistribution, the public came to depend less on the spoken word andmore on the printed one. Still, the process was gradual, and the oralmilieu that spawned the lyceum movement continued to manifestitself, however covertly, in the compositional and thematic concernsof romantic writers.

Hawthorne's anxiety about the audience he projected for TheScarlet Letter is one such manifestation. In order to cope with hishostile reader, he apparently relied on Blair's Rhetoric, publishedin 1783, which contained persuasive tactics inherited from a timewhen oratory dominated writing. Blair's lectures are a typical productof the eighteenth century's drive to regularize the conventions ofrhetoric as writing principles and yet are also, paradoxically, a pri-mary source of Hawthorne's familiarity with the oral tradition. Fromhis college years when he read Blair, Hawthorne acquired the habitof keeping commonplace books, a practice also prefigured long beforein oral, preliterate societies. He recorded in his notebooks ideas forprojected scenes in order to maintain, like his predecessor in the artof narration the oral performer, a storehouse of pre-readied themesthat could be shaped into dramatic plot during the act of composi-tion. Moreover, in The Scarlet Letter the plot is itself imbued with theresonance of the spoken word, as Hawthorne uses Arthur Dimmes-dale's oratorical virtuosity to suggest the evocative power of thesermon in the Puritan community. The Scarlet Letter is not only alasting monument of the romantic movement in American letters,but residual elements from the oral tradition make it a paradigm ofAmerica's last great age of oratory.

Although the concepts of audience, reader, and narratee havecome to be used interchangeably, it is valuable for purposes of thisinquiry to make distinctions among them similar to the accepteddistinctions between author and narrator. Thus, reader is probablybest understood as the counterpart of author—that is, the flesh-and-blood being who actually reads the novel, short story, or epic. Simi-larly, just as the narrator is, to use Wayne Booth's phrase, theauthor's "implied version of 'himself,' " so too is the narratee anidealized reader."" The term audience can best be reserved as a

Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 70.


generic concept that denotes listeners or viewers (in whatever sf)ecialway these terms might pertain to a particular narrative).^

In "The Custom-House" Hawthorne manipulates the reader-narratee relationship; and only later, in the romance proper, doeshe expand his focus to include the more general concept of audience.So excessive is his initial attention to the reader that one is persuadedhe was more than a little anxious about "converting" his reader tonarratee. From the beginning his tone is apologetic, as he, "theintrusive author," seeks an audience with '*the indulgent reader"(3). He seems to presuppose a reader as uncooperative and down-right hostile as the pair of spectators in his "Main-Street" (a sketchmentioned later in "The Custom-House"). In that piece an unluckyshowman suffers the boorish barbs of two patrons unwilling, orunable, to contribute any of their own imagination to his perfor-mances. When the showman suggests to one that he lacks "the properpoint of view," he receives the scornful reply: '*I have already toldyou that, it is my business to see things just as they are.'*' Thesecond spectator is no less critical of historical inaccuracies in theskits. A tandem more ill-suited to entertain a Hawthorne romanceis probably not to be found, and it is apparently just such a reader-ship Hawthorne addresses in the Custom-House sketch. He con-ceives of a reader akin to his own ancestors, whom he portrays asspecter-critics contemptuous of his craft:

No aim, that I have ever cherished, would they recognize as laudable;no success of mine—if my life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever beenbrightened by success—would they deem otherwise than worthless, if notpositively disgraceful. "What is he.^" murmurs one gray shadow of myforefathers to the other. "A writer of story-books! What kind of businessin life,—what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankindin his day and generation,—may that be.? Why, the degenerate fellowmight as well have been a fiddler!" (ÎO)

It is clear that Hawthorne assumes a reader in "The Custom-House" whose skepticism and insistence on '^reality" are meant to

® Three useful analyses of the nature of narrative audience are: Walter J. Ong, "TheWriters Audience Is Always a Fiction" in Interfaces of the Word (Ithaca: Cornell Univ.Press, 1977); Gerald Prince, "Notes Toward a Categorization of Fictional "Narratees," "Genre, 4 ( 1971 ). 100-106 ; Walker Gibson. Tough. Sweet and Stuffy ( Bloomington :Indiana Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 28-42.

^ "Main-Street," Vol. XI of Works, p. 57-


reflect the hard-bitten practicality of many nineteenth-century Ameri-cans. How is such a reader won over? Surely Hawthorne's self-imposed burden in this regard is greater than most, and his persua-sive strategy will, accordingly, have to be more painstaking. Andso it proves to be, as he employs both overt and covert modes ofmanipulation. His most obvious ploy is outright flattery. Professinggreat concern lest he violate his "reader's rights" (4), he is patroniz-ing in his use of the conventional appellations "indulgent reader"(3) and "honored reader" (8). As mentioned above, Hawthornelikens his reader to his own forebears in that both parties disdain hisprofession. Yet at the end of the imagined attack by his Puritan

ancestry he includes a qualifier: "And yet, let them scorn me as theywill, strong traits of their nature have intertwined themselves withmine" (10). The suggestion is that Hawthorne and his progenitors—and by identification, his reader—are not so estranged after all. Theremay indeed be some similarity of sentiment in spite of differences invalues. What follows this comment are various autobiographicalasides, all intended to establish common ground between Hawthorneand his reader. A prime example is Hawthorne's insistence that hischildren must set down roots somewhere other than Salem because"human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it beplanted and replanted for too long a series of generations, in the sameworn-out soil" (11-12). This urgent call for change and new growthechoes throughout "The Custom-House." During his tenure assurveyor of the Salem Custom House, Hawthorne had learned thislesson, an especially valuable one for "a man who has dreamed ofliterary fame" because he will discover "how utterly devoid of sig-nificance, beyond his circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aimsat" (26-27). Such self-depreciation is hardly incidental. Hawthorneintends his reader to apply this same lesson to his own circumstance,to question whether his own reality-bound preoccupations might notalso benefit from exposure to an altogether different perspective.** Ifthe reader can be made to sympathize with Hawthorne's personalexperience and to see the value of challenging one's stubborn ways—if these effects are managed—the reader will be more receptive tohis role as narratee in The Scarlet Letter,

** A related study is Joseph C. Pattison, "Point of View in Hawthorne," PMLA, 82(1967), 363—69, which argues that dream is the proper "angle of vision" for Hawthorne'sreader to adopt.


Hawthorne seeks his reader's sympathy in yet a third way: byadopting the pose of editor of Surveyor Pue's manuscript. That heincludes the romance convention of the found manuscript is onceagain indicative of his sensitivity to his readership. What has beencalled quite simply the public's "distrust of fiction" in the nineteenthcentury is, as already noted, a prejudice shared by Hawthorne'sreader." Given this attitude of resistance, Hawthorne places thestarting point of his narrative in the public domain; that is, he inviteshis reader to share in the discovery of the Pue manuscript. He at-tempts to engender some commonality of experience between thereader and himself in order to prepare for their respective roles in theromance (i.e., narratee and narrator).

All of Hawthorne's devices aimed at enlisting reader sympathyare, furthermore, conscious efforts to build toward closure in thenarrative. Hawthorne seems to be aware intuitively that written nar-rative lacks the immediacy of existential involvement that obtainsin an oral performance (as in the case of epic narrative). Early in"The Custom-House" he observes: "as thoughts are frozen andutterance benumbed, unless the speaker stand in some true relationwith his audience—it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, akind and apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening toour talk^ . . ." [emphasis added] (4). Hawthorne seems to find thedynamics of oral performance desirable, though only up to a point.Because, as a writer, he must maintain esthetic distance, he isprompted to place himself in what he calls a "true position as editor"(4). The editorial pose functions so as to persuade the reader thatHawthorne himself cannot be held accountable for any discrepanciesof historical fact (such as those criticized by the '*Main-Street" spec-tator) ; the story of Hester Prynne is Surveyor Pue's story, andHawthorne is simply its editor—a mediator whose sole purpose for"assuming a personal relation with the public" is to reveal the sig-nificance of the historical record (4). A reader willing to acceptHawthorne's role as editor is more likely to blame any historicaldeficiencies on Pue and to respond more willingly to the suggestionsof Hawthorne's retelling. By placing the source of his narrative inthe public domain, Hawthorne reminds his reader that "real life"events are often ambiguous and unintelligible. The upshot of these

® Harry C. West, "Hawthorne's Editorial Pose," American Literature, 44 (1972), 211.


tactics will be, if Hawthorne has calculated rightly, to soften hisreader's skepticism.̂ ** Beneath this skeptical veneer Hawthorne ulti-mately assumes his reader to be "kind and apprehensive," and it is tothis latent sympathy that he directs his attention (4). In sum, anessential function of "The Custom-House" is to characterize a com-posite reader and in turn to prepare that reader for his narratee rolein The Scarlet Letter. Without such preparation, Hawthorne's artfulstructuring of his romance would be less evocative. Until the readersteps into the carefully delimited role of narratee, the closure thatdistinguishes tightly plotted narrative will remain merest potential.

A profile of Hawthorne's reader would include these character-istics: skepticism, discrimination, Yankee practicality. Yet, to be asuitable counterpart to the narrator of The Scarlet Letter, he mustalso display compassion, understanding, imagination. He must co-operate with the writer in spite of the typically American tendencyto discredit that which cannot be apprehended through the senses.In order to act as a narratee in a romance, he is required to acknowl-edge his more sympathetic other half, to consciously sustain aninternal counterpoise between tough-mindedness and sensitivitythat attunes him to the mixing of reality and ideality in the romanceitself. Hawthorne's reader is incapable of entering "a neutral terri-tory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land" until he

can bring with him a mind set that is correspondingly neutral, orbalanced (36). It is in this sense that the reader fictionalizes himself.The narratee of The Scarlet Letter is a figure of precisely definedproportions who, because of his close identification with the narrator,is privy to knowledge about events in the narrative that eludes boththe central characters and the Puritan community at large.

Unlike the oral performer of the epic, who was a perpetual re-counter and preserver of historical events, the narrator of The ScarletLetter orchestrates an investigation into the moral implications ofevents. He is "consistently more interested in meaning and signifi-cance than in realism or factual accuracy," and is thus wholly aby-product of the romantic tradition/^ Robert Scholes and RobertKellogg trace the origin of this narrator type to the Greeks, whosehistor "examine[d] the past with an eye toward separating out

0̂ West, 209." Ibid.


actuality from myth."^^ Whereas the traditional oral bard had to con-fine himself to a version of his story formulated through mnemonicdevice (indeed, he could conceive his role in no other way), thehistor could present conflicting reports in his search for truth. Simi-lar to this method is what Yvor Winters calls Hawthorne's "formulaof alternative possibilities."^^ Hawthorne's editorial function inpivotal scenes in The Scarlet Letter frequently consists of summariz-ing various accounts ostensibly gleaned from witnesses. The moststriking instance of this technique is the climactic public confessionof the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, after which the members ofthe community speculate widely as to the causes for the "letter" thatappears on his breast. Here, as elsewhere in the romance, Hawthornerecommends implicitly that the reader exercise his own acumen inchoosing from among the suppositions of the crowd. The facelessPuritan community functions as a source of information from whichthe narrator, the editor, picks and chooses—only to defer final judg-ment to the reader.

The citizens of Boston function further as a chorus, whose atti-tudes alternately coincide and stand apart from those shared by thenarrator and narratee. The value matrix that establishes the bondbetween narrator and narratee is centered on sympathy and tolerance.From the beginning of The Scarlet Letter, the narrator empathizeswith Hester's plight; and the narratee, lest his identification withthe narrator after having read "The Custom-House" be incomplete, isencouraged by the callousness of the Puritan community also to sidewith Hester. The community is in fact an audience in the sensedefined earlier: they are viewers and listeners, subject to the innatelimitations of sight and hearing. Hawthorne's narrator offers thiseditorial comment on these limitations:

When an uninstructed multitude attempts to see with its eyes, it is exceed-ingly apt to be deceived. When, however, it forms its judgment, as itusually does, on the intuitions of its great and warm heart, the conclusionsthus attained are often so profound and so unerring, as to possess thecharacter of truths supernaturally revealed. (127)

The multitude is "uninstructed" in that it lacks the "supernatural"knowledge shared by the narrator and narratee. As a result, its sight

12 The Nature of Narrative (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), p. 242.18 Cited in West, 217.


(i.e., insight) is distorted. When the crowd relies exclusively on thisimpaired faculty, as in the scene when Hester's shame is made a"spectacle" on the scaffold, its obsession with guilt precludes com-passionate response. Although the members of the community aresometimes equally deceived by what they hear, their compassion isnonetheless consistently awakened by the spoken word. When Hesteris publicly shamed, she stands quietly, and the heart of the com-munity is hardened. In contrast, when Dimmesdale subsequentlyentreats Hester to name her partner in sin, his impassioned words"vibrate within all hearts, and [bring] the listeners into one accord ofsympathy" (67). At this point the public's view of Dimmesdale is ofcourse still false; they see him as a paragon of moral rectitude. It isonly later, in the crucial revelation scene, that sight and sound com-bine to enhance the people's knowledge and understanding. AsDimmesdale bares his breast, and his soul, the crowd-audience's"great heart [is] thoroughly appalled, yet overflowing with tearfulsympathy . . ." (254). They are appalled by what they see anddeeply touched by what they hear. As Dimmesdale completes hisconfession with his dying breath, the Puritan gathering responds

with a paroxysm of collective catharsis: "The multitude, silent tillthen, broke out in a strange, deep voice of awe and wonder, whichcould not as yet find utterance, save in this murmur that rolled soheavily after the departed spirit" (257). Just as the great heart of thepeople responds directly to the spoken word, so too are its deepestfeelings uttered in spontaneous harmony.

The profound effect of Dimmesdale's dying confession is certainlygenerated in part by the very fact that he dies. He is revered by hiscongregation, in spite of his admitted sin, and his untimely death inand of itself leaves them grief-stricken. Yet at the moment of deaththey no longer stand in mute despair; their voices join in a com-munal utterance of pity and fear. This spontaneous response can beaccounted for only by recognizing the dynamics of the spoken word.Had Dimmesdale died quietly, the crowd would more than likelyhave remained silent as well. There is a kind of law of inertia thatoperates in the relationship between speech and silence which states:an absence of speech from^ a person is usually met with silence fromanother, but once one speaks the other is obliged to reply. That is,verbal utterance is marked by reciprocity. A discerning examina-


tion of "auditory synthesis: word as event" is offered by Walter Ongin The Presence of the Word.^^ Father Ong notes that speech evokesreciprocal responses as very few other human activities can. In theabsence of oral confession, Dimmesdale's death would have beenquite literally a dead event. This is not mere word play, for, as Ongalso observes, "sound unites groups of living beings as nothing elsedoes."^ ' The Puritans at the scaffold are captivated by the startlingadmixture of sermon and sin in Dimmesdale's speech. Spellbound bythe spectacle, they are totally immersed in a flood of emotion only be-cause Dimmesdale speaks. The rightness of this dramatic scene isconfirmed by the fact that "sound situates man in the middle ofactuality and in simultaneity, whereas vision situates man in frontof things and in sequentiality."^^ The experience of the congregationduring Dimmesdale's confession is inclusive, and stands in boldrelief when compared with their simply tvatching Hester on thescaffold, an experience of half measure.

Except for the intensifying influence of Dimmesdale's death, theeffect of his earlier Election Day sermon is almost identical to thatproduced by his confession of guilt. It is Dimmesdale's vocal elo-quence that causes the similarity of response:

The eloquent voice, on which the souls of the listening audience had beenborne aloft, as on the swelling waves of the sea, at length came to apause. There was a momentary silence, profound as what should followthe utterance of oracles. Then ensued a murmur and half-hushed tumult;as if the auditors, released from the high spell that had transported theminto the region of another*s mind, were returning into themselves, withall their awe and wonder still heavy on them. (248)

The congregation sit in respectful silence in the church, but onceoutside "their rapture broke into speech" (248). Although all speak-ers anticipate and expect audience recognition, the inspirational in-fluence wielded by Dimmesdale is obviously utterance of a higherorder: it is oratory. He is blessed with greater powers than mostclerics, for he has received "the gift"—the Pentecostal Tongue ofFlame—"symbolizing, it would seem [says Hawthorne], not thepower of speech in foreign and unknown languages, but that of ad-

^* (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1967), p. i i i .^^ Ong, Presence, p. 122.^* Ong, Presence, p. 128.


dressing the whole human brotherhood in the heart's native lan-guage" (141-42). He is all the more unique because his burden of sinhas paradoxically enhanced his ability to empathize with his pa-rishioners, such that "his heart vibrate[s] in unison with theirs . . .and scn[ds] its throb of pain through a thousand other hearts, ingushes of sad, persuasive eloquence" (142). A positive sympathy isgenerated by the bond of sin, and Dimmesdale's affinity with his flockis compounded by a strange blend of saintly breath and wretchedflesh.

Not only are the dynamics of plot in The Scarlet Letter energizedby the power of oratorical display, the structure of the tale has beeninformed by the oral tradition as well. Hawthorne's composition ofhis finest romance was guided by entries in his notebooks andjournals—commonplace books whose collation very likely grew outof habits engendered while he was a student at Bowdoin College.The curriculum at Bowdoin in 1822, Hawthorne's sophomore year,included classes in Murray's Grammar and Blair's Rhetoric^ Thecustom of keeping commonplace books for such courses of study canbe traced to the proliferation of commonplace collections during theRenaissance, when the print revolution stimulated the urge to cata-logue the knowledge of previous, orally dominated generations. Theeducated among the New England Puritans compiled commonplacebooks on matters of theological and moral concern, and the efficacyof the practice survived as a pedagogical device in Hawthorne'stime, nourished by an oratorical, revivalist spirit. Early nineteenth-century heroes, both secular and orthodox, were often great speakers:Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun and Lyman Beecher,William Ellery Channing, Theodore Parker. The age's passion forthe spoken word required that declamation remain a part of thecollege curriculum; and though Hawthorne shied from classroom

performance at Bowdoin, he was for a time secretary of the SalemLyceum, where he maintained good standing by occasionally pre-senting talks. Temperamentally unsuited for the speaker's platform,he nonetheless benefitted as a writer from his lessons in Blair'sRhetoric.

Of particular interest as a probable source for the composition of"The Custom-House" is Lecture XXXI : "Conduct of a Discourse in

Randall Stewart, Nathaniel Hawthorne (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1948), p. 16.


All Its Parts." It has been demonstrated earlier in this discussion howHawthorne uses "The Custom-House" in order to prepare his readerfor the role of narratee. That he relied on Blair's rhetorical methodsto accomplish that task can also be illustrated. From the ancientsBlair derived two kinds of exordia for a discourse: Principium andInsinuatio. The former is a straightforward presentation of thespeaker's objective. The latter is used in the special case of a hostileaudience. Blair advises: "presuming the disposition of the Audienceto be much against the Orator, he must gradually reconcile them tohearing him."^^ Hawthorne appears to have learned this lesson well,for "The Custom-House" shows his masterful ability to, as Blair putsit, "render [the audience] benevolent."^^ Derivative oral-polemicalfeatures in "The Custom-House" associate Hawthorne with thePuritan sermon in a manner that sheds new light on his debt to hisforebears. Puritan ministers did not think of their congregations asopenly hostile, but they were aware that their flock had to be wooedaway from the vicissitudes of the workaday world before they wouldbe receptive to the Word. The ancient rhetoric of persuasion servedequally well the purposes of Puritan divine and latter-day romancer.

Because Hawthorne found compensatory value in sinfulness, hewould seem to stand, on a moral plane, at a far remove from hisPuritan ancestors. Yet the matter of sympathy is most certainly aconcern shared by Hawthorne and the Puritans. Evidence of this is tobe found in their common regard for the efficacy of the spoken word.The preeminent position of the sermon in the life of a Calvinist iswell documented, as is the fact that the clergy carefully constructedtheir sermons to appeal not just to the intellect but also to the heart.Perry Miller contends that in discussing a sermon the Puritans mostoften dwelt on the manner in which it aroused the affections, or thepassions.̂ ^ Appeals to the affections placed the heart in proper sym-pathy with the doctrinal premise of the sermon. It is about the pur-

Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (Carbondale, III.: SouthernIllinois Univ. Press, 1965), II, 159.

^̂ Blair, p. 158. The art of letter writing, taught in medieval schools and derived fromolder oratorical structures, included an element called benevolentiae captatio, or "thewinning of good will." See Walter J. Ong, "Tudor Writings on Rhetoric, Poetic, andLiterary Theory ' in Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press,

, p. 54.The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961),

p. 300.


pose of exciting the affections that some Puritans and Hawthornedisagree. The extent of this disagreement is made clear when thetheme of The Scarlet Letter is seen as "the conflict in a soul betweenthe pride which would contract it to harsh and narrow limits and theaffections which would reach out and bind it to the natural societyof its kind."^^ Hawthorne has romanticized and secularized the no-tion of affection in such way that its proper purpose is not to serveas a possible aid toward individual salvation but instead to assert one'sfellowship in the whole human community. Perhaps the best illustra-tion of Hawthorne's redefining is his description of Hester's aliena-tion from humanity:

. . . there seemed to be no longer any thing in Hester's face for Love todwell upon; nothing in Hester's form, though majestic and statue-like,that Passion would ever dream of clasping in its embraces; nothing inHester's bosom, to make it ever again the pillow of Affection. (163)

Whereas the stirring of the affections was a sermonic strategy forthe Puritan clergy, it became in Hawthorne's romance a centraltheme—needful human sympathy born of the recognition of com-mon sinfulness.

The theme of sympathy is but one among many dramatized inThe Scarlet Letter. Recent attention to Hawthorne's notebooks hasprovided a clearer understanding of how these themes were con-ceived. In the Centenary Edition of Hawthorne's American Note-books, Claude Simpson has briefly outlined Hawthorne's methodof working from notes to manuscript:

During more than a decade before he wrote The Scarlet Letter Haw-thorne repeatedly recorded notes bearing on the central relationships de-veloped in that romance and elsewhere in his work: the insidious controlof one person by another; the ironic contrast, often hypocritical, betweenman's social self and his inner anxieties. Other themes similarly treated—the failure of romantic expectations, the zeal for vengeance, the destruc-tiveness of good intentions—suggest the {X)wer of ideas, not their transla-tion into dramatic

Hawthorne's method of composition emulates that of FrancisBacon and other Renaissance writers, who augmented the work of

Carl Van Doren, The American Novel, /7Ä9-/9J9 (New York: The MacmillanCompany, 1940), p. 63.

22 Vol. VIII of Works, p. 679.


encyclopedists by compiling their own commonplace books on vari-ous topics of universal concern, called commonplaces. The codifica-tion of these topoi, or loci communes, began with the Sophists,Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian and others, and found its way to Baconvia the Middle Ages, when scribes worked doggedly to amass thewisdom of the oral past under generic headings. Like Bacon, Haw-thorne in turn collected personal bits of insight and stored them tobe later filtered through the half-lights of the romance landscape. Inthe notebook entries related to The Scarlet Letter, begun in 1838 andaccumulated over the next eleven years, he stressed ideas, not dra-matic situations.^^ The notebooks contain the germ for many a scenethat blossomed forth in the romance atmosphere, just as the ancientpoet's mnemonic storehouse served as a foundation for each newperformance. Very early in the history of narrative, oral performerssuch as Homer used commonplaces as thematic units to be strungtogether in a loose, rhapsodic approximation of the more tightlyplotted written narrative of the novel. Although The Scarlet Letteris a strongly unified work, its episodic, highly scenic structure is areminder of the cumulative drift of oral composition.

The dramatic features of The Scarlet Letter have often beennoticed, but the relation of Hawthorne's narrative stagecraft to theoral roots of America's native literary tradition has not been ac-counted for. A close reading of "The Custom-House" and the ro-mance itself reveals that Hawthorne was a writer drawn betweenAmerica's literary future and her oral past. As shown earlier, thescaffold scenes depicting first Hester's and later Dimmesdale's guiltare charged with the existential dynamics of speech. Disagreementamong critics concerning the purpose of "The Custom-House" hasstemmed from the seeming incongruity between it and the romanceproper. Once seen as an exordium designed to enlist reader coopera-tion, its complete function emerges clearly. These oral dimensionsare altogether consistent with Hawthorne's rhetorical apprenticeshipin college and confirm the judgment that The Scarlet Letter is afictional exemplar of a residually oral age.

A notebook entry that prefigures the Chillingworth-Dimmesdale relationship reads:"The influence of a peculiar mind, in close communion with another, to drive the latterto insanity" (Vol. VIII of Worlds, p. 170).

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