Why does Hawthorne name Hester Prynne Hester? Hawthorne himself, as is well known, changed his last name, Hathorne, to distance himself from those Puritan ancestors whose achievements and excesses haunted his fiction. The Scarlet Letter recounts Roger Prynne's reinvention of himself through an act of naming: when he finds his wife Hester disgraced in the new world, he adopts the name Chillingworth. Hester names Pearl in reference to the Gospel of Matthew: "But she named the child 'Pearl,' as being of great value, - bought with all she had, - her mother's only treasure!" (1:89). (1) The novel's central symbol, on the other hand, the scarlet letter A, resists the kind of hermeneutical rigidity that the naming implies. As an initial letter, or simply initial, A notoriously alludes to all kinds of names without claiming any of them. As a great orchestrator of meanings, Hawthorne is aware that names are full, if not too many, of meanings, and by no means can he be said to arrive at his characters' names casually. It is therefore surprising that Hawthorne's critics did not carefully examine the question of Hester's name. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why violent video games should not be banned"? Get an original essay The multiplicity of biblical intertexts may reflect Hawthorne's desire to write a history of New World Puritanism that would recognize and, moreover, would incorporate the extreme textualization of this society. Sacvan Bercovitch notes that Hester Prynne “draws on the tradition of the biblical Esther – a homiletic example of sorrow, duty and love, and a figure of the Virgin Mary... But above all, the “sermon” of Hawthorne traces the education of an American Esther. " Bercovitch does not draw any other parallels between the Book of Esther and The Scarlet Letter. Kristin Herzog and Luther S. Luedtke mention the coincidence of names in reference to Hester's magisterial appearance. (4) To my knowledge, there are no other references to the Book of Esther in the literature on Hawthorne. The absence of any serious critical inquiry into the relationship between The Scarlet Letter and the Book of Esther, despite the rather broad allusion to the name. 'Hester, remains puzzling Investigators may have been baffled by Hawthorne's revolutionary approach to the Book of Esther, by his delight in transforming the traditional story in a completely untraditional way. "Hawthorne was an avid reader of the Bible," said Hawthorne's editor, James T. Fields, recorded in his memoirs, "and when sometimes, in my ignorant way, I questioned the use of it. a word, he almost always referred me to the Bible as its authority. » (8) Recent criticism has tended to neglect Hawthorne's imagination. involvement in biblical literature (in comparison, say, with that of Melville), but did not do so entirely. For example, Sacvan Bercovitch argues in an essay on "Endicott and the Red Cross" that Hawthorne's familiarity with the traditions of biblical exegesis is "more subtle and extensive than his critics have recognized", and Frederick Newberry in an essay on “The Minister's Black Veil” asserts that “Hawthorne's sophisticated understanding of theological and historical context is unquestionable. » (9) Even without these expert opinions, Hawthorne's extensive reading of Puritan literature and his understanding of the Puritans would necessarily involve a sophisticated understanding of Scripture and divinity. .Relying on the Book of Esther, asking (even discreetly) to be read through the framework and the main lines (even blurred) of the Book of Esther, The LetterScarlet positions itself as a kind of updated writing that must be considered in the context of the broader trend described by Buell in his antebellum writings. Yet if The Scarlet Letter has quasi-scriptural pretensions, they are undermined by the scarlet letter itself, the letter that Hester is forced to carry. As a hermeneutically destabilized text, Hester's A alludes to the interpretive instability of any text. Hawthorne appears to question his own appeal to the authority of Scripture, to the foundational text of the Book of Esther, by making the "A" a symbol of the inability of authority to control interpretation. These connections are extensive and elusive, both apparent and veiled. (12) Not only are there many threads connecting Esther and Hester (a connection confirmed and authorized by Hester's name), but Arthur Dimmesdale finds a counterpart in Mordechai (a spiritual leader of the Jews whose secret and ambiguous relationship with Esther is never resolved). ), just like Roger Chillingworth in Haman (who ruins himself during an extravagant revenge against Mordechai). Major parallels include a central plot episode that the two texts share, analogies between the main characters, and thematic congruences. Visit to the magistrate. The turning point for Queen Esther comes when she risks death to appear at the inner court of King Ahasuerus. Hester's courageous visit to Governor Bellingham's mansion to plead to be allowed to keep Pearl - she felt that she "possessed unassailable rights against the world and was ready to defend them to the death" (1: 116) - corresponds to the courageous visit of its namesake. . The two heroines have until now obeyed, at least in appearance, the discipline of the regimes under which they live. In these scenes, they abandon their passivity. Esther receives clemency from the king, who promises to grant any request she makes; Hester, Esther's namesake, appealing to Bellingham as a king (and distinguishing herself with the scarlet letter as if she were "a great lady of the country"), also has her request granted. Bellingham's decree is that she will be allowed to keep Pearl. There are broader analogies between Esther and Hester than their dramatic scenes before the patriarchs of their respective societies. “It was my first wrong,” Chillingworth tells Hester, “when I betrayed thy budding youth into a false and unnatural relation to my decadence” (1:74). Esther was also brought into “a false and unnatural relationship” with the much older Ahasuerus; she is first introduced into his harem and then becomes his wife. “I felt no love and feigned none” (1:74), Hester tells Chillingworth; Esther feels no love and pretends none for Ahasuerus. To the extent that Hester represents Hawthorne's version of Esther, Hawthorne seems to imagine an Esther isolated and yet internally strengthened by her connection with a distant, older man. The “rich and voluptuous oriental characteristic” (1:83) that Hester has in her nature can thus develop naturally from the textual matrix from which it partly emerges. Esther is Mordechai's cousin, but she is an orphan and is raised by Mordechai. in his house. Rabbinic interpreters take up a pun on the Hebrew word "l'beit" (suggesting that Mordecai brings Esther to live in his house, to be his wife), and argue that Esther and Mordecai are married at the time Esther is part. from the harem of Ahasuerus. In the Septuagint version of the story, Esther and Mordecai – God's passionate woman and shy man – not only have a secret sexual relationship, but are also bonded to each other. “And he [Mordecai] had an adopted child, a daughterof Aminadab, his father's brother, and his name was Esther; and when her parents were dead, he raised her to be his wife; and the damsel was beautiful” (Esther 2:7). To the extent that Dimmesdale represents Hawthorne's version of Mordechai, Hawthorne seems to imagine Mordechai as a weak character who watches helplessly as the woman in his care is forced to endure a long ordeal of shame, loneliness, and isolation. Haman and Chillingworth are less than fully developed characters who come to make "the very principle of [their] lives consist in the systematic pursuit and exercise of vengeance" (1:260) - Haman's revenge against Mordechai, that of Chillingworth against Dimmesdale. In an 1847 diary, Hawthorne noted an idea of ​​"a story about the effects of revenge in demonizing the one who indulges in it" (8:278); the demonizing effects of Haman's vengeance may have struck him in this regard. (Another journal entry by Hawthorne seems to hope for a disguised representation of biblical figures: "The famous personages of history - to imagine their spirits now existing on earth, in the guise of various public or private personages" [8:235 ] ) The mechanisms of revenge, however, collapse. Haman's pursuit of Mordecai leads to his death on the gallows he had built for his enemy, and to Mordecai's accession to power; Chillingworth's pursuit of Dimmesdale leads to his public loss on the scaffold of the pillory, and to Dimmesdale's death in "triumphant ignominy before the people" (1:257). Revenge in both texts ironically exalts its object while degrading its agent; the opposite of what the avenger seeks occurs. When Haman died, his possessions were given to Esther; on Chillingworth's Pearl is named "the richest heiress of her time, in the New World" (1:261). Both Queen Esther and Hester Prynne must keep, and must ultimately reveal, a secret. Esther hides her relationship with Mordechai, Hester her relationship with Dimmesdale. “Esther had not spoken of her people or of her family, for Mordecai had commanded her not to speak” (Esther 2:10); The fact that Hester keeps Dimmesdale's secret is of course essential to The Scarlet Letter. If Esther or her namesake Hester revealed her secret, the revenge plan plotted against (respectively) Mordechai and Dimmesdale would be undone and the third malevolent character (Haman and Chillingworth) rendered harmless. Haman would not be able to take revenge on a relative of the queen and the queen's people; Chillingworth would not be able to take revenge on Dimmesdale if his relationship with Hester became known. The turning point in both texts could therefore be the heroine's revelation of her secret identity. Both Esther and Hester have religious beliefs that are unacceptable to the societies in which they find themselves. Esther must hide her Judaism from Ahasuerus and his ministers (The Book of Esther takes place during the Babylonian exile), Hester her antinomian leanings from Bellingham and his ministers (The Scarlet Letter takes place during the exile of the Puritans in America ). Hester's antinomianism associates her with Ann Hutchinson, in whose footsteps Hawthorne places her, as well as powerful Quaker dissidents like Mary Dyer. (13) If Hester is related to the passionate biblical heroine, Queen Esther, the fact seems perfectly consistent with her religious heterodoxy and places her in a tradition of dissenting women that far predates Mary Dyer and Ann Hutchinson. The Scarlet Letter's implication in ideas of dissent and tolerance, individual and communal, perhaps owes some of its power to the Book of Esther's depiction of the status of the Jews in Babylon and Esther's religious dilemma at the court of Ahasuerus. Esther is the only onebook of the Hebrew Bible not to include the word God; The scarlet letter also has a particular verbal gap at its center (the absence of the word "adultery", which the letter A clearly represents). The gaps can be seen as contributing to a literature of secrecy and concealment, of coded signs, veiled clues and enigmatic meanings. Although the correspondences between the Book of Esther and The Scarlet Letter are quite striking, they raise further questions about how the deep analogy with the Book of Esther came to be in The Scarlet Letter, and what may be its implications for Hawthorne's text. is the meaning of Hester's A? It is a symbol, a character, a letter belonging to one of the many possible sets of symbol systems; it remains unfounded and resists the canonization of an interpretation given by a given authority. The sacred awe invested in the letter by Puritan orthodoxy is undermined; The process begins with Hester's own embroidery of the letter, leading one of the spectators to ask angrily: "What is this, laughing in the faces of our pious magistrates?" (1:54). Even in the story told in The Scarlet Letter, the scripture is unable to retain its original meaning. Dimmesdale is repeatedly presented as a Hebraist: his library contains, among other religious volumes, “the knowledge of the rabbis” (1:126); when he returns from the forest to his office, his gaze falls on “the Bible, in its rich old Hebrew, with Moses and the prophets speaking to it, and the voice of God through everything!” (1:223). In the same scene, Hawthorne again shows Dimmesdale standing "with one hand on the Hebrew Scriptures" (1:223). And yet Mistress Hibbins describes Dimmesdale as a dangerously subversive biblical exegete: Who, now, who saw him pass in the procession, would think how little time has passed since he left his office, - chewing a text of Hebrew writing in his mouth, I guarantee it, - to get some fresh air in the forest! (1:241) Dimmesdale's purpose in going to the forest is to visit the Apostle Eliot - himself a translator of the Bible. Eliot's Indian Bible (1663) is the subject of a chapter in Hawthorne's first children's book, Grandfather's Chair (1841). The effect of The Scarlet Letter, seen through the prism of the Book of Esther, is – in accordance with the “literary writing” of the time – to reanimate and reconstruct one of the books of the Bible. Hawthorne's book about Hester can be seen in a midrashic sense as a new way for the Bible to matter in antebellum America. Hawthorne's story "The Adamant Man" (1837) is about a biblical hermeneutic so rigid and unsympathetic that it turns the story's Puritan protagonist into stone, and it seems these are the narrow confines of doctrinal interpretation, rather than the Bible itself, which bear the brunt of Hawthorne's satirical anger. To appreciate more precisely the close relationship between the sacred text that Hawthorne seems to reinterpret and the scarlet text that Hester is made to wear (and which she reinterprets through her embroidery), it becomes necessary, ultimately, to consider Pearl - the incarnation living character of The Scarlet Letter and the only main character in The Scarlet Letter for whom I have not yet suggested an equivalent in the Book of Esther. “Does it have a principle of being discoverable?” (1:134) Chillingworth asks Pearl; and all the characters in The Scarlet Letter, including Hester, seem to constantly wonder what Pearl is, where Pearl comes from. The mystery of his parentage is, in a sense, the mystery of The Scarlet Letter. The pearl is sometimes a text, a sign - a “living hieroglyph” (1: 207), “?