Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
Englisches Seminar
HS American Classics of the 19th Century
Wintersemester 05/06

Light at Play
In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter

by

Michael Helten

April 2006

Contents

0. Contents 0

1. Introduction 1

2. Hawthorne and the Visual Arts 1
2.1 Portraiture 1
2.2 The Daguerreotype 2
2.3 The Pieta 3

3. Color or the Lack thereof 4

4. Light at Play 5
4.1 The Moonlit Parlor 5
4.2 The Bright Morning Sun 6
4.3 The revealing midday sun 7
4.4 Utter Darkness 8
4.5 The Valley of Darkness 8
4.6 Opposites Attract 8
4.7 The Glow 9
4.8 No Sun for Hester 10
4.9 The Flood of Freedom 10
4.10 Love Shines Through 11
4.11 Artificial Light 11
4.12 The Meteor 12

5. Conclusion 13

Works Cited 14

1. Introduction

When he was engaged to marry Sophia Amelia Peabody, a painter who copied the works of famed contemporaries with “widespread praise”, Nathaniel Hawthorne was awaiting two pictures she had produced “expressly for him.” (both GOLLIN 2001: 114)¹ In a letter he assured her:

I never owned a picture in my life; yet pictures have always been among the earthly possessions (and they are spiritual possessions too) which I most coveted. (…) I have often felt as if I could be a painter, only I am sure I could never handle a brush;– now my Dove will show me the images of my inward eye, beautiful and etherealized by her own spirit. (GOLLIN 2001: 115)

This essay will first try to outline whether these lines are just flattery or in how far the visual arts really played an important role in Hawthorne’s life, and since Hawthorne was of course quite able himself to lay out before the world the images of his inward eye with great success, it will then try to show what visual techniques Hawthorne incorporated in his work, particularly in his classic The Scarlet Letter. It will be seen that, rather than creating a colorful tableau, as Hawthorne was also capable of doing in other tales (GOLLIN 1991: 53)², he creates an atmosphere in The Scarlet Letter in which “the color pattern (…) is essentially a contrast of red against black” (MATTHIESSEN 1945: 265)³, while the truly dominant technique Hawthorne puts to use is chiaroscuro, the application of light and shade.

2. Hawthorne and the Visual Arts

2.1 Portraiture

“Portraits were part of Hawthorne’s environment from his childhood on. Miniatures of his father and his father’s father were among his family’s prized possessions, and ancestral portraits were on prominent display in many of the houses he visited.” (GOLLIN 2001: 112f.) DOLIS (1984: 363)⁴ quotes an entry from Hawthorne’s American Notebooks about portraits, where the latter writes: “The pursuit has always interested my imagination more than any other; and I remember, before having my first portrait taken, there was a great bewitchery in the idea, as if it were a magic process.” LEVIN (1970: 38)⁵ goes so far in his interpretation of Hawthorne’s notebooks that he claims that they “attest his belief in pictorial art as a form of magic more potent than poetry.” It is not surprising, therefore, that The House of the Seven Gables, another one of Hawthorne’s masterpieces, “centers on truths that portraits can convey.” (GOLLIN 2001: 116) WILLIAMS (1997: 5)⁶ draws our attention to the “very etymology of the word portrait,” which stems from the Latin word protrahere, meaning to draw forth, to reveal, to extend. With this thought in mind, the entire plot of The Scarlet Letter can be seen as one giant portrait, since it is the story of the gradual revelation of a sin. This power of revelation was what impressed Hawthorne most about portrait painting: “he admired the painter whose eye searched beneath surfaces, who painted ‘not merely a man’s features, but his mind and heart.’” (MATTHIESSEN 1945: 267) So the numerous portraits and allusions to portraits in The Scarlet Letter are accounted for: the images that come to Hester’s mind on the scaffold are called her “memory’s picture gallery,” (44) Reverend John Wilson is described as looking like “one of those darkly engraved portraits which we see prefixed to old volumes of sermons,” (49) and the row of portraits in Governor Bellingham’s house is “characterized by the sternness and severity which old portraits so invariably put on; as if they were the ghosts, rather than the pictures, of departed worthies.” (79)

2.2 The Daguerreotype

When Hawthorne was born in 1804, portraits were as accurate a representation of a face as possible. During his lifetime, however, photography was invented. While the first techniques did not have a great impact on the public, since they were not easily accessible for a wide audience, “the advent of the daguerreotype in 1839 marked a fundamental shift in the production and popularity of images, especially portraits.” (WILLIAMS 1997: 1) Citing IVINS, WILLIAMS goes on to say that “[t]he shift was so profound that (…) ‘the histories of art, of science, and of thought, can be quite properly and cogently divided into their pre- and postphotographic periods.’” (WILLIAMS 1997: 1) And since “[a]ll the arts of a given period spring in a sense from the same cultural milieu,” (MATTHIESSEN 1945: 266, italics in the original) Hawthorne was influenced and fascinated by the daguerreotype. WILLIAMS (1997: xi) adds that “these portraits provide a lens through which to view not only the historical reception of photography but also the construction of authorship in mid nineteenth-century America.” 

[....]

1 Gollin, Rita. 2001. “Hawthorne and the Visual Arts.” A Historical Guide to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ed. Larry Reynolds. Oxford: OUP.

2 Gollin, Rita. 1991. Prophetic Pictures: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Knowledge and Uses of the Visual Arts. Westport: Greenwood.

3 Matthiessen, F.O. 1945. “Review: Hawthorne, the Artist: Fine-Art Devices in Fiction.” The New England Quarterly 18.2: 265-268.

4 Dolis, John. 1984. “Hawthorne’s Metonymic Gaze: Image and Object.” American Literature 56. 3: 362-378.

5 Levin, Harry. 1970. The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville. New York: Knopf.

6 Williams, Susan. 1997. Confounding Images. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.