Nathaniel Hawthornes Use of Nature in Scarlet Letter - Research Paper Example

? Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Use of Nature in Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne is one of the greatest of American His works are part of Romantic literature which gave “emphasis to love of nature, a respect for primitive and a valuing of the common natural man” (Odessa.edu, n.d.). In this paper, an attempt is made to show how Nathaniel Hawthorne in his novel Scarlet Letter used the elements of nature as a means to convey his message which focuses on romantic love as humanity’s birthright above social conventions and laws. At the same time, this essay shall try to help readers share the author’s attachment to what is natural in life beyond the confines of civilized modern living. Even in ancient days, thinkers like Plato saw in nature or the material world as the manifestation of universal truth. At the same time, they thought that the object of sensuous experience is good, true and beautiful since it mirrors the pure forms of the good, true and beautiful behind them (Scott, 1962). Hawthorne adopts this same principle in his works, giving his readers an understanding of universal truths through a sense experience of the elements of nature which we shall examine in detail. The rosebush as a symbolic theme In the literary novel, the theme is the controlling idea for everything —setting, character, action, conflict, and resolution-- to dramatize the total meaning of the story (Knickerbocker et al, 2000). It is usually revealed gradually or by degrees, and as the story unfolds the theme is expected to be defined more and more sharply. As a romanticist, Hawthorne is expected to give a thoughtful interpretation of life, perhaps even a world view of human existence through the use of a theme. In the opening chapter, Hawthorne therefore brings his readers to the scene of a prison house where a throng of people curiously gathered. These people wore garments, hoods and hats which show them to be 17th century early settlers of America which was still then a virgin country. Desiring to escape the laxity of English aristocracy, these settlers were motivated to set up their own church-state in the New World along strict and lofty Puritan religious ideals (Waggenknecht, E., 1965). Immediately, Hawthorne establishes a theme found in “a grass plot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, apple peru and such unsightly vegetation.” In this ugly plot, he saw on the side of the prison door a wild rosebush, so pleasant to the sight and offering to the condemned criminal soon to be paraded to the crowd outside the prison, a “token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.” Like a dramatist plucking the rosebush, Hawthorne points to this natural object to be his symbolic theme for ‘some sweet moral blossom found along the track of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.’ Nature’s elements as symbols The choice of basic symbols as a theme in a novel can vary. It can be a character, a man-made object, or a natural thing. For Hawthorne, the rosebush is a compound symbol, as it stands as a prototype of other elements in nature, which Hawthorne shall use to represent universal truths in his story. And in the second chapter, the scene moves to the market place where a bigger crowd awaited the criminal. It was a “summer morning” with the “bright morning sun” shining on the crowd from whom was heard harsh words about the wrongdoer Hester Prynne, and her deserving a heavier punishment, even the gallows, as someone commented. Then in contrast with the bright sunshine, Hawthorne presents the strong contrast of the “black shadow” of the beadle, personifying the “dismal severity of the Puritan code.” As it progresses, the novel will exploit more opposing natural images, such as the “too vivid light of day” and the “gray twilight of the dungeon” where Hester the accused mother and her child were imprisoned. And Hester the “young woman of perfect elegance. . . abundant hair so glossy of the sunshine with a gleam” will walk out of the prison house, carrying her newly born baby, and the embroidered Scarlet Letter A on her bosom. This sight of Hester, the Scarlet Letter on her dress, and her baby would catch the crowd’s attention with the “effect of a spell.” Climbing prominently on the ugly scaffold, Hawthorne’s beautiful heroin will take center stage as the main actor for dramatic events ahead. The interview and out into the sunshine Back in her cell, Hester receives a physician as an unwanted visitor. For Hester and her child. It would be an ominous visit, as the man would to Hester be the “Black Man” that haunts the forest round about.” He was actually Hester’s lost husband who was imprisoned by savage Indians for seven years in the “vast and dismal forest” but who was freed to come to “the settlement of Christian men” only to find his wife “fallen in a pit” for her adultery. To his long lost husband Roger Chillingworth, the name he preferred to be called, Hester would not reveal her paramour. But Roger pledged to discover and seek vengeance from the man who caused him dishonor. Soon released from prison, Hester harbors fear of his vengeful husband, who kept his identity hidden to the settlers. At the same time, she suffered the ignominy of those who looked at her and the Scarlet Letter on her breast, “the figure, the reality of sin.” In this condition, Hester felt drawn away from the Puritan community, feeling more at home with the “dark, inscrutable forest” ready to accept the assumed “wildness of her nature.” Hawthorne’s Romanticist’s bias against urban society and his affinity with pristine nature are shown in his portrayal of Hester’s situation. Threat of losing Pearl and Reverend Dimmesdale Using metaphors drawn from nature, Hawthorne pictured the growing child Pearl as “a lovely immortal flower” with “intelligence that threw its quivering sunshine” over her tiny features. She is Hester’s wild rosebush, beautiful but wild in her ways. Without playmates, Pearl kept friends and enemies in her inner mind. Unlikely objects like “a stick, a bunch of rags, a flower” became her playthings, even as the Puritan elders were to her like “the pine trees, aged, black and solemn, and their children “the ugliest weeds of the garden.” Attentive to Christian upbringing of children in the settlement, authorities attempted to take custody of Pearl away from her mother. In the scene of the visit of mother and child to Governor Bellingham’s mansion, Hawthorne took time to depict the ornate home and garden of the highest official of the town. Amidst the freshness of exteriors of the Governor’s large wooden house and “cheerfulness gleaming forth from the sunny windows,” Hawthorne did not fail to compare the mansion to elder towns with “moss grown and crumbling to decay.” Even the garden which was fair-looking with its “shaven grass” and “ornamental gardening” was depicted, except for some rosebushes and fruit trees, as a “rude and immature attempt at shrubbery.” Again, it may be noted that for romantics such as Hawthorne, artificial gardening and landscaping do not match the beauty and grandeur of nature. The Governor sounded out to Hester the need to take her child for training under religious tutelage. Hester hysterically objected to this suggestion, such that Governor Bellingham had to resort to asking the opinion of one of his house visitors, namely Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale. This occasioned Hester’s making to plea to the young minister, invoking her right to be defended by him as he was once assigned to her as her spiritual guardian. Rev. Dimmesdale did not fail Hester, as he pointed at the good which can be achieved if her own mother, sinful as she was said to be, takes care of her child. If she is able to bring the child to heaven, he noted, the daughter may bring her mother to the same salutary state. The young minister also made an added remark alluding to the unknown male parent of Pearl, that “herein is the sinful mother happier than the sinful father.” The leech and the minister on the scaffold In time, it came to Hester’s attention that Roger Chillingworth had become the physician of Rev. Dimmesdale, the only clergyman who had protected her in her trial and her ordeals. By now, Master Dimmesdale had become a very sick man, tormented by an unknown inner ailment that seriously affected him physically. Hawthorne describes the clergyman as a man of great virtue who would have climbed “to the highest mountain peaks of faith and sanctity” had he not been burdened by a “black secret of his soul.” In a vivid night scene in which Rev. Dimmesdale climbed the scaffold to attempt to make a public outcry of his secret sin, he chanced upon Hester and Pearl who came from a vigil of the dying governor of the town. Pearl and her child came to the clergyman’s arms. With the secret broken that Rev. Dimmesdale was the father of Pearl, the three together formed “an electric chain” In this most intimate scene at the scaffold, Hawthorne took time to depict a strange natural phenomenon, a meteor appearing over the muffled sky, “powerful its radiance that it thoroughly illuminated the dense medium of cloud betwixt the sky and earth.” Again Hawthorne has devised a symbol out of a natural element. This meteoric appearance was “a revelation from a supernatural source,” a warning and a scroll by which Providence writes “people’s doom.” In their intent to effect change through their literary form, literary men and women who belong to the romantic movement are inclined to use natural phenomena as a foreboding sign of things to come. Planned elopement and tragic end. Greatly intent on saving Rev. Dimmesdale from the vengeful design of his physician Roger Chillingworth, Hester met with the clergyman in the “intense seclusion of the forest” as he returned from a visit to Indian converts. Together they devised a plan to end their ordeal by escaping back to England. The clergyman approved the plan and set a date after the New England holiday when he could fittingly announce retirement as the day’s preacher. The holiday was a day of merriment, marked however by a “forgotten art of gaiety” of the “blackest shade of Puritanism.” Hester and Pearl watched the proceedings including the grand procession of magistrates to the church to listen to the sermon to be delivered by Rev. Dimmesdale. The sermon displayed clergyman’s eminent gift of mind and soul, tinged however by his announced retirement due to severe health conditions and imminent death. As the parade trooped out of the church to proceed to the town hall for the festive banquet, the unexpected happened. While walking in procession, Rev. Dimmesdale’s bodily conditioned worsened such that he had to be assisted. Reaching the scaffold where Hester and Pearl stood, the Reverend called for the three of them to ascend the scaffold. There atop the stage, Rev. Dimmesdale made his revelation to the whole people, also tearing his ministerial cloth to reveal what was later said to be a Scarlet Letter scarred on his skin. It was not a sad ending after all, as the reverend minister said that it was a “death of triumphant ignominy” promising an everlasting and pure reunion in the afterlife. Conclusion Among Romanticist, whether in literature, painting, sculpture or other forms of art, nature is presented as a controlling element. In literature, the elements of nature are also portrayed by way of symbolism and other figurative language such as similes, metaphors and personification to stir the imagination, as “a supreme faculty above reason,” and “for the ultimate shaping of the creative process equivalent to the creative process of nature” (academic.edu. n.d.). And in Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne uses the elements of nature as the instrument for the message that takes the readers to the awareness that nature can be modern man’s refuge from the artificial trappings of the industrial, mechanized and scientific world. The tragic tale concludes with more specific moral lessons from the author who points out that in death while in the arms of a partner in crime, there is the message that life on earth can be fleeting, that Divine Mercy can nonetheless grant forgiveness above whatever man can merit on his own, that Reverend Dimmesdale story tells how a man held on to his external character until proven “clear as midday sunshine on the scarlet letter,” that he was false and a “sin-stained creature of the dust.” As Romantics call for change, the Scarlet Letter has called for change against the Puritanical Society from which Hawthorne drew his own family ascendancy. From Hawthorne’s works including the Scarlet Letter, the reader can discover layers of meaning to show that more than an artist he was a critic of life and its conflicting forces, its dilemmas and uncertainties. The Scarlet Letter is said to be Hawthorne’s greatest book. Hester can easily be seen as a symbol of emancipation, not only along feminism but along the need of humanity to be freed from the shackles of religious bias, bigotry and separation. The novel’s ending pictured Hester as a comforter of other women who came to her for comfort and counsel in their suffering and sorrow. In an old and sunken cemetery, there was also found a shared tombstone with the similar sign of a scarlet letter. The Novel should then serve to give pleasure to the reader not only through its adept writing style, but also through the brilliance of the elements of nature used by the author to portray the truth and beauty behind man’s affinity with nature to which he belongs. References Academic. Edu. (n.d.) Romanticism. Web. 10 Nov. 2012. Cliffs Notes (n.d.). The Scarlet Letter. Web. 9 Nov. 2012 Knickerbocker, K.L., et al. (2000). Interpreting Literature. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Print Odessa.edu (n.d.). Characteristics of Romantic Literature. Web. 8 Nov. 2012. Wagenknecht, Edward (1965) Introduction to the Harper & Row Edition of the Scarlet Letter. Print. Read More