Hawthorne Shameconflictsand Tragedy
Hawthorne Shameconflictsand Tragedy
Hawthorne Shameconflictsand Tragedy
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underscoring at the outset that shame does not have to be toxic. When
shame can be borne, it creates tolerance, reinforces human bonds, and
allows for joie de vivre.
Shorn of the narrator’s misgivings and hesitations, which give the
book its texture, the basic plot of The Scarlet Letter is as follows.
Chillingworth, an elderly seventeenth-century English scholar, marries
Hester Prynne, a woman much his junior, and sends her to Puritan New
England. There she has an affair and finds herself pregnant with her
daughter, Pearl. Because she refuses to name the father (Dimmesdale),
she is publicly disgraced and sentenced to wear a visible sign of her
adultery (the letter “A”). When Chillingworth arrives, he finds her with
the baby. Swearing revenge, he disguises himself as a doctor in order
better to hunt down the unnamed father. Meanwhile the spectral figure
of Dimmesdale must bear the idealization of his congregation, the silence
of his station, and the burden of his secret alone, unable to reach out
either to Hester or to Pearl. There is, of course, far more to the plot
than I have summarized here. At the close of the book Dimmesdale
publicly confesses of his own accord after having given his most inspired
466
sermon, and thereby having reinforced the idealization of the members
of his congregation. Also, Dimmesdale and Hester find that their plans
to run away back to England have been foiled. In short, the most
moving and emotionally central issues in the book are symbolized
by the embroidered “A” on Hester’s gown and the half-seen, half-
comprehended “A” seared into the breast of Dimmesdale. Thus, the
question of what causes Dimmesdale’s death is left open—half-seen,
half-defined, and left to the imagination of the reader. Such deliberate
evocations of vagueness are essential in the depiction of Dimmesdale’s
pain, and essential also for an understanding of the novel.
Let me pause here to comment on my psychoanalytic approach
to a work of literature. There is much that a book like The Scarlet
Letter has to teach us, provided we know how to let it do so. At least
for me, this means subordinating the concept of analytic interpretation
(in which subject and object are distinct and there are two people) to that of
open-ended analytic investigation, which includes the use of analytic ques-
tions about the nature and functions of psychic conflict and symbolization.1
1
For these reasons, there can be no single thesis in the usual psychoanalytic sense
of an interpretation, a claim that a particular theoretical orientation is truer than
others, or a logical demonstration supporting a particular point of view. What I
am proposing here is a psychoanalytic approach to works of literature which,
SHAME CONFLICTS IN THE SCARLET LETTER
in which looking and not looking express both the longing to be recog-
nized and the terror of being seen. In “The Custom-House,” which
prefaces the novel, he comments that he is determined to “keep the
inmost Me behind its veil” ( p. 4). Is he thinking here of what is
inmost in Hester Prynne? In Dimmesdale? In his own curiosity about
the story?
Hawthorne’s narrator proves chary about plumbing the depths of
the human heart; he wonders about what will be uncovered, worries
about the effect of his intrusiveness, and questions himself about what
is really going on. This hesitancy in the narrative, these signs of uncer-
tainty, rhetorically contribute to the sense that there is a secret here
whose elucidation is both wished for and feared.3 As in Greek tragedy,
such a device conveys a sense of deep foreboding, and a dread of what
might be seen were one to look carefully.
When the narrator, a functionary at the Custom-House, perceives
the cloth with the scarlet letter, he picks it up for no good reason. It is a
cloth “much worn and faded,” a “rag of scarlet cloth [bearing the traces
of] time, and wear, and a sacrilegious moth” (Hawthorne 1850, p. 31).
469
The narrator muses that apparently it served some ornamental function.
“How it was to be worn, or what rank, honor, and dignity, in by-past
times, were signified by it, was a riddle which (so evanescent are the
fashions of the world in these particulars) I saw little hope of
solving” (p. 31).
In this way, piece by piece, and enshrouded with mystery, unfolds
the tale of Hester Prynne and her embroidered cloth. It is as though
the narrator, having some foreboding of Hester’s tragedy, is embar-
rassed to piece the story together, uncomfortable putting the clues
together, and therefore tells his tale apologetically and ashamedly.4
In what follows I will proceed from a discussion of Hester Prynne’s
shame to a discussion of Dimmesdale’s and, finally, to a concluding
section in which I return to the question of what makes shame conflicts
unbearable and tragic.
3
This device is commonly used by the chorus in Greek tragedy and was not
unknown to Freud and Hitchcock. In films like Rear Window, Hitchcock aligns him-
self with the voyeur in us all who imagines what he cannot see, and by reading signs
finds the feelings of dread growing more and more pronounced, creating suspense.
4
Such fears of piecing a story together are characteristic of shame-ridden patients,
who split, hide, and avoid rather than knit together a narrative with anything like a
hope of using it to express their “inmost Me.” (See, e.g., Kilborne 2004.)
Benjamin Kilborne
When first described, Hester is trying to use her baby to shield her-
self from the gaze of the public. “Wisely judging that one token of
her shame would but poorly serve to hide another, she took the baby
on her arm, and, with a burning blush, and yet a haughty smile, and a
glance that would not be abashed, looked around her at her townspeople
and neighbors” (pp. 52–53). Here Hawthorne observes a quality funda-
mental to shame dynamics: “one token of her shame would but poorly
serve to hide another.” Hester knew that she could not really hide
behind her daughter, since Pearl’s very existence served as a blazon
of shame at having been conceived out of wedlock. However, armed
with her “A,” Hester can feel protected, haughty, unabashed, and quite
capable of looking back sharply at those who accuse her. The scarlet
letter, “so fantastically embroidered and illuminated on her bosom” and
“greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the
colony,” had “the effect of a spell, inclosing her in a sphere by herself”
470
(pp. 53–54).
As Hawthorne notes, in the embroidered “A” Hester has represented
her shame both to herself and to others in a defiant manner, making her
much the liveliest character in the book. She is not presented as a help-
less woman on whom an unfortunate incident has brought crushing
ignominy. Quite the contrary. There is an “in your face” quality about
her scarlet letter. Like the attributes of martyred saints (e.g., the wheel
of St. Catherine, the lion of St. Jerome), Hester’s “A” and her baby
serve iconographic functions, paradoxically protecting her against pub-
lic censure, scorn, and cruelty. Rather than succumb in silence to
ignominy, Hester turns the situation around, holding out her child as
her primary object of value. And the child’s name is Pearl.
Hawthorne’s narrator feels an irresistible fascination with the
scarlet letter before we know much at all about Hester herself, who
when we meet her presents to the world first her baby and then, behind
Pearl, the scarlet letter, both tokens of her shame. Later in the novel,
in fact, Pearl is referred to as “the living hieroglyphic” (p. 207). These
two icons were “her realities—all else had vanished” (p. 59). Here
again, as throughout the novel, the tentative narrator, hardly daring
to look, and unable to see adequately even when he does, is contrasted
implicitly with Hester’s erstwhile husband, Chillingworth, the very
prototype of the ogler, the prying busybody who tirelessly prods Hester.
SHAME CONFLICTS IN THE SCARLET LETTER
understanding how void he is, and can only recoil in horror before “the
place of his own image in a glass.”
In contrast to Chillingworth’s emptiness and inability to respond
to his wife’s suffering, Hester seems full of defiance, of fire, of wild-
ness, and of independence of mind, all of which she uses her shame
to express. Despite her pain (or perhaps because of it), she is not at
the mercy of the outside world, particularly not the heckling, prying,
sadistic, and eviscerated busybody Chillingworth. Hester can use the
scarlet letter as a mirror to ward of f the evil gazes of those around
her, to turn them back on those who wish her harm, and to enclose
herself protectively. Paradoxically, the scarlet letter defines a protective
boundary between her and the world. And there is enough correspon-
dence between who she is and her attributes that something of her
shame, rage, and injury can come out. From behind her scarlet letter she
can look out bravely at the world. Her cipher is, as it were, usable in
mathematical calculations. Her shame is there for all to read. Not so
with Dimmesdale.
472
DIMMESDALE’S SHAME
thus much of truth would save me! But now all is falsehood!—all
emptiness!—all death!” (p. 192). When the truth of who one is cannot
be expressed or represented to others and exists in the dark within one-
self, out of reach and unknowable, it can silently but surely suffocate
the sense of self.
Dimmesdale would seem to condemn himself for having to hide.
He is hiding not only from external observers (e.g., Chillingworth);
more important, he is hiding from what he imagines such external
observers want to see. He is hiding from himself, since he has betrayed
his ideal of himself, represented externally by his profession as clergy-
man and by the respect he is held in by his congregation. Dimmesdale
implicitly condemns himself: for being false to himself and others; for
being both an absent lover and an absent father; and for being unable
to preserve a connection with anyone at all. By contrast, Hester, who
does not have these crippling superego conflicts, can use her shame to
express and protect who she is, and can also put forward for all to see the
importance of her connection to Pearl. She can take pride in her ability
to love and nurture her child, and can derive strength from her honesty
474
and confidence from her ability to protect Pearl—all qualities one would
expect in a clergyman, but which Dimmesdale lacks.
This theme of toxic shame and deceit together threatening psychic
viability comes up over and over in work with patients. Dimmesdale
feels falsehood, emptiness, and death because his selfhood is pro-
foundly threatened and he is unable to make connections with anyone.
A patient of mine once explained a similar conflict: “It’s a matter of
identity. You must identify with the person you’re connecting with. You
have to see something in you that you see in them. Every relationship
has some form of identification. I want to see similarity. What is so
painful for me is that I rarely find it. You could say that you are with-
out an identity when you can’t recognize in others what you can’t see
in yourself. Without an identity you can’t make a connection” (Kilborne
2002, p. 32).
Such patients feel ashamed that they have no choice but to be deceit-
ful, to be double, lest they reveal their emptiness and unacceptability
to the world.5 At the same time, they assume that other people will judge
them harshly and cut them off should what they attempt desperately
5
For an exploration of the dynamics of deceit and shame and a discussion of the
psychodynamics of spies and double agents, see Kilborne (2004).
SHAME CONFLICTS IN THE SCARLET LETTER
Hawthorne writes that Dimmesdale was subject to “more than the type
of what has seared his inmost heart.” How does shame “sear the heart”?
And what does Hawthorne suggest are the causes of Dimmesdale’s
death? We return here to the question of what “deeper” and “more
toxic” mean when applied to Dimmesdale’s shame.
What are fears of shame made of? And how do such fears lead
to repression, which in turn drives shame deeper and contributes to
making it more toxic? In the context of anxiety, and of psychoanalytic
theories of anxiety, shame can serve as a signal, calling up unconscious
fantasies of failure, abandonment, and total extrusion from the social
order (see Lansky 1997, p. 334). Such fears of ostracism can join forces
diabolically with superego evaluations, such that the exclusion one
SHAME CONFLICTS IN THE SCARLET LETTER
8
Psychoanalysts have often followed Freud’s lead in prioritizing guilt over
shame. As I have attempted to explain elsewhere (Kilborne 2002, 2004), Freud
tended to avoid shame conflicts, sometimes hiding them behind the concept of guilt.
We know that he took his father’s comment “this boy will come to nothing” seri-
ously, and, having felt the sting of its contempt, resolved to prove his father wrong.
In The Interpretation of Dreams, disguises and the extent to which they are
defensive have been a subject of considerable interest for generations. Strikingly,
dreams Freud identifies as his own—or dreams which others (e.g., Anzieu,
Grinstein) have attributed to him—can be seen to have been instigated by shame
reactions and anxieties about lethal looks. Typically, Freud hides his “inmost
me” with shame defenses, many of his dreams being driven by humiliating experi-
ences, which his dreams attempt to defend against by reversal. Consider, for
example, Freud’s “Non vixit’ dream (1900), in which he gives “P. a piercing
look,” in response to which P. “turned pale; his form grew indistinct and his eyes
a sickly blue—and finally he melted away” (p. 421). A second telling dream of
Freud’s is the one in which Old Brücke dissects Freud’s pelvis, yet Freud feels
nothing at all (pp. 452– 453). In these two examples of Freud’s dreams we can
see defenses against shame at work. In the “Non vixit” dream, positions in reality
are reversed (Freud’s humiliation before P. becomes P. who melts away in the
dream); in the dream of Old Brücke, feelings of shame are significantly evacuated
and the dreamer feels “nothing.”
9
This conflict is picked up movingly by Ellison (1952) and Pirandello (1904,
1926, 1952).
SHAME CONFLICTS IN THE SCARLET LETTER
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