The Wages of Sin

Abstract

Any theory of Hawthorne must meet, on the battleground of The Scarlet Letter, his most resolute ghost; for with the exception of a small knot of tales this book offers us the purest example of his art. This is surely the best that he could do; if one cannot recognize it Hawthorne has nothing else to offer. But it is a curious book, existing at various levels, and with interesting limitations. In the subtle intricacy of its construction it is a virtuoso’s book, showing up Hawthorne’s neoclassic bent more strongly than any other of his works;¹ it is, as has often been remarked, an extremely narrow book in its focus, a study in the operations and influences of certain passions in somewhat the same genre, let us say, as Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, though using different techniques; from a cultural angle of vision it is a dramatic presentation of certain ambiguities at the heart of the Puritan system; it is an image, probably Hawthorne’s definitive one, of the solitary, the spiritual exile; and in it there is an employment of symbolism which, at least more so than in Hawthorne’s other important writings, is generally successful.