《红字》中的圣经典故与象征意义(3)
Hester doesn’t flee. She chooses to live in a thatched cottage “on the outskirts of the town, not in close vicinity to any other habitation” under the permission of the local magistrates (81; ch. 5). And the magistrate even keeps on a close and inquisitive watch over her although she isn’t their prisoner any longer. She is completely isolated from the whole society. In her all intercourse with the society however there is nothing that makes her feel as if she belongs to it. Everything she encounters implies that she is banished.
Hester is all independent woman with strong will. Her revolt against the society and the doctrine of Puritanism is actually the quest for her self-value and position in a self-respected, paternity society. But in the eyes of most of the Puritans, her revolt is not only breaking the marriage with Chillingworth but also breaking the covenant with God that they try to establish. Like Rappaccini’s garden life in the new Boston is just like Eden of the present world.
Just like the sin of Eve which leads her ability to tell the good from the evil, Hester’s sin results in her knowledge of human nature, social organization and even some moral questions. Although she is faced with isolation and anguish at the very moment she is revealed for her sin, shamed and alienated from the rest of the community, Hester grows intellectual and becomes contemplative. By living in tribulation on her own, she speculates on many things about human beings, the society the social organization and even morality. Later she feels that a new sense with which she is endowed by the scarlet letter gives her “a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts” (115; ch. 5). Carl Van Scoren has said that “she stands erect and thinks” (69). “She criticized all with hardly more reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the judicial robe, the pillory the gallows, the fireside, or the church”, and she “cast away the fragments of broken chain” and “assumed a freedom of speculation” (220-221; ch. 13).
In a word, Hester just like Eve, is the most typical heroine of questioning, independent characters in western literature. Eve revolts against the God, who symbolizes the fatherhood and the paternity authority to obtain knowledge. And for Hester just as Claudia Durst Johnson found in this novel that the “ancientness, along with the sterile, stultifying control of this community of old men is emphasized throughout the novel” (8). Hester’s quest is to know herself and find her own value a position in a world that is dominated by men.
2.2 Arthur Dimmesdale
The Scarlet Letter set two hundred years earlier in the Boston area, is mainly focused on the adulterous love affair between a Puritan minister and a married woman in his congregation. The author reveals a fallen human world, similar to that of the ancestors of human beings Adam and Eve in The Garden of Eden according to The Bible. In his book, Nathaniel Hawthorne makes a lot of suggestions of the analogy between Dimmesdale and his archetypes in The Bible. Adam is created by the God and even if he is expelled from the Eden, he is so pious to the God. Thus, the falling experience of Hester and Dimmesdale recalls of Eve and Adam because in both cases, sin results in expulsion and suffering. Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden and Adam is forced to suffer procreation—“in toil eat all the days of his life” (King 4). While for Hester and Dimmesdale, the former is damned by the society and lives an exiling life ever since, and the latter all through his life, damned by himself and suffers from the whipping and denounce of his own.
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