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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
The Scarlet Letter explores the effects, on the transgressors, of three distinct types of sin—the revealed sin of Hester, the concealed sin of Dimmesdale, and the unpardonable sin of Chillingworth. The complexity of these effects is suggested when Hester, outwardly penitent, exclaims to Dimmesdale that their deed had a consecration of its own, or when Dimmesdale, spiritually tormented by his hidden guilt, finds his power for good in the community increased as a result of his transgression, or when Chillingworth becomes, through his demonic pursuit of revenge, the greatest sinner of them all, and is assigned, finally, to eternal damnation in Hawthorne's special hell reserved for those of his villains who commit the sin for which there is no forgiveness.
1 The American Notebooks by Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Randall Stewart (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1932), p. 106.
2 Numbers following all quotations from Hawthorne indicate volume and page in The Works, ed. George Parsons Lathrop (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1883).
3 Hawthorne's reference here is to The Pilgrim's Progress, at the end of which Bunyan, after describing Christian's entrance into the celestial city, notes that Ignorance, ferried across the river by Vain-hope, is not only denied entrance but is carried away to a door in the side of a hill: “Then I saw that there was a way to hell, even from the Gates of heaven” (John Bunyan, Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim's Progress, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1907, ed. John Brown, p. 279). Hawthorne's indebtedness to Bunyan is the subject of W. Stacy Johnson's “Hawthorne and The Pilgrim's Progress,” JEGP, l, 156–166. It is possible that Hawthorne's interest in the unpardonable sin was stimulated by Bunyan's autobiographical Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, in which Bunyan describes his search for such a sin, his anguished despair when he assumes that he has committed it, and his ebullient rejoicings upon his discovery that he did not commit it after all. The unpardonable sin is also the subject of the sermon-tract, The Jerusalem Sinner Saved; or, Good News for the Vilest of Men.
4 Too frequently, studies of Hawthorne, referring to the notebooks or to Ethan Brand's own brief description of the transgression, have assumed only some one of these aspects to be the unpardonable sin.
5 Cotton Mather, in The Wonders of the Invisible World (London, 1862), after describing one of the witch trials, comments: “The witches were executed; and confessed nothing; which indeed will not be wondred by them, who consider and entertain the Judgment of a Judicious writer, that the unpardonable sin, is most usually committed by Professors of the Christian Religion, falling into witchcraft” (p. 120). The pattern which Hawthorne follows in his accounts of the unpardonable sin may be found, in part, shadowed forth in Cotton Mather's learned disquisition on the abominable art of witchcraft.
6 The meeting on 5 Aug. 1850 and the subsequent friendship of Hawthorne and Melville while the latter was in the midst of revising Moby Dick have given rise to a good deal of speculation about Hawthorne's influence on the book. A good summary of the relationship between the two writers is contained in Randall Stewart's “Melville and Hawthorne,” SAQ, li (July 1952), 436–446; rptd. in Moby Dick Centennial Essays, ed. Tyrus Hillway and Luther S. Mansfield (Dallas, 1953), pp. 153–164. Nathalia Wright suggests specific influences in “Mosses from an Old Manse and Moby Dick: The Shock of Discovery,” MLN, lxvii (June 1952), 387–392. Although my primary point is not that Melville borrowed from Hawthorne, but rather that a pattern for the commission of the unpardonable sin is common to the work of both, it is true that most of Hawthorne's stories and novels in which I have traced the pattern had appeared before the meeting took place. Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), which Melville read just before he met Hawthorne and which he reviewed in The Literary World, 17 and 24 Aug. 1850, contains “The Birthmark,” “Rappaccini's Daughter,” and “Egotism; or, the Bosom Serpent.” The Scarlet Letter appeared in 1850; “Lady Eleanore's Mantle” appeared in the Democratic Review in Dec. 1838; “Ethan Brand” appeared originally in The Boston Museum, Jan. 1850, but a letter to Hawthorne in 1851 indicates that Melville did not read it until its appearance in the Dollar Magazine in 1851 (see Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, Boston, 1884, i, 404.)
7 Numbers after the quotations from Moby Dick refer to pages in the edition by Luther S. Mansfield and Howard P. Vincent (New York: Hendricks House, 1952).
8 Cotton Mather, pp. 80–81: “The Devil, exhibiting himself ordinarily as a small Black man, has decoy'd a fearful knot of proud, froward, ignorant, envious and malicious creatures to lift themselves in his horrid Service by entering their names in a Book by him tendred unto them.”
9 A recent book on Melville, Lawrance Thompson's Melville's Quarrel with God (Princeton, 1952), has attempted to identify Ahab's attitude with Melville's: “Baldly stated, then, Melville's underlying theme in Moby Dick correlates the notions that the world was put together wrong and that God is to blame; that God in his infinite malice asserts a sovereign tyranny over man and that most men are seduced into the mistaken view that this divine tyranny is benevolent and therefore acceptable” (pp. 242–243). In order to arrive at such a reading of Moby Dick, Thompson has relied heavily on “insinuated” meaning which is “quite contrary to the superficial sense of the overt statement” (p. 7), and he claims that Melville deliberately obscured his meaning to protect himself from heresy hunters. Such an approach is, it seems to me, highly speculative and frequently misleading, and results, as the body of my paper indicates, in what I consider incredible conclusions. Although Melville's point of view, like Hawthorne's, is not orthodoxly Christian, neither, surely, is it, as Thompson would have it, anti-Christian.