Blood Vengeance in the Scarlet Letter (2006)

the spirit of men there is no Julius Caesar 11.1.168 When is drawn, the human tendency leans toward Old Testament eye-for-an-eye retribution. how may one avenge wrong committed by society en masse? By withholding what is vital to the common good, as is the case of Hester Prynne in Scarlet Letter. D. H. Lawrence sarcastically qualifies the novel as by stating that nobody has muddy boots in Scarlet (1:121). Lawrence could as easily have said that no one has hands either. Although the word blood occurs twelve times in the text, bloody three times, and bloodthirstiness once, we see no shed. In fact, the verb bleed does not occur in the novel. One way to interpret this curious absence of shed is to think in terms of Hawthorne's purposely repressing the historical record of violence that accompanied the emergence of his Puritan forebears. A historically repressive interpretation could be considered valid if the romance stood alone as text. We see scaffold equipped the Puritan machines of punishment, yet none is used. We see the armor that governor Bellingham wore in the Pequod War (1:105-06) but it glistens and sparkles, clean of the shed of the Indians. We could easily accuse Hawthorne of eliding the violence that stands behind Puritan progress and achievement, accuse him of pandering to the cultural symbolism of the election-day procession and Dimmesdale's sanguine prophecy for New England in his sermon on that occasion, and accuse him of covering over as guilt for bloodshed (OED) if the romance were not inextricably tied to The Custom-House. In that preface, Hawthorne's narrator reminds us that it is the nature of America to draw blood. American eagle perched atop the Custom House is capable at any time of turning on those it has protected with scratch of her claw, dab of her beak, or rankling wound from her barbed arrows (1:5). Even so ubiquitous symbol as the American flag hanging over the Custom House entrance sports red stripes to symbolize (in the words of the Continental Congress) hardiness and valor, but even these noble qualities sometimes demand blood. Hawthorne's bloodless tale is no manifestation of conventional American aesthetic, keeping of the violence offstage, as it were. Many of Hawthorne's predecessors and contemporaries spattered their scenes gore. (1) Since Hawthorne graphically presents in Endicott and the Red Cross, where the of wolf 's head, nailed to the meeting house, is still plashing on the doorstep (9:434), in Alice Doane's Appeal, where appears bloodstained hearth (11:273), and in House of the Seven Gables, where appears the ruff and beard of Colonel Pyncheon (2:15), one may conclude that if Scarlet Letter observes bloodless aesthetic, it is voluntary one, not Hawthorne's adherence to protocol. Neither did Hawthorne shrink from portraying the gruesome details of Puritan punishments in other writings, notably Endicott and the Red Cross. He treats the reader to images of visceral horror: But among the crowd were several whose punishment would be life-long; some, whose ears had been cropped, like those of puppy-dogs; others, whose cheeks had been branded the initials of their misdemeanors; one, his nostrils slit and seared. Also among them is a young woman, no mean share of beauty, whose doom it was to wear the letter A on the breast of her gown, thus suggesting that these punishments were historically coexistent and that Hester's penalty represents no refinement of Puritan charity in later generation (9:435). To assume that Hawthorne was simply pandering to his ancestors' memory, however, is to minimize his artistic skill, especially his clever use of imagery. separation of the romance from The Custom-House allows Hawthorne to isolate two versions of history in fairly discrete way and to treat in strictly figurative fashion. …