Studies in Classic American Literature — NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AND "THE SCARLET LETTER"
Which is the inevitable falseness, duplicity of art, American Art in particular.
VII. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AND "THE SCARLET LETTER"
Nathaniel Hawthorne writes romance.
And what's romance?
Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything As You Like It, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose and its always daisy-time.
_As You Like It_ and _Forest Lovers_, etc. _Morte D'Arthur.
_ Hawthorne obviously isn't this kind of romanticist: though nobody has muddy boots in the _Scarlet Letter_, either.
But there is more to it.
_The Scarlet Letter_ isn't a pleasant, pretty romance.
It is a sort of parable, an earthly story with a hellish meaning.
All the time there is this split in the American art and art-consciousness.
On the top it is as nice as pie, goody-goody and lovey-dovey.
Like Hawthorne being such a blue-eyed darling, in life, and Longfellow and the rest such sucking doves.
Hawthorne's wife said she "never saw him in time" which doesn't mean she saw him too late.
But always in the "frail effulgence of eternity."
Serpents they were.
Look at the inner meaning of their art and see what demons they were.
You _must_ look through the surface of American art, and see the inner diabolism of the symbolic meaning.
Otherwise it is all mere childishness.
That blue-eyed darling Nathaniel knew disagreeable things in his inner soul.
He was careful to send them out in disguise.
Always the same.
The deliberate consciousness of Americans so fair and smooth-spoken, and the under-consciousness so devilish.
_Destroy!
destroy!
destroy!
_ hums the under-consciousness.
_Love and produce!
Love and produce!
_ cackles the upper consciousness.
And the world hears only the Love-and-produce cackle.
Refuses to hear the hum of destruction underneath.
Until such time as it will _have_ to hear.
The American has got to destroy.
It is his destiny.
It is his destiny to destroy the whole corpus of the white psyche, the white consciousness.
And he's got to do it secretly.
As the growing of a dragon-fly inside a chrysalis or cocoon destroys the larva grub, secretly.
Though many a dragon-fly never gets out of the chrysalis case: dies inside.
As America might.
So the secret chrysalis of _The Scarlet Letter_, diabolically destroying the old psyche inside.
_Be good!
Be good!
_ warbles Nathaniel.
_Be good, and never sin!
Be sure your sins will find you out.
_ So convincingly that his wife never saw him "as in time."
Then listen to the diabolic undertone of _The Scarlet Letter.
_ Man ate of the tree of knowledge, and became ashamed of himself.
Do you imagine Adam had never lived with Eve before that apple episode?
Yes, he had.
As a wild animal with his mate.
It didn't become "sin" till the knowledge-poison entered.
That apple of Sodom.
We are divided in ourselves, against ourselves.
And that is the meaning of the cross symbol.
In the first place, Adam knew Eve as a wild animal knows its mate, momentaneously, but vitally, in blood-knowledge.
Blood-knowledge, not mind-knowledge.
Blood-knowledge, that seems utterly to forget, but doesn't. Blood-knowledge, instinct, intuition, all the vast vital flux of knowing that goes on in the dark, antecedent to the mind.
Then came that beastly apple, and the other sort of knowledge started.
Adam began to look at himself.
"My hat!"
he said.
"What's this?
My Lord!
What the deuce!
--And Eve!
I wonder about Eve."
Thus starts KNOWING.
Which shortly runs to UNDERSTANDING, when the devil gets his own.
When Adam went and took Eve, _after_ the apple, he didn't do any more than he had done many a time before, in act.
But in consciousness he did something very different.
So did Eve.
Each of them kept an eye on what they were doing, they watched what was happening to them.
They wanted to KNOW.
And that was the birth of sin.
Not _doing_ it, but KNOWING about it.
Before the apple, they had shut their eyes and their minds had gone dark.
Now, they peeped and pried and imagined.
They watched themselves.
And they felt uncomfortable after.
They felt self-conscious.
So they said, "The _act_ is sin.
Let's hide.
We've sinned."
No wonder the Lord kicked them out of the Garden.
Dirty hypocrites.
The sin was the self-watching, self-consciousness.
The sin, and the doom.
Dirty understanding.
Nowadays men do hate the idea of dualism.
It's no good, dual we are.
The Cross.
If we accept the symbol, then, virtually, we accept the fact.
We are divided against ourselves.
For instance, the blood _hates_ being KNOWN by the mind.
It feels itself destroyed when it is KNOWN.
Hence the profound instinct of privacy.
And on the other hand, the mind and the spiritual consciousness of man simply _hates_ the dark potency of blood-acts: hates the genuine dark sensual orgasms, which do, for the time being, actually obliterate the mind and the spiritual consciousness, plunge them in a suffocating flood of darkness.
You can't get away from this.
Blood-consciousness overwhelms, obliterates, and annuls mind-consciousness.
Mind-consciousness extinguishes blood-consciousness, and consumes the blood.
We are all of us conscious in both ways.
And the two ways are antagonistic in us.
They will always remain so.
That is our cross.
The antagonism is so obvious, and so far-reaching, that it extends to the smallest thing.
The cultured, highly-conscious person of to-day _loathes_ any form of physical, "menial" work: such as washing dishes or sweeping a floor or chopping wood.
This menial work is an insult to the spirit.
"When I see men carrying heavy loads, doing brutal work, it always makes me want to cry," said a beautiful, cultured woman to me.
"When you say that, it makes me want to beat you," said I, in reply.
"When I see you with your beautiful head pondering heavy thoughts, I just want to hit you.
It outrages me."
My father hated books, hated the sight of anyone reading or writing.
My mother hated the thought that any of her sons should be condemned to manual labour.
Her sons must have something higher than that.
She won.
But she died first.
He laughs longest who laughs last.
There is a basic hostility in all of us between the physical and the mental, the blood and the spirit.
The mind is "ashamed" of the blood.
And the blood is destroyed by the mind, actually.
Hence pale-faces.
At present the mind-consciousness and the so-called spirit triumphs.
In America supremely.
In America, nobody does anything from the blood.
Always from the nerves, if not from the mind.
The blood is chemically reduced by the nerves, in American activity.
When an Italian labourer labours, his mind and nerves sleep, his blood acts ponderously.
Americans, when they are _doing_ things, never seem really to be doing them.
They are "busy about" it.
They are always busy "about" something.
But truly _immersed_ in _doing_ something, with the deep blood-consciousness active, that they never are.
They _admire_ the blood-conscious spontaneity.
And they want to get it in their heads.
"Live from the body," they shriek.
It is their last mental shriek.
_Co-ordinate.
_ It is a further attempt still to rationalize the body and blood.
"Think about such and such a muscle," they say, "and relax there."
And every time you "conquer" the body with the mind (you can say "heal" it, if you like) you cause a deeper, more dangerous complex or tension somewhere else.
Ghastly Americans, with their blood no longer blood.
A yellow spiritual fluid.
The Fall.
There have been lots of Falls.
We fell into _knowledge_ when Eve bit the apple.
Self-conscious knowledge.
For the first time the mind put up a fight against the blood.
Wanting to UNDERSTAND.
That is to intellectualize the blood.
The blood must be _shed_, says Jesus.
Shed on the cross of our own divided psyche.
Shed the blood, and you become mind-conscious.
Eat the body and drink the blood, self-cannibalizing, and you become extremely conscious, like Americans and some Hindus.
Devour yourself, and God knows what a lot you'll know, what a lot you'll be conscious of.
Mind you don't choke yourself.
For a long time men believed that they could be perfected through the mind, through the spirit.
They believed, passionately.
They had their ecstasy in pure consciousness.
They _believed_ in purity, chastity, and the wings of the spirit.
America soon plucked the bird of the spirit.
America soon killed the _belief_ in the spirit.
But not the practice.
The practice continued with a sarcastic vehemence.
America, with a perfect inner contempt for the spirit and the consciousness of man, practises the same spirituality and universal love and KNOWING all the time, incessantly, like a drug habit.
And inwardly gives not a fig for it.
Only for the sensation.
The pretty-pretty _sensation_ of love, loving all the world.
And the nice fluttering aeroplane _sensation_ of knowing, knowing, knowing.
Then the prettiest of all sensations, the sensation of UNDERSTANDING.
Oh, what a lot they understand, the darlings!
_So_ good at the trick, they are.
Just a trick of self-conceit.
_The Scarlet Letter_ gives the show away.
You have your pure-pure young parson Dimmesdale.
You have the beautiful Puritan Hester at his feet.
And the first thing she does is to seduce him.
And the first thing he does is to be seduced.
And the second thing they do is to hug their sin in secret, and gloat over it, and try to understand.
Which is the myth of New England.
Deerslayer refused to be seduced by Judith Hutter.
At least the Sodom apple of sin didn't fetch him.
But Dimmesdale was seduced gloatingly.
Oh, luscious Sin!
He was such a pure young man.
That he had to make a fool of purity.
The American psyche.
Of course the best part of the game lay in keeping up pure appearances.
The greatest triumph a woman can Have, especially an American woman, is the triumph of seducing a man: especially if he is pure.
And he gets the greatest thrill of all, in falling.
--"Seduce me, Mrs. Hercules."
And the pair of them share the subtlest delight in keeping up pure appearances, when everybody knows all the while.
But the power of pure appearances is something to exult in.
All America gives in to it.
_Look_ pure!
To seduce a man.
To have everybody know.
To keep up appearances of purity.
Pure!
This is the great triumph, of woman.
_A.
_ The Scarlet Letter.
Adulteress!
The great Alpha.
Alpha!
Adulteress!
The new Adam and Adama!
American!
_A.
_ Adulteress!
Stitched with gold thread, glittering upon the bosom.
The proudest insignia.
Put her upon the scaffold and worship her there.
Worship her there.
The Woman, the Magna Mater.
_A.
_ Adulteress!
Abel!
Abel!
Abel!
Abel!
Admirable!
It becomes a farce.
The fiery heart.
_A.
_ Mary of the Bleeding Heart.
Mater Adolerata!
_A.
_ Capital _A.
_ Adulteress.
Glittering with gold thread.
Abel!
Adultery.
Admirable!
It is, perhaps, the most colossal satire ever penned.
_The Scarlet Letter.
_ And by a blue-eyed darling of a Nathaniel.
Not Bumppo, however.
The human spirit, fixed in a lie, adhering to a lie, giving itself perpetually the lie.
All begins with _A.
_ Adultress.
Alpha.
Abel, Adam.
_A.
_ America.
_The Scarlet Letter.
_ "Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious painters have vied with one another to represent; something which should remind him, indeed, but only by contrast, of that sacred image of sinless Motherhood, whose infant was to redeem the world."
Whose infant was to redeem the world indeed!
It will be a startling redemption the world will get from the American infant.
"Here was a taint of deepest sin in the most sacred quality of human life, working such effect that the world was only the darker for this woman's beauty, and more lost for the infant she had borne."
Just listen to the darling.
Isn't he a master of apology?
Of symbols, too.
His pious blame is a chuckle of praise all the while.
Oh, Hester, you are a demon.
A man _must_ be pure, just that you can seduce him to a fall.
Because the greatest thrill in life is to bring down the Sacred Saint with a flop into the mud.
Then when you've brought him down, humbly wipe off the mud with your hair, another Magdalen.
And then go home and dance a witch's jig of triumph, and stitch yourself a Scarlet Letter with gold thread, as duchesses used to stitch themselves coronets.
And then stand meek on the scaffold and fool the world.
Who will all be envying you your sin, and beating you because you've stolen an advantage over them.
Hester Prynne is the great nemesis of woman.
She is the KNOWING Ligeia risen diabolic from the grave.
Having her own back.
UNDERSTANDING.
This time it is Mr. Dimmesdale who dies.
She lives on and is Abel.
His spiritual love was a lie.
And prostituting the woman to his spiritual love, as popular clergymen do, in his preachings and loftiness, was a tall white lie.
Which came flop.
We are so pure in spirit.
Hi-tiddly-i-ty!
Till she tickled him in the right place, and he fell.
Flop.
Flop goes spiritual love.
But keep up the game.
Keep up appearances.
Pure are the pure.
To the pure all things, etc. Look out, Mister, for the Female Devotee.
Whatever you do, don't let her start tickling you.
She knows your weak spot.
Mind your Purity.
When Hester Prynne seduced Arthur Dimmesdale it was the beginning of the end.
But from the beginning of the end to the end of the end is a hundred years or two.
Mr. Dimmesdale also wasn't at the end of his resources.
Previously, he had lived by governing his body, ruling it, in the interests of his spirit.
Now he has a good time all by himself torturing his body, whipping it, piercing it with thorns, macerating himself.
It's a form of masturbation.
He wants to get a mental grip on his body.
And since he can't quite manage it with the mind, witness his fall--he will give it what for, with whips.
His will shall _lash_ his body.
And he enjoys his pains.
Wallows in them.
To the pure all things are pure.
It is the old self-mutilation process, gone rotten.
The mind wanting to get its teeth in the blood and flesh.
The ego exulting in the tortures of the mutinous flesh.
I, the ego, I _will_ triumph over my own flesh.
Lash!
Lash!
