A Vital Fragment: A Reading ofNathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter

Abstract

A Vital Fragment: A Reading ofNathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet LetterJaekwang HwangThis essay discusses Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter in terms of a fragmentary text structured by the differential play of language. The discussion is centered upon “The “Custom House” and the concluding part of the novel because a fragmentary text of this sort always problematizes the ideas of textual origin and closure. In his preface to The Marble Faun, Hawthorne remarks that “Ruin” serves as an indispensable component in making his “Romance” grow. He also complained about the lack of Ruin in his dear native land, that is, America. Yet the author was oblivious about the fact that he, to write The Scarlet Letter, had invented the scarlet symbol and some fragmentary texts as a substitute for ruin. In many respects, the scarlet symbol in the fiction can be construed not only as ruin but also as a fragment in that it is a fraction of a signifier. Indeed, Hawthorne appropriates the continuity between sign and ruin in rendering The Scarlet Letter into a semantic fragment that resembles the symbolic fragment of the German and British Romantics. For this reason, it also anticipates an innovated writing style which is in keeping with post-modern literary theories. Like a fragment or ruin, the scarlet letter A conceals the originary moment of its creation, the presence of its author, and its full image or referent. It also acts like a decentering signifier that challenges the possibility of an outline, groundwork, a beginning, an end, a totality and a closure in the fiction. With its predilection for the differential play of the scarlet symbol, The Scarlet Letter prefigures the anti-essentialist view of literary texts.