Scarlet Letters, Dead Letters: Correspondence and the Poetics of Democracy in Melville and Hawthorne

I

In his 1879 book on Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James remembers his childhood misapprehension of the title of The Scarlet Letter:

The writer of these lines, who was a child at the time, remembers dimly the sensation the book produced, and the little shudder with which people alluded to it, as if a peculiar horror were mixed with its attractions. He was too young to read it himself, but its title, upon which he fixed his eyes as the book lay upon the table, had a mysterious charm. He had a vague belief indeed that the “letter” in question was one of the documents that come by the post, and it was a source of perpetual wonderment to him that it should be of such an unaccustomed hue. ¹

James’s translation of childhood mistake into adult pun is warranted by Hawthorne’s own assumption of the very same pun in his introduction to the novel, “The Custom-House,” in which he describes his discovery of the faded scarlet letter in an “envelope” made of “ancient yellow parchment.” Moreover, although Hawthorne originally speculates that the envelope “had the air of an official record,” once he opens the seductive seal, he finds the enclosed letters and papers to be “of a private nature.” ² In short, then, Hawthorne commences his public novel by opening private letters.

I begin with James’s pun because it discloses the compound of ideas I want to pursue in this paper: the tendency of Nathaniel Hawthorne and, especially, of his own contemporary correspondent, Herman Melville, to use postal letters as a trope to represent the larger issues of literary production and social communication with which their fictions are explicitly engaged. Thus Hawthorne opens the novel that asks how the law can be made to function successfully when there may be no stabilized meaning to the letters that write the law by literally opening an enveloped package that contains Hester’s scarlet letter. And in Moby-Dick, which labors to catalogue the possible meanings of the leviathan symbol of the white whale, Ishmael explicitly metaphorizes the project of cetology as postal work: “My object here is simply to project the draught of a systematization of cetology. I am the architect, not the builder. But it is a ponderous task; no ordinary letter-sorter in the Post-office is equal to it.” ³ Moby-Dick is here an extraordinary example of letter-sorting. For both authors, literal correspondence becomes the privileged metaphor by which to describe the politics of symbolic exchange.

Letter-writing makes explicit the reciprocal relationship between writer and reader that is only implicit in publication. While a novel also depends on reciprocity, insofar as the reader must purchase the novel, or understand the novel, or enjoy the novel (to name some of the criteria by which such reciprocity might happen), this relation between reader and writer is not a necessary condition of the genre. Conversely, the relationship between reader and writer that a letter inscribes (a relationship best illustrated by the most prominent conventions of the letter—the superscription and the subscription) is the only defining feature of a letter. And by thus focusing our attention on the importance of the reader, letters make manifest that the function of both literature and familiar letters is social communication. Moreover, the letter is a particularly useful metaphor for literature because it points not only toward communicative union (the ability of the author to make himself present to the reader), but also toward communicative disunion, since letters necessarily also mark the separation between reader and writer. Not only are letters written in lieu of physical presence, but they also inscribe, as Theodor Adorno describes the paradox, the writer as an “uncomprehended individual.” As such, Adorno explains, “In a letter one can disavow isolation and nonetheless remain distant, apart, isolated.” ⁴

We see an interest in this dialectical function of the letter in much of Melville’s fiction of the early 1850s: in Pierre, where the hero’s ruin is precipitated by his receipt of a letter from his...