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CHAPTER FIVE. “ A Strange Sympathy betwixt Soul and Body”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850)
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CHAPTER FIVE “A Strange Sympathy betwixt Soul and Body” Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850) This is his first punishment, that by the verdict of his own heart no guilty man is acquitted. —Juvenal, Satires The phrase “a strange sympathy betwixt soul and body,” which so aptly characterizes the essence of psychosomatic disorders, is uttered in The Scarlet Letter by the scholarly physician Roger Chillingworth about the “rare case” (135) of pastor Arthur Dimmesdale, whose mysteriously declining health puzzles and intrigues him. “A bodily disease,” Chillingworth explains to Dimmesdale, “which we look upon as whole and entire in itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part” (135). The connection that Chillingworth here makes between the physical and the psychological seems at first glance anachronistically modern in a work published in 1850, yet actually it is in consonance with the premodern holistic conceptions of humoral medicine. The action of The Scarlet Letter takes place “not less than two centuries” (57) previous to 1850, at a time when the close conjunction of body and mind was an integral facet of the prevailing belief system. According to humoral medicine, the “sympathy betwixt soul and body” would in fact have been the natural expectation rather than a “strange” phenomenon. Apart from the medical theories of the mid-seventeenth century, Hawthorne could also have drawn on his own recent personal experience. In 1849, at the age of forty-five, Hawthorne lost the job he had held for three years at the Salem Custom House. His position was precarious for he had not yet sufficiently established his reputation as a writer to be able to support his family by the pen alone. A few weeks later his mother died. In 73 the aftermath of this double loss, Hawthorne sickened. The writing of The Scarlet Letter later that summer can be seen not only as a means to earn money but also as a form of therapy. When Hawthorne read the story’s final pages to his wife in February 1850, he reports that it broke her heart and sent her to bed with “a grievous headache.” This little incident might have confirmed for Hawthorne the potential that distressing emotions have for conversion into physical symptoms. ❖ ❖ ❖ In The Scarlet Letter the social context is of such decisive importance that any reading must begin on this “intervening variable.”1 Its crucial momentum is indicated by the fact that the narrative opens on a description of the environment . The novel, which has been designated as “the single indispensable study of Puritan culture,”2 rests entirely on that culture’s premises and beliefs. The Massachusetts Bay colony was in many ways eclectic, even in its unusual legal structure as a business corporation chartered with authority to exert jurisdiction over the lands it occupied. The main purpose of the Puritan experiment in its early days was “to show that men could govern themselves in a political state exactly as they governed themselves in a church organization.”3 The original settlers intended to base their legal system almost exclusively on biblical authority, but in practice this proved awkward in the judgment of ordinary civil and criminal cases. Establishment of the Bible as a legal code had the effect of elevating clerical opinion to unprecedented heights. Ministers ruled on most legal issues; acting in their capacity as accredited biblical scholars, they were invested with final moral authority in civil as well as spiritual matters. If the New England colony was “a city on a hill,”4 its clergy were “the bright and shining Lights” in the “golden Candlesticks.5 For the figure of Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter it is vital to understand this extraordinary exaltation of ministers, who wielded immense power by playing a lead part in determining who among the settlers had experienced a true conversion and so deserved the privilege of franchise. The “early severity of the Puritan character” (57) in the new colony is underscored from the outset of The Scarlet Letter. The title of the first chapter , “The Prison Door,” immediately indicates the shortfall in the settlement ’s utopian aspirations to virtue and happiness, for space had already had to be allotted not only to a cemetery but also to a prison. Of these two, the cemetery is, despite its finality, the less unpalatable because it is merely the completion of the normal course of human life whereas the prison is a place of punishment for violations of the colony’s...