Hidden in Plain Sight: The Scarlet Letter and American Legibility

HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT: THE SCARLETLETTER AND AMERICAN LEGIBILITY Michael T. Gilmore Brandeis University It is a curiosity of American literature that the novel that by near-unanimous consent launches the canon or national tradition begins with a secret. Or rather, with an unwillingness to divulge a secret in public. The novel ofcourse is The Scarlet Letter, and the opening scene, in which Hester stands on the scaffold and defiantly refuses to name her lover, signals a complex swerve of high or elite literature from the popular pressure toward legibility. This pressure , to make all things visible or accessible, has manifested itself across a continuum of social, political, and cultural practices, several of which, emergent in the antebellum period, Hawthorne showed a troubled awareness of: daguerreotypy, which he wrote about in The House ofthe Seven Gables, and the fads for mesmerism, phrenology, and physiognomy, which he addressed in both The Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance. Hawthorne' s swerve or demarcation is complex because he at once shares and recoils from the demand for openness. In The Scarlet Letter, he labors to find some way to check the intrusions of legibility, while at the same time he strives to fashion a mediated or indirect mode of revelation that respects the need to "be true," as the text has it, without surrendering the right to privacy. Another way of framing this, which suggests something of Hawthorne's proleptic insight, would be to say that against the tyranny of knowing, he champions distanced and guarded forms ofdisclosure that, in the twentieth century, have been incarnated in the motion pictures and the analyst's couch. Three historical periods, in other words, figure as the framework for this essay. The first is Puritan Boston; the second, the antebellum years; and the third, the 1890s. To bring the three into conversation aboutthe act ofhiding in public is, on the surface, wildly anachronistic. In one era, the dream of a purified city on a hill installed a regime of "holy watchfulness." Every aspect of life was held up to public scrutiny, for sins committed by an individual could subject the entire colonial experiment to divine wrath. Hawthorne's time, two centuries later, brought the emergence ofaprivate sphere. The growth of market society drove a wedge between work and the home. The isolated household, no longer a site of artisanal production, came to signify all those facets of the self needing shelter from the glare of politics and money-making . Another half century, and urbanization and industrialization, fueled by unprecedented numbers of foreign immigrants, combined to transform a still largely rural nation into a megalith of strangers. Millions hungered for the closeness and order of the past without, however, wishing to surrender the newfound freedom of anonymity.1 122Michael T. dimore Hawthorne's novel, I am proposing, straddles the boundary between these three eras. He turns his searchlight on the Puritans from a present already conscious of privacy's value. And he gestures toward a future where new technologies of protected transparence were incubating in response to modernity's apparent chaos. I claim license for venturing this assertion from Hawthorne himself, who indulges in a few anachronisms of his own. Most relevant for my purposes, he overstates seventeenth-century Boston as an intimate community or gemeinschaft in order better to discriminate it from the more impersonal society or gesellschaft that was materializing as he wrote, and of which Hester, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth are representatives in Puritan mufti. The reader of The Scarlet Letter is immediately conscious of discrepant fictional worlds. There is the world of the Puritans, who recognize no distinction between the public and the private and who assume that all should be bared before the multitude; and there is the consciousness of the three central characters, who wrap themselves in secrecy. In that remote, simpler past, in a tiny settlement no bigger than a village, nothing can be hidden from surveillance . Women thrust themselves into the public ways and speak boldly there; sinners are expected to confess openly and to endure punishment before their neighbors; and the separate sphere of family life, cherished in the mid-nineteenth century, simply does not exist as such. Hester...