Apple Partaken: A Post-Lapsarian Reading of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter By Ben Elliott Faculty Mentor, Dr. Maren Clegg-Hyer, Department of English
Article Abstract This paper, alongside contemporary likeminded scholarship, seeks to explore a Post-Lapsarian reading of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter via the lens of allegorical hermeneutics. To this end, the work’s core cast, larger setting, and Puritan community will be examined as filling the roles of Adam, Eve, Satan, God, Cain and Abel, and Eden itself. Hester, having tasted sin, finds herself cast from the world she once knew, which, in the case of Hawthorne’s work, is the social sphere of Puritan women. In this reading, her compatriot in sin, Arthur Dimmesdale, is allegorized as Adam, and their shared progeny, Pearl Prynne, with mind to her duality, serves the role of both Cain and Abel. Finally, the work’s antagonist, Roger Chillingworth, serves as another stand-in for God but, in his wickedness, also Satan. In examining the text in this manner, the project opens the text up to both secular and religious readings, and, by analyzing the ways in which Prynne and the characters around her react to this fall from grace and its consequences, the work can be recontextualized as an examination of sin, temptation, and the theological ramifications of the Fall of Man. Furthermore, this reading strives to allegorize Hawthorne’s work alongside the biblical canon to allow for a more three-dimensional and evocative interpretation of the work. 67
