The Powers that Be

I

 

The action of The Scarlet Letter takes place in the Massachusetts Bay colony in the 1640s.  Hester Prynne, married in England, has come to the colony in advance of her husband and has been there two years without him at the beginning of the story.  She has a baby as the result of an illicit affair, and is condemned to wear a scarlet letter A on her breast for the rest of her life.  The father, the well-respected minister Arthur Dimmesdale, does not confess his involvement, and Hester is the only one who knows.  While she is on display on the scaffold during the first part of her sentence, she recognizes her husband in the crowd, a man who will call himself Roger Chillingworth.  She is the only one who knows who he is.  He takes up residence in the colony as a physician, with a view to finding out with whom she had the affair and taking revenge on him.

 

Dimmesdale suffers extremely from guilt and his health declines.  Chillingworth, treating him at first as his physician, discovers his guilt and works to make him suffer even more.  Hester meanwhile earns a living sewing, looks after her daughter Pearl, and provides nursing and charity of various kinds to the community.  She remains an outcast without friends, but finds some acceptance on account of her sewing prowess and her good deeds.  At last, Hester tells Dimmesdale who Chillingworth is, and they plan together to escape him by leaving the colony.  He discovers their plan and foils it by arranging to ship with them.  Dimmesdale at last makes a public confession and dies.  A short coda follows in which Chillingworth dies and we learn what eventually happens to Hester and Pearl.

 

The narration is straight forward.  The first three chapters follow Hester.  In four, she undertakes not to tell anyone who Chillingworth is, and Chillingworth vows to discover who her lover was and take revenge on him.  Five through seven follow Hester and Pearl, then in eight they visit the governor, who is attended by Dimmesdale, Chillingworth, and some others.  The principal question for the governor is whether Hester should be allowed to keep her child.  Dimmesdale speaks strongly in favour of her, and Chillingworth notices his zeal.  Nine through eleven establish Chillingworth as Dimmesdale's personal physician, and they take up residence together, ostensibly for the patient's benefit.  In twelve, Dimmesdale spends an evening standing alone on the scaffold, joined at the end by Hester and Pearl, and the three are discovered there by Chillingworth.  Hester is alone again in thirteen, then in fourteen she speaks with Chillingworth, asking him to stop tormenting Dimmesdale, and advising him that now she will tell Dimmesdale who he really is.  Hester and Pearl take up fifteen and sixteen, at the end of which they meet Dimmesdale in the forest, and the three of them are together through nineteen.  Dimmesdale is then the focus from twenty through twenty-three, with glimpses of the others, and at the end of twenty-three, Dimmesdale dies.  Twenty-four wraps things up.  We thus follow primarily one character at a time for long instalments, and the end of one instalment introduces the character who will be the main subject of the next.

 

The simplicity of the plot, the small number of main characters, and the division of the story into large instalments, encourage an impression of weights and balances and the relation of the parts.  We see Hester mainly by herself or with Pearl; her interactions with either Dimmesdale or Chillingworth are very limited; she is concerned about them, but most of what we see of her doesn't directly involve them.  Chillingworth and Dimmesdale, on the other hand, are always together imaginatively if not in person.  We thus see Hester as one part of the story, and the two men as the other part, and to some extent we can't but be conscious of the cuckolded husband, the cuckolder, and the woman in the middle.  But the main division is a moral one.  Dimmesdale lacks courage, Chillingworth lacks compassion, and both are proud, while Hester shows courage, compassion and humility.  As the story proceeds, the moral situation solidifies.  Dimmesdale withers further and further into his weakness, while Chillingworth deteriorates into little more than a tormenting demon.  The picture is reinforced ironically by the ways the community judges the two men.  Dimmesdale's sermons become more powerful as his ill-health and moral failure continue, and he comes to be seen as a sort of saint generating holiness from suffering.  Chillingworth is taken for an astonishingly dedicated healer, perhaps even provided by God himself to minister to the saint's needs, although perhaps working through Satan but with God's permission.  All the while, Hester takes the community's ostracism and abuse and in return makes quiet and steady contributions to its health, need, and even adornment.  She earns a place for herself but accepts her station, and the only right she ever asserts is to be Pearl's mother.

 

Pearl, although she takes up quite a bit of space in the book, isn't a fully realized character and can't have been intended as one, and she has no real weight in the plot.  She is expressly called a sprite, and she engages only fitfully with those around her.  She supports Hester, but almost as a bemused goddess might treat a favoured mortal.  She is often little more than a device, a sort of chorus voice who articulates, for instance, that Dimmesdale is unwilling ever to let others see him with Hester and Pearl.  We're not concerned about how Pearl will turn out; we're concerned only very briefly with whether she will stay with Hester, and that is for Hester's sake, not for Pearl's.  There is no Pearl sub-plot.  The entire plot of the story belongs to Hester, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth.

 

It is a bit reminiscent of Greek tragedy in its simplicity.  Compare it, for instance, with Aeschylus's Oresteian trilogy.  Both are sustained by a handful of unrelenting facts.  Agamemnon has killed his daughter; his wife then kills him; their son then kills her; and the Furies torment the son until Apollo reconciles them to a different resolution.  Hester's adultery, evidenced by her illegitimate daughter, has removed her from Plymouth Bay society.  Dimmesdale cannot bring himself to admit that he is the other party.  Chillingworth, the injured husband, takes revenge on Dimmesdale.  Finally, Dimmesdale confesses and dies, and Chillingworth dies not long after.  A handful of characters, lit brilliantly, course through their fates, and the story ends. 

 

But that resemblance is superficial.  The Oresteian trilogy, and most Greek tragedy, is propelled by competing ethical imperatives.  Agamemnon wrongs his wife by killing their daughter.  When his wife requites the wrong by killing Agamemnon, she wrongs their son.  He in turn kills her, and his matricide earns him the wrath of the Furies.  The ethical forces are much weaker in Hawthorne's story, and they scarcely conflict.  Hester is, by community standards, rightly punished - in fact there is some question of whether she deserved much worse - and her shaming, by itself, requires no response from anyone.  Dimmesdale, if he lacks the courage to own his involvement, deserves to suffer.  Chillingworth is, at least arguably, entitled to satisfaction from Dimmesdale.  Moreover, if each of them chose differently, the suffering wouldn't be extinguished.  Hester's lot wouldn't be improved by resentment.  If Dimmesdale confessed early on, he would suffer differently, but he would still suffer.  And if he confessed, the opportunity for Chillingworth's special revenge would not obtain.  Without any compelling forces working on and through the characters, there isn't anything tragic about what happens to them.  At most, we could make the story out to be a "tragedy of suffering."

 

It couldn't, after all, be a tragedy of action, because the principal characters do very little.  The plot configuration results mainly from the liaison of Hester and Dimmesdale, which takes place before the story begins.  Chillingworth arrives and is recognized, and looks for Hester's lover.  There is one small bit of suspense in the middle of the book, about whether Pearl will be taken from Hester.  It isn't until almost the end that Hester and Dimmesdale suddenly decide to go away, and that gets quashed quickly.  By subtraction, as it were, most of the action must then occur in Hester's development on the one hand, and in Dimmesdale's deterioration, aggravated by Chillingworth, on the other.  And that comports with the way the narrative is deployed; those are precisely the main subjects of what I called the instalments of the story.  But we don't ever see even the main characters, especially Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, doing very much.  There is a certain amount of activity, even progressive activity, on Hester's part, although the best of it is unconscious, and certain elements somewhat spoil it.  But we very seldom see Dimmesdale and Chillingworth actually doing what we're often told they are doing.

 

Henry James thinks that the interaction of Chillingworth and Dimmesdale is precisely the most dynamic part of the story.  He does think the novel is a particularly quiet one in terms of action.  "The people strike me not as characters," he says, "but as representatives, very picturesquely arranged,  of a single state of mind; and the interest of the story lies, not in them, but in the situation, which is insistently kept before us, with little progression, though with a great deal, as I have said, of a certain stable variation; and to which they, out of their reality, contribute little that helps it to live and move."  For Henry James, this isn't a serious drawback in a novel.  He goes on to say that Hawthorne's imagination "plays with his theme so incessantly, leads it such a dance through the moonlighted air of his intellect, that the thing cools off, as it were, hardens and stiffens, and, producing effects much more exquisite, leaves the reader with a sense of having handled a splendid piece of silversmith's work."  This seems just, although it's hard not to be reminded of H. G. Wells's famous remark about James's own novels.  But then, in James's evaluation, Hester nearly drops out; the story "is in a secondary degree that of Hester Prynne; she becomes, really, after the first scene, an accessory figure; it is not upon her the dénouement depends."  Chillingworth and Dimmesdale instead come forward:

 

The story goes on for the most part between the lover and the husband - the tormented young Puritan minister ... - between this more wretched and pitiable culprit, to whom dishonour would come as a comfort and the pillory as a relief, and the older, keener, wiser man, who, to obtain satisfaction for the wrong he has suffered, devises the infernally ingenious plan of conjoining himself with his wronger, living with him, living upon him, and while he pretends to minister to his hidden ailment and to sympathise with his pain, revels in his unsuspected knowledge of these things and stimulates them by malignant arts.

 

But this isn't as straightforward a claim as it might seem at first, if we look closely at Dimmesdale and Chillingworth.

 

After their initial early appearances, they are reintroduced in the eighth chapter.  The husband is now "old Roger Chillingworth, a person of great skill in physic, who, for two or three years past, had been settled in the town.  It was understood that this learned man was the physician as well as the friend of the young minister, whose health had severely suffered, of late, by his too unreserved self-sacrifice to the labors and duties of the pastoral relation."  Chillingworth is also altered; Hester "was startled to perceive what a change had come over his features, - how much uglier they were, - how his dark complexion seemed to have grown duskier, and his figure more misshapen, - since the days when she had familiarly known him."  In the ninth chapter we learn that since the opening scenes Chillingworth has established a substantial reputation as a physician and begun to associate closely with Dimmesdale, whose health begins to fail about the time of Chillingworth's arrival.  There are hints that Chillingworth has begun to suspect Dimmesdale's secret before Dimmesdale's outburst at the governor's residence.

 

Roger Chillingworth scrutinized his patient carefully, both as he saw him in his ordinary life, keeping an accustomed pathway in the range of thoughts familiar to him, and as he appeared when thrown amidst other moral scenery, the novelty of which might call out something new to the surface of his character ... [Chillingworth] strove to go deep into his patient's bosom, delving among his principles, prying into his recollections, and probing everything with a cautious touch, like a treasure-seeker in a dark cavern.  Few secrets can escape an investigator who has opportunity and license to undertake such a quest, and skill to follow it up ... At some inevitable moment, will the soul of the sufferer be dissolved, and flow forth in a dark but transparent stream, bringing all its mysteries into the daylight.

 

But there has been nothing definite yet - "No secret, such as the physician fancied must exist there, ever stole out of the minister's consciousness into his companion's ear.  The latter had his suspicions, indeed, that even the nature of Mr. Dimmesdale's bodily disease had never been revealed to him."  Meanwhile, others claim to have noticed in Chillingworth what Hester will soon notice.  "At first, his expression had been calm, meditative, scholar-like.  Now, there was something ugly and evil in his face, which they had not previously noticed, and which grew still the more obvious to sight, the often they looked upon him."  But this observation is explicitly connected with the view that Chillingworth is in league with Satan, and in any case the change in Chillingworth has taken place before he discovers Dimmesdale's secret.  At the beginning of the tenth chapter, Chillingworth himself still seems very uncertain.  Dimmesdale, he says to himself, "pure as they deem him, - all spiritual as he seems, - hath inherited a strong animal nature from his father or his mother.  Let us dig a little further in the direction of this vein!"  The digging, though, doesn't yet turn up anything determinative, and "he would turn back, discouraged, and begin his quest towards another point."

 

Eventually - at the end of the tenth chapter - Chillingworth finds what he has been after.  He wants Dimmesdale to "lay open to him the wound or trouble in your soul," and Dimmesdale replies, "No! - not to thee! - not to an earthly physician!"  Shortly after this, Chillingworth finds Dimmesdale asleep and peers inside his vestment.  "With what a wild look of wonder, joy, and horror!  With what a ghastly rapture, as it were, too mighty to be expressed only by the eye and features, and therefore bursting forth through the whole ugliness of his figure, and making itself manifest by the extravagant gestures with which he threw up his arms towards the ceiling, and stamped his foot upon the floor!"  Clearly Chillingworth had not been sure until this point - and this is confirmed at the beginning of the eleventh chapter:

 

Calm, gentle, passionless, as he appeared, there was yet, we fear, a quiet depth of malice, hitherto latent, but active now, in this unfortunate old man, which led him to a more intimate revenge than any enemy had ever wreaked upon an enemy.  To make himself the one trusted friend, to whom should be confided all the fear, the remorse, the agony, the ineffectual repentance, the backward rush of sinful thoughts, expelled in vain!  All that guilty sorrow, hidden from the world, whose great heart would have pitied and forgiven, to be revealed to him, the Pitiless, to him, the Unforgiving!  All that dark treasure to be lavished on the very man, to whom nothing else could so adequately pay the debt of vengeance!

 

We are now at the climax of what Henry James summarizes in saying that Chillingworth "devises the infernally ingenious plan of conjoining himself with his wronger, living with him, living upon him, and while he pretends to minister to his hidden ailment and to sympathise with his pain, revels in his unsuspected knowledge of these things and stimulates them by malignant arts."  It is certainly devilish - a prolonged, restrained, deliberate and carefully calculated application of torture.  But we get only the slightest glimpse of the thing itself, in a short passage almost immediately following the one quoted just above:

 

He became, thenceforth, not a spectator only, but a chief actor, in the poor minister's interior world.  He could play upon him as he chose.  Would he arouse him with a throb of agony?  The victim was forever on the rack; it needed only to know the spring that controlled the engine; - and the physician knew it well!  Would he startle him with sudden fear?  As at the waving of a magician's wand, uprose a grisly phantom, - uprose a thousand phantoms, - in many shapes, of death, or more awful shame, all flocking round about the clergyman, and pointing with their fingers at his breast!

Strange, how helpless Dimmesdale has suddenly become, given that he is himself unaware of any change in his relationship with Chillingworth.  Hitherto, when Chillingworth has probed uncomfortably, Dimmesdale has been able to put him off - to divert him, or simply to end the conversation.  There was a close call - in his "No!  Not to thee!" episode - but he managed it.  Chillingworth's new power is assumed, not established.  Instead of illustration, all we get is a very brief and vague description, in eighteenth-century philosophical jargon, in terms of "the spring that controlled the engine."  And after this we see nothing at all, because we see almost nothing more of Chillingworth.  He appears briefly at the end of the vigil in the twelfth chapter, has a short conversation with Hester in the fourteenth, and jams the escape plans at the end.  Whatever he does to Dimmesdale after his discovery of Dimmesdale's guilt happens offstage.  We aren't shown it; instead we have been asked to imagine it; the action is all implied.

 

Now that doesn't establish that the action doesn't occur "in" the book - that's a delicate point, and I'll come back to it - only that we never see Chillingworth torturing Dimmesdale.  The treatment of Dimmesdale follows similar lines.  Even before the discovery, his malady is described only in vague terms.  His health has begun to fail; his cheek is pale; he loses weight; he frequently puts his hand over his heart and seems to feel pain there; his voice grows more tremulous; there is gloom and terror in his eyes.  There is no doubt Dimmesdale is suffering, trying unsuccessfully to persuade himself that he is justified in keeping his secret, and chafing under Chillingworth's care.  He says to Chillingworth, with regard to guilty men, "guilty as they may be, retaining, nevertheless, a zeal for God's glory and man's welfare, they shrink from displaying themselves black and filthy in the view of men; because, thenceforward, no good can be achieved by them; no evil of the past be redeemed by better service.  So, to their own unutterable torment, they go about among their fellow-creatures, looking pure as new-fallen snow; while their hearts are all speckled and spotted with iniquity of which they cannot rid themselves."  Accurate, perhaps, but not of much consolation to him.

 

What exactly changes after Chillingworth's discovery?  Dimmesdale "had constantly a dim perception of some evil influence watching over him."  He connects it with Chillingworth, but blames himself for such an uncharitable sentiment.  "For, as it was impossible to assign a reason for such distrust and abhorrence, so Mr. Dimmesdale, conscious that the poison of one morbid spot was infecting his heart's entire substance, attributed all his presentiments to no other cause.  He took himself to task for his bad sympathies in reference to Roger Chillingworth, disregarded the lesson that he should have drawn from them, and did his best to root them out.  Unable to accomplish this, he nevertheless, as a matter of principle, continued his habits of social familiarity with the old man."  The irony is clever, but is it plausible?  The torture is dreadful; Chillingworth has "constant opportunities," and keeps poking at the wound; but Dimmesdale spends as much time as ever with his tormenter, trying to persuade himself that something else is the matter.  Something else is the matter, of course - his unconfessed relations with Hester - and we never see in any detail why it isn't this same old cause producing the same old effect.  It's hard to see exactly what Chillingworth adds to it, although we're assured that he does.  We're also told that Dimmesdale's sermons became peculiarly effective, that to his parishioners it seemed that "his heart vibrated in unison with theirs, and received their pain unto itself, and sent its own throb of pain through a thousand other hearts, in gushes of sad, persuasive eloquence."  He impassions virgins, and makes old people want to be buried near him - but we never hear a word of what he actually says.

 

In short, Hawthorne tells us that Dimmesdale's suffering gets worse because of Chillingworth's activity, but nothing demonstrates this, and in fact Dimmesdale's ongoing association with Chillingworth rather tells against it.  Dimmesdale has a burden of guilt that is ample to account for his continuing deterioration; Chillingworth isn't needed, and there's no reason to attribute much efficacy to what he attempts.  We can almost see the courses the two men take as being in a sort of preordained harmony, in which sufficient causes exist in each alone to explain his behaviour, although someone with a less robust perspective might attribute one's behaviour to the other's influence.

 

Hester, meanwhile, makes some progress.  She becomes a willing servant to a community that doesn't regard her as belonging to it, and that takes frequent opportunities to remind her of her outcast status.  She is patient and humble; she asserts herself only when the well-being of her daughter is at stake.  She tries to console Dimmesdale, suggesting that his sin is behind him and that his suffering should bring him peace.  Done a bit differently, she might have appeared a moral genius, finding redemption in suffering, always looking ahead, converting the loathing others feel for her into a love she feels for them, and so forth.  But Hester has various failings.  Dressing Pearl extravagantly, for instance, is at odds with what a more perfect Hester would teach her daughter.  So is telling Pearl that she once met "the Black Man," and that the scarlet letter is his mark.  The conceit that she can detect sin in others, if understandable in someone who is so alone, and if indicative of some sympathetic impulses, is nonetheless perverse; she is a bit too mature to feature as an ingenuous Young Goodman Brown.  When she offers Dimmesdale the solution of running away, she overlooks the reality that Dimmesdale is already in effect running away, and it isn't working.  And when, almost at the end, we hear that Hester had once thought she might be the prophetess of better relations between men and women, we realize that we're looking back on quite an ordinary woman, despite some attempts by Hawthorne to make her seem more.  She does, on the whole, make the best of a bad situation - most importantly, by not festering and decaying as Dimmesdale and Chillingworth do.  And we do see her moving as we do not see the two men moving.

 

 

II

 

As I said earlier, the fact that we don't see Dimmesdale and Chillingworth moving doesn't mean that their movements aren't "in" the story.  James's view is substantially accurate - this is a novel of picturesque arrangements, stable variations, small progress, ornate but static pieces.  And the pieces that are arranged can certainly be substantives that abbreviate motion - verbs frozen into nouns, as it were, such as "Dimmesdale's moral decay" or "Chillingworth's development as a devil" - so that we can think not only of continuing tensions but of escalating tensions.  For that, it is sufficient that we imagine motion, that we attribute it, that we believe it occurs when we are told that it does.  It doesn't matter if the motion is illusory, provided the illusion is accepted.  But that does constrain the kind of pleasure we can take in the novel.  A novel merely asserting an action, saying that it occurs instead of showing it occurring, is like a drama relating something that has happened offstage instead of acting it onstage.  That might sometimes be necessary, but doing it without being forced is giving up a tool of the genre.   It amounts to increasing what Aristotle calls thought - "the capacity to say what is pertinent and apt" - at the expense of the plot, by referring instead of demonstrating:

 

"Thought" covers all effects which need to be created by speech: their elements are proof, refutation, the conveying of emotions (pity, fear, anger, etc.), as well as enhancement and belittlement.  It is clear that the same principles should also be used in the handling of events, when one needs to create impressions of what is pitiable, terrible, important, or probable - with this difference, that the latter effects must be evident without direct statement, while the former must be conveyed by the speaker in and through speech.  For what would be the point of the speaker, if the required effects were evident even without speech?

 

The pleasure then tends to be in the contemplation of proportions, of relations, of juxtapositions.  The narrative is pushed in the direction of being a proof, and the pleasure taken becomes more like the pleasure of geometry or other arts of proof.  "Well, so be it," someone might say.  "There are different kinds of novel, and different kinds of pleasure appropriate to each.  It is a question of taking a novel on its own terms, or at most a question of taste.  A novel that depends on situation, on the positioning and handling of relatively static elements, can be well executed and be a fine novel, though it might not be your own favourite kind of novel."  But that sort of defence seems unsatisfactory in at least three ways.

 

First, novels that are short on the depiction of action encourage lapses of authorial judgment.  In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne is tempted far too often into clunky pieces of symbolism - sunshine retreats before Hester's hand, a scarlet letter appears emblazoned across the heavens, and so forth.  He drops frequently into commentary that veers awkwardly - think of some of his comments about the nature of "woman," for instance.  Every appearance of Pearl is strange, and the space given to her is uncomfortable, given her function.  When the constituents of a story are static chunks, special bridgework has to be invented.  A story anchored in action, on the other hand, is always already moving toward its next stage - the bridgework, one might say, is discovered rather than invented, and the author is kept busy.  To give it a New England accent, idle hands are the devil's workshop, and Hawthorne gets into trouble with his ad hoc stitchery.

 

Second (and this can be no more than a sketch here), there is a fortuitously simple way to imagine how the novel could have been better, by comparing it with another novel that treats very similar material much more actively, Silas Marner.  At first blush, in fact, George Eliot's book seems to refer quite directly to Hawthorne's, even down to some expressions that seem deliberate echoes.  In any case, it focusses on three individuals and treats them in two groups, with Silas on the one hand and the two Cass brothers on the other hand.  Silas, like Hester, is an outsider who has suffered a calamity, but through his adopted daughter (a bit of a sprite but convincing, unlike Pearl) he finds moral growth and a sense of community.  Godfrey Cass, meanwhile, has secretly fathered a child and has been concealing it, especially from his wealthy father, which allows his malevolent brother Dunstan to blackmail him, and the blackmail continues for some time.  The thematic resemblances, the parallel populations, and the internal relations of those populations, are striking.  But in Silas Marner, all of the action is shown to us in a single, coherent plot.  We see what Silas, Godfrey and Dunstan really do, and we hear what they really say, and it has a much fuller effect.  There is nothing unfair about the comparison.  The material isn't somehow lighter than Hawthorne's.  The treatment isn't rounder because of its length - Silas Marner is so short, in fact, that some critics liken it to a fable.  The execution is simply more satisfying because there is real movement without any clumsy bridgework.  The Scarlet Letter is ponderous and lacks life beside it.

 

Third, the technique in The Scarlet Letter is better suited to shorter work, and creates problems in a novel.  Hawthorne has tried to adapt a strategy that he uses with splendid results in quite a few of the short stories.  He constructs an image, a situation, a dilemma, a tendency, or an idea, and delineates it precisely and consistently so as to give it a bordered character, to make it a substantial entity in the reader's mind.  Then he bruises it, hits it with an idea from outside, an idea that shows what was weak, what was missing, what was mistakenly assumed, what a better alternative would have been.  We see how the second idea answers to the first, conditions it, lights it differently.  Sometimes the effect is amusing, humbling, or merely surprising, as for instance in "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" or "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment."  Sometimes the blow strikes deeper, as in "Young Goodman Brown" or "Roger Malvin's Burial."  Sometimes the initial idea is shown to be resistant to the attempted bruising.  And sometimes the effect simply doesn't come off.  But when it does, the result is typically a decisive insight, one that is literally arresting, that acts to freeze the story.  Suddenly, there is nothing else to do with the intense situation; it dissolves, the image fades; there is nothing more for Hawthorne to operate on; and the story naturally ends.  Deployed as the structure of a novel, the device tends to create abrupt endings.  The material in a novel has accumulated significant inertia and needs to be wound down gradually.  It is hard to see how The Scarlet Letter could be concluded without Dimmesdale's secret coming to light.  But once it does, all of the tension is gone immediately.  The idea runs out of energy, and there's nothing left for Hawthorne to do but to dispose quickly of his characters.  He kills Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, offers a brief afterthought of Hester, and then cuts to a too-cute grave scene.  The ending of The House of the Seven Gables is similarly rushed, and I think it is for the same reason - despite a conscious attempt at a more dynamic novel, Hawthorne instead developed further variations on his old technique.

 

Almost all novels make some use of illusion.  As Plato noticed, an author cannot be expert in all the arts in which his characters claim expertise, but (contrary to Plato) that doesn't necessarily mean the work is flawed - it often suffices that the characters plausibly appear to be practising their appropriate arts.  Depending on the focus of the plot, this sort of illusion can attach even to a central character, provided the art in question is peripheral to the plot.  The nineteenth century is full of novels involving the political and love interests of clergymen and doctors who, in addition to pursuing power and love, practise their arts without their authors having been theologians or physicians.  We don't need to know the details of their ministering and doctoring to accept that those professional practices carry them about on their rounds, support their communication with colleagues in their profession, and so on.  But in their capacities as politicians and love-makers, they should be seen to act.  In a novel, the closer an activity is to the core of the plot, the more the plot is weakened by not showing the activity itself.