The Seba library treats Scarlet Letter in 9 passages, across 3 authors (including Bloom, Harold, Richard Tarnas, Hari, Johann).
the scarlet letter ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world's scorn and bitterness, and became a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence too.
Bloom quotes Hawthorne's own text to demonstrate the letter's transformation from instrument of communal punishment into a symbol of prophetic, sorrow-tempered authority vested in Hester as counselor of women.
, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015thesis
We sense the movement of sexual power into an antinomian context, but Hawthorne partly evades such a movement in Hester. He will not let her prophesy and will not quite prophesy for her.
Bloom argues that The Scarlet Letter achieves its aesthetic strength through Hawthorne's deliberate withholding of Hester's full prophetic voice, creating a tension between the reader's desire and the author's evasion.
, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015thesis
It is a very dialectical moment when Hawthorne condenses into a single sentence both Hester's stance toward life and her grand effect upon his own art: 'It was only the darkened house that could contain her.'
Bloom identifies the novel's defining dialectical tension as Hester's excess of force over the structures — social, artistic, theological — designed to contain her.
, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015thesis
Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne), 127, 136, 151, 192, 231, 234–38, 240 ... Hester Prynne as Emersonian, 158, 175, 232, 235, 254, 258 Hester Prynne as national heroine, 234
Bloom's index entry for The Scarlet Letter encapsulates his major interpretive claims: Hester as Emersonian self-reliant subject, as national heroine, and as the center of the novel's aesthetic greatness.
, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015thesis
only The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has the special status of Moby-Dick, Leaves of Grass (1860), Walden, The Scarlet Letter, The Portrait of a La
Bloom situates The Scarlet Letter within the small canon of American works that achieve a singular, irreducible sublimity distinguishable from the rest of their author's output.
, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015supporting
the Saturn-Pluto cycle and archetypal complex associated with such themes as harsh oppression and constraint, crime and punishment, sin and judgment, trauma and retribution, rigid control and dark consequences
Tarnas places the thematic world of The Scarlet Letter — sin, judgment, punitive social control — within the Saturn-Pluto archetypal complex that governs the creation of paradigmatic literary works.
, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006supporting
the oppressive cruelty of the pathological superego, the internal slavemaster, the obsessive-compulsive neurotic structure, the life-denying puritanical conscience, the relentless compulsion for order, control, judgment, and inhibition.
Tarnas identifies the Puritan moral-psychological apparatus that The Scarlet Letter dramatizes as the shadow form of the Saturn-Pluto complex — the pathological superego expressing itself as social persecution and theological damnation.
, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006supporting
marking them with the scarlet letter of a criminal record
Hari deploys the scarlet letter as a living cultural metaphor for the stigmatizing function of criminal prosecution in the drug war, extending Hawthorne's symbol into contemporary social psychology.
, Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction, 2015supporting
The Scarlet
Tarnas's index references The Scarlet Letter in the context of the Saturn-Pluto archetypal alignment, implying its inclusion among paradigmatic works shaped by that cosmic configuration.
, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006aside