나다니엘 호손의 「주홍글씨」의 심리학적 접근

A Psychological approach to Hawthorne"s The Scarlet Letter

&nbsp;&nbsp;This dissertation is to analize Psychologically Hawthorne&quot;s The Scarlet Letter, Which is Hawthorne&quot;s debut in a new artistic medium and a kind of retrospective exhibit of his work. No other of his novels is so close to the preoccupations of his tales. And the dramas that Hawthorne enacts in this setting (his Choice of chronological settings) are also familiar ones. Dimmesdale&quot;s experience exhibits the self-destructive operations of concealed guilt and the obsession with sin portrayed in "Roger Malvin&quot;s Burial" and "Young Goodman Brown". And in composing The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne seems purposely to gather the themes-historical, moral, psychological-that have given his work its distinct identity.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;When The Scarlet Letter is approached through Hawthorne&quot;s tales its status as an almost self consciousness culmination of his artistic career is the first thing that is striking.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;Hawthorne lavishes on Hester all of the psychological analysis that he deliberately withholds from Chilling worth. He endows he with complex reality of a whole self as he becomes increasingly conten simply to present Chilling worth&quot;s diabolical face. This is what creates the discrepancy between their ontological statues, and it should be obvious by now that this discrepancy is neither careless nor purposeless. Chilling worth relinguishes his own freedom and adopts the deterministic outlook of the puritans. A dark necessity, he tells Hester, rules their fates : As he does so he gives up his complexity of being and becomes a rigidified figure of diabolical evil, a character in a sort of providential romance that the puritans imagine. Hester is allowed the freedom and variegated selfhood of a Character in a more realistic mode because she first opens herself to the full complexity of her existance.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;In conelusion here, a dogmatic and theological and a secular and humanistic imagination come into passionate conflict one last time. Dimmesdales outlook here is that of the puritans raised to a ghastly pitch. He sees Chilling worth as the tempter and fiend, he speaks of the lurid gleam of Hest&quot;s Letter ; he sees the drama of his own life as a strife between God and the Devil, and his revelation as a plea of guity at the bar of Eternal Justice (254).