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...Prynne--who "becomes, really, after the first scene, an accessory figure"--but with the two men who had shared her bed: "The story," James observed, "goes on for the most part between the lover and the husband." James's emphasis on the intensity of the men's bond, and his description of the doubleness of Roger Chillingworth's attentiveness to Arthur Dimmesdale, calls attention to the novelty of Hawthorne's portrayal, in which Chillingworth appears (in James's words) "to minister to his [Dimmesdale's] hidden ailment and to sympathise with his pain" while "revel[ing] in his unsuspected knowledge of these things and stimulat[ing] them by malignant arts." (1) The ersatz physician does not merely attend to his patient's symptoms but also reads them, testing and modulating his evolving interpretation of their significance by eliciting from the preacher telltale spasms and winces. Dimmesdale, in short, offers up to his observant companion a literal body of evidence, a set of physiological and affective traces of actions past. As historian Henri Ellenberger has observed, Chillingworth's corporeal epistemology is predicated on eliciting his patient's "pathogenic secret," that which the sufferer will not, or cannot, express, but which is the hidden source of his bodily ills. (2) In the words of one late-nineteenth-century surgeon, a canny physician knows that the involuntary motion of the body--such as a patient's pulse--"tells its own tale." (3)
A number of twentieth-century readers have, like James, discerned that the imbrication of medicine and detective work in the elaborate, evocative interactions of The Scarlet Letters fictional doctor and patient was indeed one of "the highly original elements in the situation that Hawthorne so ingeniously treats." (4) Yet there has been an instructive discrepancy in the critical interpretation of Chillingworth's hermeneutic practice. For the psychoanalytic critic Frederick Crews, Chillingworth's pursuit of somatic clues cast him as "the psychoanalyst manque." (5) Chillingworth, in Crews's psychoanalytic account, is alert to the symbolic significance of his patient's symptoms, a reading that modulates the character's malevolence. The psychoanalyst is attentive to the body's gothic eloquence, as an astonished Sigmund Freud discovered when the "painful legs" of his early patient Fraulein Elisabeth von. R. "began to 'join in the conversation' during our analysis." (6) From a psychoanalytic perspective, even as Chillingworth exacerbates his patient's pain he nonetheless prods the minister toward the cathartic acknowledgement of his pathogenic secret that marks the end--in the dual sense of goal and conclusion--of a psychoanalytic encounter. Chillingworth anticipates the twinned interpretive and therapeutic force of the method Freud would develop a half century later: as Freud wrote of his patients' quirks and odd comments, "it is difficult to attribute too much sense ... to these details." (7)
For the historicist critic Stephanie Browner, however, the attentions of Chillingworth possess neither therapeutic potential nor hermeneutic density. Rather, in Browner's account, Hester's husband fixes the object of his scrutiny with the "blank, unassuming, and yet knowing gaze of the new [scientific] medicine." (8) Browner argues that Chillingworth, embodying what Michel Foucault has termed the "clinical gaze," reduces the dynamic intricacy of his patient's distress to a singular source--an act of adultery--just as modernizing medicine at mid-nineteenth century was challenging an earlier holistic paradigm of illness by affirming a materialistic, lesion-based account of health and disease. Whereas Crews discerned in the relationship between Chillingworth and Dimmesdale the (admittedly twisted) elements of a dynamic therapeutic encounter, Browner suggests that "the obviously demonic figure" in essence performs a premature autopsy on the agonized minister. In the psychoanalytic account, the human body is understood to speak multivalent, nuanced, potentially therapeutic truths elusive to both doctor and patient and discernible only through collaborative acts of imagination and interpretation; by contrast, in the biomedical account the body provides a univocal, symbolically inert register of forensic fact, which merely awaits the excavation of the quasi-omniscient scientist.
This critical impasse speaks to a central rift in modern psychology, which is, as the anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann has pointed out, "Of Two Minds" (the title of her study) about the epistemological pertinence of the encounter between doctor and patient, and the appropriate ways to treat human anguish and anxiety. In her study of psychiatric training at the close of the twentieth century, Luhrmann describes in telling detail the distinctions between thinking "psycho-dynamically" and thinking "biomedically." "Psychodynamic thinking," she writes,
is a curious and highly distinctive manner of thought: ... It is notoriously difficult to characterize. Psychotherapists produce an array of metaphors to describe the therapeutic encounter--it is a dance, a duel, a drama, an attempt to listen with a different ear, to listen for what is under the surface or behind the words; it is peeling the onion, unraveling the psyche, piercing the armor of the character. (9)
The scientific model of "biomedical psychiatry" engenders a different approach, one in which "the patient has become the enemy," an obstacle to accurate diagnosis and treatment: "This is a model of disease in which the body is unmindful, in which human intention and personality disappear from the body like figures from a photograph bleached by the sun." Biomedical psychiatry, Luhrmann argues, "is about doing something, about acting and intervening, the way doctors are supposed to do." (10)
The Scarlet Letter, set during the historical preeminence of Puritan theology yet centrally concerned with the terrestrial relationship between a sick minister and his medical attendant, provides a prehistory of a central tension in modern psychiatric theory about how to interpret and to treat humanity's often inchoate ills. At the time Hawthorne was writing, psychology had not yet emerged as a discrete field of study; as historian Edward S. Reed has written, "Early in the century, psychology was considered to be a science of the soul. By the end of the century, psychology had more or less abandoned the soul and replaced it with the mind." (11) Writing from within the earlier medical paradigm of traditional therapeutics, and searching for a mode in which "science" or secular knowledge might provide insight into the complex depths of human experience, Hawthorne placed the human body at the center of his romantic symptomology: "To symbolize moral or spiritual disease by disease of the body;--thus, when a person committed any sin, it might cause a sore to appear on the body;--this to be wrought out." (12) The idea that a transcendent truth might be expressed on and through the physical body was, of course, not a novel one, for the witch-hunters of Cotton Mather's time often found a blemish on the skin of a putative witch to confirm the suspect's demonic affiliation. Indeed, natural occurrences of all sorts were interpreted by Puritan divines as messages from a communicative deity, leading William Bradford, for instance, to discern God's displeasure with a coterie of malcontents in "a great and fearful earthquake" that rocked the colony in 1638. (13) As the historian David Hall has written, "The people of seventeenth-century New England lived in an enchanted universe." (14)
For Hawthorne's Puritans, however, living in an enchanted universe meant that the connection between spiritual sin and the physical body was unproblematic; in Hall's words, "Always portents reaffirmed the rightness of a moral order." (15) Because they were taken as revealed truth, material signs did not require a diagnostic epistemology as Hawthorne understood it. Stanley Fish has written of the way that a certain kind of theological thinking forestalls interpretation. In his "Normal Circumstances and Other Special Cases" Fish offers the case of a born-again baseball player who "literally sees everything as a function of his religious existence":
[I]t is not that he allegorizes events after they have been nor-really perceived but that his normal perception is of events as the evidence of supernatural forces. [Baltimore Oriole] Kelly played on May 1st only because the regular right fielder came down with conjunctivitis, and "even that," [Baltimore Sun reporter] Janofsky exclaims, "he interpreted as divine intervention." "Interpreted" is not quite right because it suggests an imposition upon raw data of meaning not inherent in them, but for Kelly the meaning is prior to the data which will always have the same preread shape. (16)
For Fish's ballplayer and Hawthorne's Puritan, divine significance is immanent in the world, even in quotidian corporeal complaints such as an eye infection. It is precisely to the point, then, that the face of an elderly Puritan woman, Dimmesdale's devoted parishioner, expresses "divine gratitude and ecstacy" after he whispers possibly irreverent words in her ear. The factual question--did he actually offer an "unanswerable argument against the immortality of the human soul"?--matters not at all. (17) Precisely because a religious meaning preceded and shaped the encounter, the devoted widow could only hear confirmation of her sense that the minister was the incarnation of the holy.
In this essay I argue that Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter dramatizes the movement from a theological framework, in which the world is saturated with significance and there is a presumptive correspondence between emblem and meaning, body and spirit, to a secular perspective in which questions of epistemology and interpretation become central. This process takes shape most centrally in the figure of Dimmesdale, who watches with dismay coupled with relief that nothing he expresses--either in words or on the surface of his body--can unsettle his parishioners' veneration of him. Posing a challenge to the self-affirming system of the theological is the figure of Chillingworth with his determination to read contingent human meanings from the evidence of the flesh. Only the medical attendant who attaches himself to the afflicted minister conceives that Dimmesdale's body presents a conundrum that might be resolved by worldly investigation. And while critics have tended to align Chillingworth solely with a murderous empiricism in his attempt to diagnose his patient, (18) I instead examine how the figure of the doctor, in supplying a non-theological account of the relationship between the physical and the spiritual in the case of the minister, also opens up the rich interpretive space that for Hawthorne is the defining feature of romance. Psychology, rather than sin, will set down roots in the fertile discrepancy between meaning and emblem, spirit and body. Elaborate, ambiguous, and often conflicting human narratives come to mediate between a symptom--for example, Dimmesdale's chest pain--and its source or significance.
Illness in The Scarlet Letter tells a particular human story about the afflicted individual, one that evolves over time and must be uncovered by a set of interpretive procedures. There is, moreover, a deep compatibility between Hawthorne's secularizing of corporeal emblems once thought to express divine truth and the conceptual premise of medicine in the United States for the first half of the nineteenth century. Practitioners of traditional therapeutics did not think that health and disease had a singular source (whether divine or naturalistic). Instead, nineteenth-century doctors conceived of the human body in humoral terms. Good health indicated a dynamic equilibrium of the body's vital fluids, while symptoms of disease indicated that the humors were...
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