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FRANK KERMODE
lost certainties. The past grows obscure, like those "half-obliterated
coats of arms" brought over from the old world, like the Governor's
garden, dominated by the new, extrasystematic pumpkin. Whether it is
a rosebush or the wilderness, the symbol hesitates, grows occult to the
modern eye. The interpretative light falls differently, from the imagi–
nation and not from heaven.
Is the forest what the text will allow us
to
believe, an emblem or
type of the "moral wilderness," or of pastoral sympathy, which it also
proposes? What are we encouraged to make of the brook, the old tree?
Of the Black Man, through whom nature is associated with the de–
monic? Is Chillingworth diabolical, or is that a naive opinion and
what he himself, in a remarkable expression which, more than any
other, tells us how Hawthorne must be read, calls a "typical illusion?"
"The reader," says the text as it draws to its end, "may choose among
these theories." May we choose to say that in associating nature and
sex with evil, with the breaking of a law and a necessary punishment,
the old world erred? That its strict antithesis between nature and grace
made no allowance for the extra-ordinary overdetermination of na–
ture? All that is, at least, licit. Dimmesdale, returning from his mo–
ment with Hester in the mock-paradise of the forest, becomes almost
comically an enemy of grace; and yet in his experience sin seems to
produce a certain abundance of grace, and we can say (though we can
also deny) that had he not sinned he could not have preached as he did.
Pearl is the crucial instance, embodying the oxymoron "native
grace," and variously proposed as elf, child of sin, witch-child, child of
Misrule; a visitor, nevertheless, from the "spiritua l world" (XIII), and
the agency by which her mother is prevented from founding a new
Antinomian, and so in a measure naturalist, religion. The child is
repeatedly associated with mirrors and reflections; the mirror is the
type of the type, but in Hawthorne, it is usually mysterious or distort–
ing, denying the possibility of a simple relation between image and
reality, sign and referent. So we cannot know where we have her. Is she
an allomorph of the ambiguous Leller itself? A natural child excluded,
for most of the book, from the human family that is held together by
grace? A Florimell both true and false? Anyway, Pearl plays her part in
enforcing the submission of Dimmesdale, and not only enters the re–
stricted family of grace but disappears to the Old World, with its types
of nobility, its dark armorial bearings; whi le Hester, still wearing her
own type, rejoins the community on new terms. Pearl drifts back
to
the
