As many critics investigating the history of the novel in the United States maintain, urbanization across the country brought changes to the prevailing forms of American literary works-from public recitation to private consumption, from dramatic performance and poetry reading in the presence of an audience to fiction reading in a secluded room. This new mode of reception led such fiction irresistibly to acquire a new function: that of a peephole into another's private space. Suddenly thrown into the din and bustle of a rapidly urbanizing space, city-dwellers came to fear the fact that almost all of their neighbors were complete strangers to them. They could never know what their neighbors were thinking and doing in spite of their close vicinity, and so they began to harbor a growing desire to look into the private spaces of those neighbors. By means of the omniscient narrator in novels, people enjoyed gazing into these "closed rooms" otherwise shut off from the world. In that sense, novel writers of the 19th century, even if their works were not set in the city, could not help but be conscious of the reality that industrial urbanization was the very foundation of the novel as a genre. In other words, a novel written in that period, especially one set in an urban area, inevitably assumes a metafictional character, for it refers to the condition upon which the novel itself depends. Hawthorne's "Wakefield", which depicts a protagonist who runs away from his home and lives in the next street to observe what happens to his wife, is one of the earliest examples of such stories: using metropolitan London as a setting, and hence, in the way described above, as a prerequisite for the story, it can be clearly read as a metafiction, in that the narrator presents an outline is developed into the story proper. Wakefield's surreptitious gaze into a private room is similar to that of the author himself, for the author also peeps into Wakefield's private room to show it to the reader. Hawthorne considered his occupation as author to be sinful, because of this immorality of this gaze into other people's private spheres. His sense of guilt gives The Scarlet Letter a curiously metafictional aspect: the story embodies the shift in the mode of literary reception from a public recitation in the presence of the Puritan community (as of the appreciation of a picture) to a physician's private interrogation of the hidden interior of his patient's heart in a solitary room (as of reading a novel), and once again back to a public recitation (as of watching a drama onstage). It is due to this sense of guilt for his novelist's avocation that Hawthorne throughout this romance wavers between guilt-free public recitations and guilt-laden private readings; when he finally abandons the latter, it is as if to denounce the literary form of fiction.

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Examining the hitherto neglected analogy between the Salem Witchcraft Trials (1692) and the Revolutionary War (1775-83), this paper attempts to illuminate the trajectory from Puritan governors to American presidents, with a special emphasis on the literary tradition of Election Day Sermons. While the Salem Witchcraft Trials were caused by disbelief in the “Foreign Power” as partially represented by the governor Edmund Andros, “The Declaration of Independence” (1776) retrofits the rhetoric of hardcore Puritans attacking the witches and witch-like governors in the previous century, and impeaches King George III for being another invader and plunderer, paving the way for American Presidency. However, it is also true that a glance at the Puritan heritage of Election Day Sermons from Samuel Danforth to Samuel Langdon suggests that Puritan ministers begin to displace their theocratic tone with a more democratic one. Surviving the political upheavals in American history, the spirit of Election Day Sermons transformed Danforth’s concept of “Errand into the Wilderness” into John O’Sullivan’s slogan “Manifest Destiny” (1845), the updated version of the Monroe Doctrine, and another name for imperialist expansionism.

This perspective allows us to reread Nathaniel Hawthorne’s magnum opus The Scarlet Letter (1850) not only for its embedded Election Day sermon but also the novel with its “The Custom-House” preface itself as an incredibly well-wrought romance of the Election Day Sermon. Of course, I am keenly aware that a number of distinguished scholar-critics such as A.W. Plumstead, Sacvan Bercovitch, Alan J. Silva and others have already pointed out the impact of Election Day Sermons on the discourse of Arthur Dimmesdale, the forbidden lover of the heroine Hester Prynne. Indeed, without the heritage of Election Day Sermons, Hawthorne, a close friend of O’Sullivan, could not have described the minister so vividly in Chapter 23, “The Revelation of the Scarlet Letter”: “His subject, it appeared, had been the relation between Deity and the communities of mankind, with a special reference to the New England which they were here planting in the wilderness. ... whereas the Jewish seers had denounced judgments and ruin on their country, it was his mission to foretell a high and glorious destiny for the newly gathered people of the Lord” (Norton 168, italics mine). But what interests me most here is that in producing Dimmesdale’s sermon Hawthorne himself perhaps wanted to express a more contemporary American Jeremiad, in the wake of the presidential election in 1848. For the advent of the new president Zachary Taylor of the Whig party deprived Hawthorne the Democrat of his surveyorship in the Custom House, leading him to narrate the moral panic by means of the metaphor of “guillotine,” with which the members of the victorious have “chopped off all our heads” (31). It is at this moment that Hawthorne’s actual Jeremiad in antebellum America coincides with the fictional Dimmesdale’s apocalyptic sermon, revealing the creatively anachronistic but surprisingly organic interactions between “The Custom-House,” written after the 1848 Presidential election, and The Scarlet Letter, featuring the 1649 Election Day sermon given for the new Puritan governor.

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Margaret Fuller, living in the nineteenth century's 'Cult of True-Womanhood', spent all her life exploring the territory beyond her destiny. When she met newly-wed Hawthorne at Concord, she worked as an editor of 'Dial' and pondered on the relationship between man and woman. In his works such as 'Rappacini's Daughter' and The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne dramatized Fuller as a 'Dark Lady' who told a story of punishment and retribution. Like Beatrice, her father's good intention to give his daughter higher education made Fuller isolated from the world; Hester, being a noble and courageous woman, cherished in vain for the idea of being a prophetess for a new world. Hawthorne fully sympathized her idea, yet kept his attitude conservative, considering that Fuller with her knowledge and claim was a stigma in those days. In conclusion I would like to say that Fuller's radical (at that time) ideas about women' s rights, equality of both sexes and the nature of marriage influenced Hawthorne's writings, especially those works such as 'Rappacini's Daughter' and The Scarlet Letter.

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As Henry James says, Hawthorne is perpetually looking for images which shall place themselves in picturesque correspondence with the spiritual facts with which he is concerned. The world that Hawthorne seeks is geeneratd by contemplation of the symbol, not by the eternal yoking-together of two realms which by definition are different in kind. In The Scarlet Letter the scarlet "A" is not only the meaning of adultery but also meaning in general. This aspect of the work is emphasized by the writer's method of circling interpretation through the minds of various characters. Hester is not the only person who wears the symbol. Pearl is also the scarlet letter both physically and mentally. She is really a kind of commentary on the symbol itself. In Dimmesdale the symbol is changed from its normal course an appears as the psychosomatic mark on his breast. In Chillingworth the effect of the symbol on body and mind is complete, because he has entirely plunged himself in a symbolic role. Needless to say, the letter A is the symbol of sin. But it is a concept that the symbol really conveys. Just as quickly as the concept is symbolized to us, our own imagination dresses it up in a private, personal conception, which we can distinguish from the communicable public concept only by a process of abstraction. We never deal with a concept without having some particular presentation of it, through which we grasp it. What we really have in mind, is always universalium in re. When we express this universalium we use another symbol to exhibit it, and still another res will embody it for the mind that sees through our symbol and apprehends the concept in its own way. In fact, it is not the essential act of thought that is symbolization, but an act essential to thought, and prior to it. Symbolization is the essential act of mind; and mind takes in more than what is commonly called thought. There are transformations of experience in the human mind that have quite different overt endings. They end in acts that are neither practical nor communal; I mean the actions we call ritual. Ritual is essentially the active termination of a symbolic transformation of experience. It is not prescribed for a practical purpose, not even that of social solidarity, though such solidarity may be one of its effects. It was Freud who recognized that ritual acts are not genuine instrumental acts, but are motivated primarily a tergo, and carry with them, a feeling not of purpose but of compulsion. They must be performed, not to any visible end, but from a sheer inward need. Empirically senseless, they are none the less important and justified when we regard them as symbolic presentations rather than practical means. They are spontaneous trans-formations of experience. All the characters are the persons who feel down to some realm of reality that contains their ultimate life-symbols and dictates activities which may acquire ritual value. Many symbols in the work may be said to be charged with meanings. They have many symbolic and signific functions, and these functions have been integrated into a complex so that they are all apt to be sympathetically invoked with any chosen one. The letter A is such a charged symbol: the actual instrument of Dimmesdale's death, hence a symbol of suffering; first laid on his shoulders, an actual burden, as well as on both grounds a symbol of his accepted moral burden. The life of a symbol is a smooth and skillful shuttling to and fro between sign-functions and symbolic functions, a steady interweaving of sensory interpretations, influences, imaginative prevision, factual knowledge, and tacit appreciations. Dreams can possess it at night and work off the heaviest load of self-expression needs, and evaporate before the light of day.

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