The Scarlet Letter and Pathetic Fallacy

In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne plays with the stylistic element of pathetic fallacy in really interesting ways. As a partial Transcendentalist and self-proclaimed Romanticist, his use of this element fits cohesively with other aspects of his style and philosophy. He depicts the natural world almost as a mirror of his characters' emotions, but in a refreshing and interesting way. He doesn't just imbue the natural world with characters' emotions arbitrarily; he does it in a way that comments on the subjectivity of the human experience.

The forest scene, in chapters 15-19, overflows with pathetic fallacy. As if to mirror Hester's guilt and somber attitude, the narrator describes a stream that "kept up a babble, kind, quiet, soothing, but melancholy, like the voice of a young child that was spending its infancy without playfulness" (p. 552). Not only is this line absolutely beautiful, but it reveals Hawthorne's stylistic tendencies and sets up an important symbol for the following chapters. By the end of chapter 19, after Hester convinces Dimmesdale to runaway with her and Pearl, "the melancholy brook" then adds this tale to "the mystery with which its little heart was already overburdened" (p. 567). Though not describing the brook, chapter 18 also depicts nature through pathetic fallacy: "Such was the sympathy of Nature--that wild, heathen Nature of the forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by higher truth--with the bliss of these two spirits! Love... must always create sunshine... it overflows to the outward world" (p.  561). In this scene, Hawthorne imbues nature with the characters' emotions in a very Romantic and Transcendentalist way.

But Hawthorne's use of Pathetic Fallacy is more than just a means to an end (the end being evoking the emotions of his characters). He comments on its significance as a literary technique and as a way to capture the subjective aspects of human experience; it doesn't matter if nature actually, realistically mirrors characters' emotions. It does if they interpret it to. At the end of the previous passage in Chapter 18, the narrator states: "had the forest still kept its gloom, it would have been bright in Hester's eyes, and bright in Dimmesdale's" (p. 561). In Chapter 13, when the meteor appears above Boston, Hawthorne again comments on the aesthetic and philosophical significance of pathetic fallacy when he describes Dimmesdale's reaction: "we impute it, therefore, solely to the disease in his own eye and heart, that the minister, looking upward to the zenith, beheld there the appearance of an immense letter,--the letter A,-- marked out in lines of dull red" (p. 536). In this passage, Hawthorne explains how regardless of the actual scientific or objective phenomenon that occurred, Dimmesdale interpreted it as a representation of his guilt. In this way Hawthorne validates pathetic fallacy as an accurate way to capture the complexities and subjectivity of the human experience.