The Subtle Residual: Baroque Echoes in The Scarlet Letter

The following essay analyzes a significant Baroque substrata underlying The Scarlet Letter, taken up, among other things, in relation to the momentous Puritan legacy that is an essential element of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s literary work. In particular, the paper focuses on analyzing crucial and minor Baroque topoi represented in the novel, such as metamorphosis, relativism and ambivalence of reality, anxiety and the obsession with death. Furthermore, the article investigates the role of sharp chromatism within The Scarlet Letter, the use of typical Baroque symbols, such as the ellipse and the maze, and the fundamental role of distinctive Baroque tropes, that is, metaphor and antithesis. In order to examine the aforementioned Baroque elements, the present essay refers to the theoretical framework drawn up by Raymond Williams in his classic work Marxism and Literature (1977). That theoretical model, elaborated by Williams on the basis of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, aims at describing social and cultural practices and phenomena as dynamical interaction between “residual,” “dominant” and “emergent” components. While the “dominant” represent the core of the cultural triad, the “residual” and the “emergent” situated on its periphery are likewise essential for a persuasive dynamic description of literary phenomena at any given moment. The following article interprets the echoes of the Baroque literary tradition in the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne as belonging to the domain of “residual” and hence effectively formed in the past, but still active in the cultural process as an effective element of the present.