Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

87authorial meaning establishes an ‘indeterminacy’ that is not merely a modern critical aberration”(261). This closure is in the new symbolic horizons that the book opens. However, to accept theopenness of the novel is to forget a major part, which is the ideological and historical subtexts ofThe Scarlet Letter. It requires no further argument to stress the fact that the narrative is, amongother things, an allegory of reading a symbol. It demonstrates the illusions of symbolic promise,and dismantles the symbol’s status. Put another way, it critiques allegorically, the literaryideology of symbol. The Scarlet Letter, however, is an allegorical fiction that lends itself toendless readings. Among other thingsnamely, the “political unconscious” that permeates anydiscourseJameson deconstructs the traditional binarist discourse of law and literature byemphasizing the omnipresence of the historical and the influence of the social on the literary.Much like Jameson’s Marxist purport that everything is political, Arac argues that The ScarletLetter reaches back to America’s founding texts (the Declaration of Independence, theConstitution). Reaching back to these originary texts, The Scarlet Letter tries to elevate itself tothe level of a founding canonical literary text. Both Bercovitch and Arac demonstrate howsymbol and allegory reflect a political and social need of antebellum America for harmony andunity. However, ideology and symbolization work hand in hand in the letter A, which undertakesnew meanings throughout the novel: from a symbol of adultery to an abstract symbol ‘for’Puritan America. These meanings do not cancel one another but reveal a larger hermeneuticeconomy in which any reading can be valid. The narrative has two systems of signification whichare interrelated: one is the event and the concept of historicity, and the other is affect. Hawthornerelies greatly upon affect, frequently deploying phrasing as “that mystery of a woman’s soul”(55). The letter A stands as a material shifter that indexes an event. It also stages repetitively