Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

49the sea from an island after shipwreck” (10). This kind of letter without addressee is bound toarrive at its destination since wherever it arrives is its final destination. Is the scarlet letter A aletter without an addressee? The answer is that we have a letter with multiple or indefiniteaddressees. Is the letter’s itinerary governed by the arbitrariness of the sign? Is the letter doomedto reach its destination? And if it fails to reach it, is that part of the dynamics of destiny? As Žižekargues, a letter always reaches its addressee because “one becomes its addressee when one isreached” (12). According to Žižek, who draws in his analysis of ideology on Lacan andAlthusser, the letter interpellates the subject when it arrives at its final destination in the subject.By this logic, the letter functions as an Ideological State Apparatus (ISA). As an ISA, the letter“function[s] massively and predominantly by ideology” (Althusser 149). To what extent is thehistorical documentsignified in “The Custom-House” and in The Scarlet Letter by the debris ofthe dead fathers and their literal and literary remainsreadable? How can the document berecovered? Is the recovering process free from interpellation and assujettissement? Thesequestions are points de capiton on which the meaning is distributed, disseminated, and hidden.Meaning is produced retroactively and prospectively through anasemia and the interpellativenature of the future anterior.The scarlet lettera product of Puritan Americaproduces ideologies which areinternalized by the individuals. The ideological function of the letter is to serve as “a sermonagainst sin” (52) and thus interpellate and subjectify women. It is worth noting that Hawthorne’snarrative is an extension of the Puritan project of controlling women. In her feminist reading ofHawthorne’s narrative, Louise DeSalvo disapproves of Hawthorne’s ancestors and she isoffended by his portrayal of women. For our purposes, I find it particularly useful to consider