Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

85the narrative of Pue, which, in turn, supplements a missed Puritan history. The work of thesesupplements is done through prosopopeia. Here, I want to link the trope of prosopopeia to desire.This desire to restore voice to the dead corpse/corpus allows for the exchange of gazes. Sincedesire is surplus that is (over) determined by lack, it can only unfold in the field of the subject.Much like “The Custom-House,” the letter A becomes an occulted object that promises access tothe desired absent Thing. By this logic, both the narrator and the reader are suspended in the fieldof promise as desire conditioned by lack and absence. The narrator’s desire, however, is abiographical desire. The narrator goes back to the archival document to look for secrets.However, biography is also subject to the play of différance.What does the letter A mean? There have been many attempts at understanding theunderlying meanings in The Scarlet Letter. The unfathomable repetition of the scarlet letter A is arepetition that creates an imperceptible plurality that permits the reader to go beyond thehermeneutic closure of The Scarlet Letter. Henry James argues that the letter A is “in danger ofseeming to stand for nothing more serious than itself” (94). Then, he apologizes and says, “TheScarlet Letter has the beauty and harmony of all original and complete conceptions, and itsweaker spots, whatever they are, are not of its essence; they are mere light flaws and inequalitiesof the surface” (95). Hawthorne’s narrative could be said to sacrifice symbolic complexity for thesimplicity of a moral lesson. However, Hawthorne offers a moral at the end of the narrative, buthe also plays with the witnesses’ accounts of what appeared on Dimmesdale’s breast, and herefers the reader, at the end, back to the Custom House’s primal scene. Arac argues that TheScarlet Lettera cultural productreflects a theory of ideology: it “addresses the anonymoustoil of women under the barbarism of patriarchy” (248). One of the anxieties of the reader of The