The Scarlet letter and Cultural Representation of 17th Century England

纳撒尼尔·霍桑是一位杰出的作家，他阅读和理解历史文献的能力与一流的历史学家一样出色，在这方面，他在19世纪的作家中并不是个例外。这是一个被广泛认可的事实，即使是最近以Michael J. Colacurcio为代表的新历史主义团体。以17世纪早期的美国为背景的《红字》的历史研究仍在积极进行。然而，回顾历史上对这一浪漫主义的研究，我们不得不断言，这一趋势的研究虽然在密切关注美国性方面表现出色，但却致命地缺乏对英国性的尊重。同样致命的是未能对这些文化方面进行详细观察。由于他们对政治或宗教方面的片面和偏见而导致的失败。我们可能会问，真正的，真实的，对历史文本的阅读，是否会发生在，更多类型的历史主义者中。在对霍桑《红字》的研究中，第一代清教徒移民从17世纪的英国引进了丰富的文化表现形式，而这种新的关注使我能够在以文化为导向的霍桑文学研究的进程中迈出进一步的步伐。这一进步可以在我对吸引文艺复兴时期人们的古典忧郁的肖像画的新方法中得到强有力的说明。人们一直在努力追踪这些忧郁的肖像的种类。通过采用这种新的图像学方法，我们能够追踪到“黑色”概念的新“载体”，这是被那些完全被清教主义的传统行话和习语所占据的批评家们所忽视的。现在我要做的就是公布我研究《红字》的全部结果。我接下来要做的是把我的研究范围扩大到霍桑的浪漫主义群体，采取类似的方法来接近作者的文本，但以更广阔的视野，不仅连接到古代的英国，而且更广泛的视角在意大利和欧洲其他地区，少

Nathaniel Hawthorne was an author remarkable for his ability, to read and understand historical documents as marvelously as a first-class historian, and he was not, in this respect, an exception among 19th century authors. This is a fact widely recognized even along recent neo-historicist group represented by Michael J. Colacurcio. Historical approach to the Scarlet Letter of which the background is the early 17th century America is still vigorously undertaken. Looking back at the historical study of this romance, however, we cannot but assert that the studies made in this trend, though remarkable in the close attention to the Americanness, fatally suffer from the lack of the respect to the Englishness. Similarly fatal is the failure to make detailed observation of those cultural aspects. a failure due to their partial and prejudiced interest in the political or religious aspects. We may rightly ask if a true, authentic kind of the reading of historical texts could take place among the … More se types of historicists.In this study of Hawthorne's the Scarlet Letter, exclusive, focus is thrown on the abundance of cultural representations imported from 17th century England by the first generation of the Puritan immigrants, and this new focus has enabled me to take further steps in the progress of my cultural-oriented study of Hawthorn's literature. This progress may strongly be illustrated in my new approach to the iconographies of the classical melancholy that had attracted people of the Renaissance. Consistent efforts have been made to trace the varieties of those melancholy iconographies. By adopting this new iconographical approach have been able to trace the new "vector" of the idea of "blackness" that was left unnoticed by critics whose minds were totally occupied by the conventional jargons and idioms of Puritanism. What is now left for me to do is publish the total results of my approach to The Scarlet Letter. What I am hereafter to do is to widen the scope of my study to the group of Hawthorne's romances, taking the similar methods of approaching the author's text, but with the wider view, not connect to the antiquated England only but also of more extensive perspective in Italy and other parts of Europe, Less