The Scarlet letter and Cultural Representation of 17th Century England

纳撒尼尔霍桑是一位杰出的作家，他能像一流的历史学家一样熟练地阅读和理解历史文献，在这方面，他在19世纪世纪的作家中也不例外。这是一个事实，甚至沿着最近的新历史主义集团为代表的迈克尔J.Colacurcio广泛承认。以17世纪初的美国为背景的《红字》的历史研究仍在蓬勃进行。然而，回顾这一时期的研究，我们不能不指出，这一时期的研究虽然在对美国性的关注上引人注目，但却存在着对英国性缺乏尊重的问题。同样致命的是未能对这些文化方面进行详细的观察。由于他们在政治或宗教方面的片面和偏见的利益而失败。我们可能会问，是否有一种真正的、可信的对历史文本的阅读， 关于我们 在对霍桑的《红字》的研究中，我把注意力集中在世纪第一代清教徒移民从英国引进的丰富的文化表征上，这一新的关注点使我对山楂文学的文化取向研究迈出了新的步伐。这种进步可以从我对古典忧郁的肖像画的新方法中得到有力的说明，古典忧郁曾吸引了文艺复兴时期的人们。人们一直在努力追踪这些忧郁的肖像画的变化。通过采用这种新的图像学方法，我们能够追踪到“黑色”观念的新“载体”，这一点被那些头脑完全被清教主义的传统行话和习语所占据的批评家所忽视。现在我要做的就是公布我对《红字》的研究结果。我以后要做的是把我的研究范围扩大到霍桑的传奇小说群，采取类似的方法来研究作者的文本，但具有更广泛的视野，不仅与古老的英国联系在一起，而且在意大利和欧洲其他地区也有更广泛的视角。

Nathaniel Hawthorne was an author remarkable for his ability, to read and understand historical documents as marvelously as a first-class historian, and he was not, in this respect, an exception among 19th century authors.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