The medical palimpsest of The Scarlet Letter: an interdisciplinary reading
- Correspondence to: Joshua Dolezal PhD candidate, Department of English, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 202 Andrews Hall, Lincoln, Nebraska, 68588–0333, United States; joshuadolezalearthlink.net
- Accepted 14 December 2004
Abstract
The multiple historical layers of Roger Chillingworth’s character have been overlooked in criticism of The Scarlet Letter. By considering the possible influence of Robert Browning’s dramatic poem Paracelsus (1835) on Hawthorne’s romance (1850), as well as the ways in which overtones of both herbalism and clinical medicine complicate Chillingworth’s character, one rediscovers Chillingworth as Hawthorne’s audience likely experienced him: as a fictional palimpsest bearing multiple inscriptions of medical history that reveal an interplay between integrity and corruption. Thus, an interdisciplinary reading of The Scarlet Letter challenges the conventional critical assessment of Chillingworth as a satanic or Faustian figure.
Footnotes
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↵i A palimpsest may be: 1: “a parchment or other surface on which writing has been applied over earlier writing which has been erased”; and/or 2: “something reused or altered but still bearing traces of its earlier form” (Compact Oxford English Dictionary).
