Application Of Lacan's Theories To A Post-Structuralist Psychoanalysis Of The Main Characters In The Scarlet Letter

The Scarlet Letter is Hawthorne's representative work. There are many reviews and criticisms of it both at home and abroad. This thesis applies Lacan's post-structuralist psychoanalysis to the study of the four main characters in the novel so as to have a new and deeper understanding of them, and especially the process of their psychological development.There are six Lacanian concepts important to the analysis of the four main characters: first, the mirror stage; second, Lacan's famous L-schema; third, three orders; fourth ,transference; fifth, the Other and the other; and sixth, phallus.The four characters can be divided into two categories. Pearl and Hester belong to the kind of normative subjects, while Dimmesdale and Chillingworth belong to the type of pathological subjects.Pearl's development toward psychological maturity is a paradigm case of the passage from infancy through the steps of the mirror stage. She is shown in the early chapters going through the first step of the mirror passage, where she finds images of identification and antagonism. In the last chapters, her climactic step takes her through recognition of the loss of the phallic symbol and acceptance of symbolic castration, to final submission to the identification and authority of the father.Hester's crime-in Lacanian terms-is an expression of her psychic involvement in the Imaginary and her punishment an expression of the dominating authority of the symbolic.After she is made to stand exposed on the scaffold of Boston, readers can find her apparent submission to the communal law , to the representatives of authority and to the Other. After seven years of preparation for absorption by the Symbolic .Hester moves from the Imaginary into the Symbolic.Dimmesdale suffers from a neurosis marked by the symptoms of hysteria and becomes a paradigm case for dramatizing the relations among the hysterical condition, its symptoms, and its cure. One sees various expressions of the neurosis in Dimmesdale's fasts, dreams, visions, vigils, self-flagellation and repetitive behaviors. The effect of Dimmesdale's relation to Chillingworth lies in the apparent transference-relation between them. Through the agency of the transference, the minister becomes capable of effecting a cure.In the case of Chillingworth, we see Hawthorne progressively unmasking the pathological subjecthood of the old man. The progress Hawthorne delineates looks like a descent from ordinary subjectivity through neurosis to psychosis. The function Chillingworth serves, subsumed in his role as physician to Dimmesdale, is that of the psychoanalyst. Chillingworth represents a figure of the transferential other to Dimmesdale because of their identificatory relation, while he, in one sense, is indeed the Other to Dimmesdale,Hester and Pearl.