Door of the soul or bitter nourishment: the heart and signs of shame in American culture

Abstract

The essay focuses on the heart as complex signifier for shame in American literature. It starts off by reading some passages from Thomas Hooker’s texts, arguing that the heart is here to be understood as one of the symbols that most convincingly convey what shame meant for Puritans. Then it reads Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, probably the most canonical book about shame of American (and not only) literature, in order to pinpoint the novel’s numerous references to the heart that is, however, emptied of any clear symbolic value, and reduced to a cathacresis, a metaphor deprived of any actual reference. Finally, it lingers on a poem by Stephen Crane, in which the heart, rather than standing for or referring to shame, returns the gaze of the poet/viewer who has identified the savage “Other” described in the poem as the embodiment of shame.