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A for Adultery – The Scarlet Letter 71
pital of Haarlem or The Women Regents of the Haarlem Almshouse. Thus the images
are solidly anchored in a pictorial tradition spanning the time when the novel is
supposed to take place to Hawthorne’s own time. Sjöström himself also talked
about drawing inspiration for his films from paintings, visiting museums in order
to study lighting and picture composition, and buying countless reproductions.
21 This method of his is indeed not limited to a few examples only – another
pictorial reference has been mentioned in relation to He Who Gets
Slapped – but rather appears to have been a consistent ingredient of Sjöström’s
craft, noted already in A Man There Was, The Monastery in Sendomir or
The Phantom Carriage. 22
Bushes also reappear repeatedly as a metonymy for nature, first as Dimmesdale
chases Hester round a bush to make her reveal what she is hiding. She then
throws the garment away onto the bush. Later, bushes hide them for a moment,
and when they reappear, they hold hands. As they later walk out of frame to the
right, the camera pans to the left and stops at the image of the underwear hanging
on the bush as a metaphor for their forbidden intimacy.
After a fade-out, there is a fade-in to a scene where we now see the reflection
of the two lovers in the water. At first, the image is blurred, as the pastor throws
twigs into the water, but then it becomes still and clear as a mirror. Next to the
water, there is a bush, which hides the lover’s embrace. But their mirror reflection
in the water in the previous image seems to betray their secret, at least to
the spectator. They are already involved in what is to become a play with doubleness;
the reflection in the water repeats Hester’s reflection in the hidden mirror
from the first reel. There is a third mirror scene, doubling the first one in the
forest. Now it is Pearl’s image that is reflected in the water as she plays with a
garland that she puts in her hair. Then there is a cut to an image of Hester and
Dimmesdale lying down and resting on the grass. As they talk about their escape,
Hester tears off the A and loosens her hair. The scene therefore also functions
as a double of the first mirror scene when her hair was loosened for the
first time, the happy days before the A would forever be imprinted on her bosom.
In the conclusion of his essay, Roth-Lindberg argues that:
the fugitive, simple, almost playful images in the montage are – on one level – expressing
the “mirror relation” in all of Sjöström’s films, which is revealed – and possible to
notice – only with the new observations and language of psychoanalysis during the
70s and 80s. This relation of mirroring or doubling exists between the living and the
dead (The Phantom Carriage), between the I and the masks (the play with double identities
in He Who Gets Slapped), between man and his image – in the mirror and in the
child (The Scarlet Letter). 23