Johnson’s comparison of the pen to the penis is an interesting one which I have not before contemplated, but makes more sense even, than the classic comparison of the sword to the phallus. I mean, is anything that is long and hard is a phallic object that the world is full of them, but the pen, containing ink which, when used in the pen, has the ability to create is something else entirely, it has elements, besides for shape, that make the comparison all the more valid. We even have an oft-quoted adage that “the pen is mightier than the sword,” perhaps comparing the two as phallic symbols and recognizing the pen’s creative superiority.
The idea of impotence was the only, or even the main point in The Scarlet Letter, the novel was about much more than that, but Johnson does identify this very important, underlying, driving tension in the story. To say that the story is only about impotence and the way it affected the narrator, the author, and the characters would take away from the book’s value as a religious and social criticism, as a text that promotes freedoms, Romanticism, emotions, and that rails against the suppression of natural feelings as well as the excessive moralization that Hawthorne saw in the Puritan community, moralizations that led to things far worse than the ousting of Hester from the community, the guilt and unhappiness and eventually death, of Dimmesdale, and the Chillingworth’s transformation into a villain. All of these did come about because of the laws of the Puritan community, but the Salem witch trials, which were alluded to throughout “The Scarlet Letter” was a far more extreme event in the history of the Puritan colonies.
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