Well, there are certainly plenty allusions for you to
find! I will pick out one historical allusion for you and comment upon it, and hopefully
this will give you the idea of how to work out what they mean, and above all, how
Hawthorne is using them in this excellent novel.
At the end
of Chapter 6, which concerns itself with the character of Pearl, Hester is thinking of
the strange ways of Pearl and how some gossiping villagers insist that because the
father has never been found she is the offspring of the Devil. Note how the author
finishes this chapter:
Luther, according to the scandal of his monkish
enemies, was a brat of that hellish breed; nor was Pearl the only child to whom this
inauspicious origin was assigned, among the New England
Puritans.
Luther here refers
to the figure of Martin Luther, who was the leading figure in the Reformation in
Germany. His revision of Christianity argued that salvation was to be won by faith
rather than works. Here, then, this allusion allows Hawthorne to make an ironic comment
on the Puritans belief that actually it was through works that they would be
saved.
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