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The Scarlet Letter and Nathaniel
Hawthorne's America
by Brenda Wineapple
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| Nathaniel Hawthorne, ca. 1860-1865 (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
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Nathaniel Hawthorne is the strange American author who
has never been out of fashion; since his death in 1864,
his stories and novels have resisted the tides of taste,
canon reformation, and critical vicissitude. Melville
had to be “rediscovered” in the 1920s, Henry
James fell out with the social realists of the 1930s (ditto
Edith Wharton), and today formerly acclaimed novelists
like William Dean Howells seem quaint or antiquated when
placed alongside Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Toni
Morrison. Not Hawthorne. Henry James, William Faulkner,
Robert Lowell, Flannery O’Connor, John Updike, Philip
Roth—even Morrison herself—have had to come
to terms with his work, as if Hawthorne were their literary
father, which in a way he was, and even today writers
as different from one another as Baharti Mukherjee, Paul
Auster, Susan Lori Parks, Rick Moody, and Stephen King
continue to refashion his tales and novels. And this cursory
list does not even begin to include a multitude of Hawthorne-inspired
plays, films, and operas.
Take The Scarlet Letter. Just four years ago,
an inventive New York City high school teacher asked me
if I would come to her English class and talk about the
novel with her students, almost all of whom spoke English
as a second language. Consenting, I entered the plain
cement-block public school by passing through a metal
detector and found myself among a polyglot group of teenagers
who, one after another, opened their dog-eared copies
of The Scarlet Letter to read me passages aloud
and then explain why Hester didn’t rat out Roger
Chillingworth (partly she feared him, partly she resented
Dimmesdale), why Reverend Dimmesdale seemed so weak (he
was an egotist), why the Puritans dreaded the forest (it
represented the scary unknown). Then they asked whether
Hester’s illegitimate daughter, Pearl, was nuts.
And they had other questions, too, just the sort of urgent
ones that have beset readers for over 150 years: Why does
Hawthorne admire and condemn Hester, a single mother,
at the same time? What does Hawthorne tell us about the
nature of friendship in the relationship between Chillingworth
and Dimmesdale? Can men ever be friends? And what does
the end of the novel mean: Why does Hester return to Boston,
and can she really find peace with a new circle of female
acquaintances, to whom she gives advice?
But, as these students admitted, initially the novel’s
style had perplexed them. Hawthorne writes in an Augustan
idiom, with long and sinuously balanced sentences peppered
with commas. He sets his scene slowly. In Chapter One
of The Scarlet Letter, we see a throng of men
and women stand before a “wooden edifice, the door
of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with
iron spikes.” But before we know more of these people
or the occasion drawing them to this gloomy place, we
learn that “the founders of a new colony, whatever
Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally
project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest
practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin
soil as a cemetery, and another portion as a prison.”
Why does such eloquence, alien as it may sometimes seem,
withstand the dictates of time, place, age, or trend?
Partly the answer lies in the fact that Hawthorne, as
progenitor of the American canon, articulates a complex,
ironic view of American history and culture. For instance,
in The Scarlet Letter, he supplies a Romantic
view of the Puritans as dour patriarchs wearing ruffs
and lacking compassion that schoolchildren, reading the
novel, assume to be accurate. (Many also assume Hawthorne
lived in the seventeenth century, his depiction of colonial
Boston seems so real.) Yet Hawthorne scrutinizes the foundation
myths of America— its exceptionalism, its entrenched
innocence, its sentimentality, its violence, and its cavalier
attitude toward the past—with skeptical, often satiric
eye. And in casting American history as perplexing moral
drama in which the individual is beset by historical,
cultural, and psychological limitations, he creates unforgettable
characters and plangent symbols (the minister’s
black veil, the scarlet letter, the Great Stone Face,
the birth-mark) that provide Americans with a mirror through
which we see our culture darkly and by which we have come
to know ourselves and our nation if, as Hawthorne suggests,
such knowledge is possible.
Human society: a utopia of virtue and happiness, or the
site of sin and death, or both - these are the novel’s
central ambiguities. Hawthorne is the master of ambiguity,
which is another way of saying that he’s the master
of duplicity, of saying one thing and meaning quite another.
That technique lies at the heart of allegory, but Hawthorne
was much more than an allegorist, for of all the standard
nineteenth-century American authors, only Hawthorne created
memorable women characters; Emerson did not. Thoreau did
not. And certainly Melville placed no women aboard the
fictional ships he sailed through the South Seas. Hawthorne
is the great exception; he wrote about women’s rights,
women’s work, women in relation to men, and social
change. He wrote empathetically, sensitively, and also,
sometimes, with disdain, converting his profound ambivalence
about women, society, and politics into cultural symbols
of ambiguity that, like the scarlet A, still baffle us,
for what starts as a symbol drenched in infamy, signifying
“adultery,” becomes a badge of courage and
integrity, worn by one who is able and angelic albeit
tied forever to Arthur. The students in the New York City
high school knew that.
They knew, too, that concealment is part of The Scarlet
Letter, which is a book about, among other things,
secrets. “We may prate of the circumstances that
lie around us,” Hawthorne writes in the introduction
to The Scarlet Letter, “but still keep
the Inmost Me behind the veil.” Hester keeps not
just the identity of her illegitimate daughter’s
father a secret, but she keeps Chillingworth’s former
relation to her, as her husband, a secret too; in fact,
all the adult characters traffic in secrets, which makes
some sense out of the narrator’s last injunction
to the reader: “Be true! Be true! Show freely to
the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the
worst may be inferred!”
But above all, Hawthorne’s supreme achievement is
Hester Prynne herself, who stands when we first meet her,
straight and tall, imperial and grand, proud and strong
and isolated from the community. Part Anne Hutchinson
(about whom Hawthorne wrote earlier) and part Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Hester is further derived from a number of Hawthorne’s
friends and relatives, prominent among them the feminist
Margaret Fuller, whom Hawthorne knew well, especially
in the years before he wrote The Scarlet Letter,
and whose Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)
urged women to fulfill whatever destiny they desired:
“if you ask me what offices they may fill, I reply—any.
… Let them be sea-captains, if you will.”
Also contributing to the portrait of Hester was Hawthorne’s
mother, herself a single parent of sorts, Hawthorne’s
father having died when he was just four; and doubtless
in Hester there’s a touch of Hawthorne’s elder
sister, an eccentric woman with a very tart tongue. “Useful
knowledge,” she liked to say to her brother, “is
the most useless of all…. If you ever write a book,
take care that it be with no intention to be useful.”
I think, too, that Hester contained Elizabeth Peabody,
Hawthorne’s sister-in-law, a woman blessed with
good intentions, who introduced the idea of kindergarten
to America and believed in change of all kind, from educational
reform to the abolition of slavery to the fair and just
treatment of Native Americans.
For Hawthorne was very much a man of his time and not
that of the Puritans about whom he so eloquently wrote.
Which isn’t to say that he did not care for them;
he did—with classic ambivalence. Puritans and colonial
New Englanders are the subject of many of his stories.
“The past is never dead,” Hawthorne writes
in “The Custom House” essay that precedes
The Scarlet Letter. But Hawthorne also saw the
railroad bring the ends of the country together, and the
telegraph reconfigure space and time; he watched photography
change the meaning of art and portraiture, which were
the subjects of his next novel, The House of the Seven
Gables; and he heard all the debates then raging
for and against industrialization, abolition, wage-slavery,
and capitalism. He even participated, for a short while,
in a commune, before he married. He was good friends with
Franklin Pierce, the fourteenth President of the United
States. And he had to feed and support a growing family
“in a republican country,” as he put it, in
which “somebody is always at the drowning point.”
After the election of James Polk as United States President
in 1844, Hawthorne’s political friends rallied round
him and found him a civil service appointment as Surveyor
in the Salem Custom House, where he worked until the Whigs
regained the presidency in 1848 and forced him out. In
“The Custom House” essay, written to pillory
the patronage system that deprived him of his post (even
though it would in four years provide him with another
one), he presents himself as the somewhat reluctant employee
who one day stumbles on an artifact, a red cloth embroidered
as the letter A, among the personal effects of a former
surveyor in the dusty attic of his workplace. Curious,
he happens to place the letter on his chest, but it’s
so hot it burns him and he drops it to the floor. So Hawthorne,
as is frequent with him, becomes one more character in
his own tale, a nineteenth-century man who touches the
seventeenth-century by means of an eighteenth-century
surveyor (the past is never dead).
When Hawthorne’s publisher, James T. Fields, read
the unfinished manuscript of The Scarlet Letter,
he insisted it be published as a novel, not a short story;
and from then on he marketed Hawthorne’s work with
entrepreneurial genius. “Somehow or other,”
Hawthorne later thanked him, “you smote the rock
of public sympathy on my behalf.” Even more importantly,
Fields supplied the encouragement that Hawthorne needed
in order to write and to face the consequences of writing,
including neglect and bad reviews.
For let’s not forget that by 1850, the year of The
Scarlet Letter’s publication, Hawthorne had
been writing for over twenty years. In 1828, he had published,
anonymously and at his own expense, his first book, Fanshawe,
a huge failure; a proud man, Hawthorne later destroyed
as many copies of this novel as he could find and, years
hence, pretended it didn’t exist. But he continued
to write short stories and sketches and in 1837 collected
them into the volume Twice-Told Tales, a critical success
that didn’t much sell. He was like a man talking
to himself alone in a dark place, he told a friend, and
once mocked himself as “the obscurest man of letters
in America.”
But The Scarlet Letter received much acclaim.
Hailed as original, touching, deep in thought and condensed
in style, it also sold 4,500 copies almost immediately.
Readers responded viscerally to Hester Prynne, and they
still do, as if her fate summons forth anew, generation
after generation, that unexpected bedfellow of American
history, female strength and sexuality. No American character—no
female protagonist before or since— has galvanized
readers in quite the same way. As a result, The Scarlet
Letter continues to enthrall, asking us over and
over what it means to live with others and feel apart;
to be part of history yet separate from it; to love passionately
and never forget; to hope too long, plot secrets, face
reality, feel scared, and yet still believe in the promise,
as Hester does at the novel’s end, of a better world—
and whose promise, perhaps illusory, she will share with
other women. As Hawthorne will, even when he is most skeptical.
“My theory is,” Hawthorne told a friend, “that
there is less indelicacy in speaking out your highest,
deepest, tenderest emotions to the world at large, than
to almost any individual. You may be mistaken in the individual;
but you cannot be mistaken in thinking that, somewhere
among your fellow-creatures, there is a heart that will
receive yours into itself.”
Brenda Wineapple is the author of
Hawthorne: A Life (Knopf), which won the Ambassador
Prize for Best Biography of 2003 from the English-Speaking
Union. Her new book, White Heat: The Friendship
of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson
(Knopf) will be published in August.
| For a list
of books and websites about Nathaniel Hawthorne,
The Scarlet Letter, and the Puritans,
visit our Additional
Resources Page |
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