Global English literature: The Scarlet Letter

Author

 Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

But the past was not dead.’
(“The Custom House”, Introductory to “The Scarlet Letter”)

Biographical/historical background

H. graduated from Bowdoin College (Maine) in 1825, returned to Salem where, for twelve years,
‘he lived quietly at home, reading and writing.’ Read about his own family’s involvement in the
Salem witch trials (May – October 1692. One of the judges: John Hathorne), then changed spelling of his name. (To distance himself?)

1827

Fanshawe (anonymously, authorship revealed after his death)

1837

Twice-Told Tales

1841

Brook Farm > The Blithedale Romance 1852

1842

marries Sophia Peabody (sister Elizabeth Peabody)

the Concord years

Transcendentalism (R.W. Emerson, H.D. Thoreau, Margaret Fuller)

1846-1849

surveyor at the Salem Custom House

1849

Death of mother (he recovered through writing The Scarlet Letter)

Puritanism (suppression of the private self)

Slavery (an American anomaly)

Hester Prynne

Peark (“a born outcast of the infantile world (…) emblem and product of sin (...)

R

Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale (“subtle but remorseful hypocrite that he was!”

R

Roger Chillingworth (her one time husband, British doctor)

triple time frame 1642 narrated time: “a period when the forms of authority were felt to possess the sacredness of divine institutions

1752

Jonathan Pue Surveyor/’internal’ author

1849

Hawthorne’s reconstruction of Pue’s story as found in The Custom House

public vs private

the power of perception (the gaze!)

th

e battle over the meaning of the A

*a mother as outsider (“The world’s law was no law for her mind.” 182) (Interesting ‘sister’: Amu

in Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things)

* Hester & Antinomianism (Anne Hutchinson): (76, 183)

What is a romance? (><a novel)
“When a writer calls his work a Romance , he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its
fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed
to be writing a Novel.” (Preface to The House of the Seven Gables)

“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 the site of a prison.” (75)

“Meagre, indeed, and cold, was the sympathy that a transgressor might look for, from such

bystanders at the scaffold.” (77)

“In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she

belonged to it.” (108)

“(...)the little Puritans, being of the most intolerant brood that ever lived, had got a vague idea of
something outlandish, unearthly, or at variance with ordinary fashions, in the mother and child;
and therefore scorned them in their hearts, and not unfrequently reviled them with ther tongues.
(...) Mother and daughter stood together in the same circle of seclusion from human society (...)”
(118)

“The letter was the symbol of her calling. Such helpfulness was found in her (...) that many people refused to interpret the scarlet A by its original signification. They said that it meant Able;” (180)

“The public is despotic in its temper.” (180)

“The world’s law was no law for her mind. It was an age in which the human intellect, newly

emancipated, had taken a more active and a wider range than for many centuries before. Men (…)

had overthrown and rearranged – not actually, but within the sphere of theory, which was their

most real abode- the whole system of ancient prejudice (…) Hester Prynne imbibed this spirit. She

assumed a freedom of speculation, then common enough on the other side of the Atlantic, but

which our forefathers, had they known of it, would have held to be a deadlier sin than that

stigmatized by the scarlet letter.” (182-3)

“the scarlet letter ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world’s scorn and bitterness, and
became a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence
too.” (274)