America as a Cultural Prisonhouse

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Scarlet Letter (1850)

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

- born in Salem, Massachusetts

- Hawthorne‘s father, a sea captain, was a descendant of John Hathorne, a judge at the Salem Witch Trials

- began to write in the 1820s, first in obscurity in his „owl‘s nest“, became friends with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, his classmate at Bowdoin College – „Twice-Told Tales“ (1837)- joined the utopian transcendentalist community at Brook Farm in 1841

- was appointed surveyor of the Salem Custom House in 1846; became American Consul in Liverpool in 1853

- Short stories: „Young Goodman Brown“ (1835), „Rappaccini‘s Daughter“ ´(1844)

- Four major romances: The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852), and The Marble Faun (1860)

- the dreamlike

Themes

Techniques

- the imaginary

- the supernatural

- allegorical abstraction

- transcendence of the material world

- the American past- operates in the

intermediate zone between fiction & reality

The Romance

“the power of blackness” (H. Melville)

“[I]t is that blackness in Hawthorne, of which I have spoken, that so fixes and fascinates me.” (H. Melville)

Hawthorne’s Negative Romanticism

“Young Goodman Brown”

The Scarlet Letter (1850)

Boston in the 1640s

- Hester Prynne, with her illegitimate child, Pearl, on her arms, steps from a prisonhouse, a wild rose-bush blossoming next to the entrance

Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale

„Roger Chillingworth“

The Scarlet Letter (1850)

Hester Prynne

- young woman

- „tall, with a figure of perfect elegance, on a large scale.“

- „She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam“.

- „She was lady-like, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those days“

Pearl

- elf-like creature

- Commnity thinks she is „demon offspring“.

Reverend Dimmesdale

- independent and isolated woman: „What we did had a conscration of ist own“

- Hester‘s „godly pastor“

- fears public condemnation

„Roger Chillingworth“

- Hester‘s thought-to-be-dead husband seeking revenge

- epitomizes a perversion of the human heart

Themes- Adultery (vanishing of traditional beliefs

& values)

- Bigotry (morality vs. sin)

- Church (America‘s Puritan past)

Key symbols

It was the capital letter A. By an accurate measurement, each limb proved to be precisely three inches and a quarter in length. It had been intended, there could be no doubt, as an ornamental article of dress; but how it was to be worn, or what rank, honour, and dignity, in by-past times, were signified by it, was a riddle which (so evanescent are the fashions of the world in these particulars) I saw little hope of solving. And yet it strangely interested me. […]

When thus perplexed -- and cogitating, among other hypotheses, whether the letter might not have been one of those decorations which the white men used to contrive in order to take the eyes of Indians -- I happened to place it on my breast. It seemed to me -- the reader may smile, but must not doubt my word -- it seemed to me, then, that I experienced a sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat, and as if the letter were not of red cloth, but red-hot iron. I shuddered, and involuntarily let it fall

upon the floor.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, „The Custom-House“, from The Scarlet Letter (1850)

Salem

This old town of Salem – my native place […] – possesses, or did possess, a hold on my affections, the forced of which I have never realized during my seasons of actual residence here. […] It is now nearly two centuries and a quarter since the original Briton, the earliest emigrant of my name, made his appearance in the wild and forest-bordered settlement, which has since become a city. […] He was a soldier, legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the Church; he had all the Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He was likewise a bitter persecutor […]. Nathaniel Hawthorne, „The Custom-House“, from The Scarlet Letter (1850), p. 1336-7.

Key phrases:

- „the greatest of all dreams“ (the American Dream)

- „New Jerusalem“ (analogy to the biblical exodus, „God‘s chosen people“)

- „City Upon a Hill“ (John Winthrop, „A Model of Christian Charity“, 1630

- „English and Indian, freemen and slaves, join together“ (Melting Pot)

How does the novel end?

- Hester goes to England, returns after some years to end her life in isolation

- Pearl becomes „the richest heiress of her day in the New World“

- Dimmesdale dies in Hester‘s arms, thanking God for this „triumphant shame“

- Chillingworth dies one year later, deprived of his inner goal, the search for revenge

Film: Hester and Dimmesdale, the charismatic hero, end up together, their love is fulfilled -> happy ending projected onto the text

"People of New England!" cried he, with a voice that rose over them, high, solemn, and majestic -- yet had always a tremor through it, and sometimes a shriek, struggling up out of a fathomless depth of remorse and woe -- "ye, that have loved me! -- ye, that have deemed me holy! -- behold me here, the one sinner of the world! At last -- at last! -- I stand upon thespot where, seven years since, I should have stood, here, with this woman, whose arm, more than the little strength wherewith I have crept hitherward, sustains me at this dreadful moment, from grovelling down upon my face! Lo, the scarlet letter which Hester wears! Ye have all shuddered at it! Wherever her walk hath been -- wherever, so miserably burdened, she may have hopedto find repose -- it hath cast a lurid gleam of awe and horrible repugnance round about her. But there stood one in the midst of you, at whose brand of sin and infamy ye have not shuddered!"

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850), p. 1469

Most of the spectators testified to having seen, on the breast of the unhappy minister, a SCARLET LETTER – the very semblance of that worn by Hester Prynne – imprinted in the flesh.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850), p. 1470

For the next session“Democratic Vistas”:

Read and prepareWalt Whitman

“Song of Myself”

from Leaves of Grass (1855)

plus bio sketch