1 Biographical sketch Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804 - 1864

Norton Websource - Authors: Hawthorne http://www.wwnorton.com/naal/frame/hawthorne.htm

Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, a descendant of Puritan ancestors, including one of the judges of the Salem witchcraft trials. He graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine, where he had become friends with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and later president of the United States Franklin Pierce, and then returned to Salem to write. Hawthorne's early endeavors were mostly short stories, but even though he published many of these tales in magazines and literary annuals, they always appeared anonymously and did little to advance his literary career. Only when he published these stories in collections, as in Twice-Told Tales (1837) and Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), did Hawthorne become a recognized literary force. In 1842 he married Sophia Peabody of Salem, and Hawthorne's primary focus turned to family. His masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, appeared in 1850 and became an international sensation, with critics in Great Britain and the United States proclaiming him the finest American romance writer. Other novels by Hawthorne include The House of Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852), and The Marble Faun (1860).

2 The Puritan Legacy

Anthony Trollope (1879): “Hatred, fear and shame are the passions which revel through the book. To show how a man may so hate as to be content to sacrifice everything to his hatred; how another may fear so that, even though it be for the rescue of his soul, he can not bring himself to face the reproaches of the world; how a woman may bear her load of infamy openly before the eyes of all men,—this has been Hawthorne’s object.”

Carl van Doren (1920): “Some ancestral strain accounts for this conception of adultery as an affair not of the civil order but of the immortal soul.”

Chester E. Eisinger (1951): “According to Puritan theory, adherence of the unregenerate man to nature and natural law will lead to a life of riot and confusion… The Puritan held that no one, whether or not in a state of grace, can live by nature alone…. The natural man, according to the Puritans, enjoyed natural liberty, which was antithetical to civil liberty and led to excesses in conduct. To live by natural liberty was to deny the authority of God and the doctrine of original sin. The social covenant could be preserved only by adherence to the doctrine of civil liberty.”

Nina Baym (1970): “The Puritans demanded a far-reaching surrender of selfhood to society, it is true, but always in the service of the vital and holy work which had brought them to the New World.… little resemblance to Puritan theology… no vivid sense of Hell … a doctrine which appears to suggest that man is bound for heaven unless and until he commits a sinful act…. Dimmesdale is a seriously distorted Puritan, and the settlement is distorted in like manner.”

3 Narrative technique: Romance versus Novel

Hawthorne, “Preface to The House of Seven Gables” (1851): “When a writer calls his work a Romance … he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material …. A Novel … is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience… [Romance] has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation.”

Jonathan Arac, “Narrative Forms”, The Cambridge History of American Literature, Volume 21820-1865, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (1995), 714-19:

“Hawthorne, in his longer works, maintains an extremely high proportion of narration to dialogue, while at the same time abandoning most of the materials—that is, the actions— of traditional narration…. Hawthorne defined the special ‘medium’ of the romance writer as ‘moonlight, in a familiar room’ …. The key figure in Hawthorne’s long narratives, in keeping with his theatricality, is the ‘sensitive spectator’ … another of the bridging devices by which Hawthorne’s romances function…. In an Emersonian movement of compensation, the sensitive spectator responds to the absent and contrary features of a face or context, feeling the pain in bravery and the triumph in humility that together make Hester a reconciliation of opposites, embodying the power Coleridge had attributed to the imagination.”

4 Narrative persona: “The Custom-House”

· What is the function of the Introductory section?

· Jonathan Arac, “Narrative Forms”, The Cambridge History of American Literature, Volume 2, 1820-1865, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (1995), 711-13:

“ This interdependence of romance and everyday marks the relation of “The Custom-House to “The Scarlet Letter”, that is, of the introductory sketch of modern life to the long tale of seventeenth century with which it shares a book.… it offers to prove the ‘authenticity’ of the narrative, but it does so by invoking ‘literary propriety’, an appeal to convention rather than a warrant of authenticity. By taking possession through “The Custom-House” of the (physical) scarlet letter as his property, the author of “The Custom-House” personalizes the narrative.

There are many correspondences between the authorial figure of “The Custom-House” and the characters of “The Scarlet Letter”. Both Hester in the tale’s opening and Hawthorne in the sketch are subjected to disapproval by an imagined crowd of Puritan authorities. Both Dimmesdale in the tale and Hawthorne in the sketch are split by a passionate inner life that is wholly at odds with their ‘official’ public position. Both Chillingworth in the tale and Hawthorne in the sketch display prowess as critical analysts of character….A recurrent mood of “The Custom-House” … is harried dejection…. Consider a major rhetorical motif in “The Custom-House”, the insistence that the gloom of “The Scarlet Letter” stems in part from an act of revolutionary victimization…. The sketches of ‘official’ character that occupy Hawthorne in the avowedly antipolitical literary practice of “The Custom-House” correspond to his occupation during his maximal political involvement…”

5 Hawthorne & Emerson: Individualism

the basic symbolic opposition in The Scarlet Letter is that between self and society.

It is the office of dissent to challenge (subvert, combat, and deny) the power of consensus it represents… To endorse Hester as radical is to believe that social change follows from self-realization, not vice-versa; that true revolution is therefore an issue of individual growth rather than group action, and that the conflict it entails betweens elf and society centers not on schemes for institutional change, whether by reform or transformation, but on the freedom of the individual “to begin anew”…

In America, as nowhere else, individualism came to signify a set of social ideals and, more than that, a political and economic system destined to bring society to “ultimate perfection”. This outlook contrasts not only with the European critique but with Emerson’s adversarial ideal… For Emerson individualism centered first and last on the independent self. Progress for him was a function of self-reliance working against the ubiquitous conspiracies of society.

Essentially, Emerson shared the radical skepticism about institutions that Hester voices midway through the novel; he shared the same outrage at the abuses of political office and the ravages of social anomie that Hawthorne details in “The Custom House”…

Emersonian dissent reminds us that ideology in America requires a constant conflict between self and society.

Emerson’s radical individualism (1836-41) invests the self with the boundlessness of free enterprise capitalism in an apparently open, empty, and endlessly malleable New World…. The Scarlet Letter expresses the pressures towards reaggregation at a moment of deep cultural anxiety (1848-51).

The contrast I spoke of between Emerson and Hawthorne is also a radical complementarity: it suggests the capacities of culture to shape the subversive in its own image and thereby, within limits, to be shaped in turn by the radicalism it seeks to contain.

(Source: Sacvan Bercovitch, The Office of `The Scarlet Letter’. Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1991.)

6 Symbolism

Henry James (1880): “In The Scarlet Letter there is a great deal of symbolism; there is, I think, too much.”

The 2 Scarlet Letters

The Forest

Pearl

Mirrors

7 Hester and Feminism

Carl van Doren (1920): “Her story is an allegory of the passion through which the race continues. She feels the ignominy which attends her own irregular behavior and accepts her fate as the reward of evil, but she does not understand it so far as to wish uncommitted the act which her society calls a sin. A harder woman might have become an active rebel; a softer woman might have sunk passively down into unavailing penitence. Hester stands erect, and thinks.”

Sacvan Bercovitch (1991): “We admire Hester neither for her antinomian tendencies (in any sectarian sense), nor for her feminism, nor for any other theological or political heresies embedded in her defiance, and not even (or not primarily) for her attributes as mother and lover, but for what we feel to be her heroic self-reliance, an extraordinary independence of spirit manifested with increasing force through the novel, and doubly reinforced at the end by her capacity to transform remembrances of social wrongs past (and evidence of present social injustice) into a vision of future self-realization.”