America as a Cultural Prisonhouse

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• America as a Cultural Prisonhouse
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
• The Scarlet Letter (1850)

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• Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

• born in Salem, Massachusetts

- Hawthornes 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 owls 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

3

• Short stories Young Goodman Brown (1835),
  Rappaccinis 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 Romance
Techniques
Themes
- the dreamlike
- allegorical abstraction
- the imaginary
- transcendence of the material world
- the supernatural
- operates in the intermediate zone between
fiction reality
- the American past
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the power of blackness (H. Melville)
Hawthornes Negative Romanticism
Young Goodman Brown

• It is that blackness in Hawthorne, of which I
  have spoken, that so fixes and fascinates me.
  (H. Melville)

5

• 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
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• The Scarlet Letter (1850)

Hester Prynne
- tall, with a figure of perfect elegance, on a
large scale.
- young woman
- 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
- independent and isolated woman What we did
had a conscration of ist own
- Commnity thinks she is demon offspring.
Roger Chillingworth
Reverend Dimmesdale
- Hesters godly pastor
- Hesters thought-to-be-dead husband seeking
revenge
- fears public condemnation
- epitomizes a perversion of the human heart
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• Themes

- Adultery (vanishing of traditional beliefs
values)
- Bigotry (morality vs. sin)
- Church (Americas Puritan past)
Key symbols
8
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)
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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.
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Key phrases
- the greatest of all dreams (the American
Dream)
- New Jerusalem (analogy to the biblical
exodus, Gods chosen people)
- City Upon a Hill (John Winthrop, A Model of
Christian Charity, 1630
- English and Indian, freemen and slaves, join
together (Melting Pot)
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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 Hesters 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 -gt
happy ending projected onto the text
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"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
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(No Transcript)
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• For the next session
• Democratic Vistas
• Read and prepare
• Walt Whitman
• Song of Myself
• from Leaves of Grass (1855)
• plus bio sketch