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The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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Nov 19, 2019 Antonomasia added it · review of another edition

Shelves: divine-comedy-booklovers, american, historical-fiction, 2019, 19th-century, religion, ebooks-kindle, 1001-books

It can feel triumphant to finish a classic you'd previously abandoned for dullness - but The Scarlet Letter has also left me confused about how to rate it. I found it a book of two halves (one half actually being two thirds, and the other, one third). Through chapter XV (it's an American book, so I'll use this useful Americanism here) it was emotionally unengaging, with the additional annoyance of historical inaccuracies. It was more or less the same book which, sometime between 2002-05, I hadn' It can feel triumphant to finish a classic you'd previously abandoned for dullness - but The Scarlet Letter has also left me confused about how to rate it. I found it a book of two halves (one half actually being two thirds, and the other, one third). Through chapter XV (it's an American book, so I'll use this useful Americanism here) it was emotionally unengaging, with the additional annoyance of historical inaccuracies. It was more or less the same book which, sometime between 2002-05, I hadn't got anything like that far into. Definitely only three stars there. Then from XVI, with its promising title (to me - probably not to the average US highschooler), 'A Forest Walk', it became something quite different.

Hawthorne called The Scarlet Letter 'a romance' - a common term in the mid-19th century for a novel that had a strong psychological dimension, as one of the introductions explained. (I read the old Penguin intro by Nina Baym, which was interesting and lively - as well as the one in this current Oxford edition.) In that final third, The Scarlet Letter becomes a story that could also fit the modern definition of a romance. I don't read a lot of romance, and most of the great romances of classic literature have left me cold, puzzled as to why millions of readers love them (e.g. Elizabeth Bennett and Darcy; Jane Eyre and Rochester). But in the final third of The Scarlet Letter, the central characters pressed many of the same buttons that Dorothea and Will Ladislaw of Middlemarch did for me. It barely mattered that there seemed something cheap, contrived and melodramatic about the scenario, like elements of a teenage fantasy set in antiquated prose. I became terribly sentimental over both of them, wishing things would work out - although I knew they almost certainly wouldn't, given what I'd already heard about the ending of Hawthorne's novel. I can absolutely imagine reading the last third again (and I don't re-read much). But the rest of it? What a slog - no thanks.

Although the Oxford introduction, by Cindy Weinstein, is overly abstract at times (the stuff about Pearl and belonging should be in a postgrad essay or more specialist textbook, not here) I was glad of the forewarning about the shifting attitudes of Hawthorne's omniscient third-person narrator. In retrospect I find these changes annoying and a bit manipulative, though in that final third, when I was happier with the placement of my own sympathies, I could see how I had responded to them as a reader. Around half-way through, the respective stories of Hester Prynne and of Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale seemed an absurdly neat fit for strands of social-media pop feminism. The woman, Hester stoically and strongly endures but there is relatively little detail. (It's mostly tell-not-show.) Meanwhile it seemed that far more page-time was devoted to minutiae of the man's mental suffering and expounding just how sensitive and clever he was. The details of the bullying he was experiencing were minimal - it therefore ended up sounding as if it was nowhere near as bad as Hester's experience. The reader can't see much of what is happening outside his mind, and therefore not why it has such a profound effect on him. I guess Hawthorne was trying to do what his late contemporary Poe had done, using hints of horror to create an overwhelming sense of dread - but as far as I'm concerned, he falls flat. The novel should make it more convincing that both characters' suffering is profound, while their constitutions are different.

At least in the final third, there is more on what Hester thought about during these years, but that still leaves the earlier part of the story imbalanced. Likewise, we eventually get some hints as to why and how the original adultery may have happened, but I felt it was in the wrong place in the book. How would it not have been thought about repeatedly in the preceding seven years? Perhaps it was excluded to please the original prudish readers of the 1850s (who nonetheless prided themselves on being less censorious than their Puritan forebears) - but Hawthorne could still have shown something without graphic detail about sex. The total absence, set alongside numerous other novels of the time which contained love scenes, is disappointing and, I felt that, for a 20th-21st century reader used to flashback scenes, this leaves a hollow at the heart of the book.

Hester's strength and independence were emphasised repeatedly in introductions, leaving me puzzled why I'd never heard more people talk about The Scarlet Letter as a feminist novel. The reasons soon became obvious once I started reading the novel itself. In the second chapter - and several times later in the novel - Hawthorne rather unfavourably contrasts sturdy, voluble Puritan women born and bred in 'old England' with the delicate flowers of his own time - he was evidently a proponent of Victorian ideals of women as physically fragile, socially deferential and morally refined. (And displays ideas that now seem bizarre and quaint about how humans might become apparently so different physically from their ancestors in only 200 years.) The narrative voice is certainly not feminist by contemporary standards. But Hester is highly capable, brave and honest, a free thinker and possessed of great self-control (if one discounts the great slip-up that leads to her outcast status - and in any case readers are reminded that many in the settlement are guilty too - she was just unlucky enough to be caught). Her role in the settlement may be traditionally feminine as a seamstress, carer and nurse, but in character she could be said to be manly - one of these solid Puritan women living "within less than half a century of the period when the man-like Elizabeth had been the not altogether unsuitable representative of the sex", as Hawthorne says. This stands in contrast to the sensitive, delicate Arthur Dimmesdale, who seems like a Romantic poet or a late-20th century androgynous rock star marooned in the wrong time and vocation: physically and mentally fragile, morally ambiguous as both sinned against and sinner, inspired and magnetically charismatic. According to traditional gender roles, Hester is more man than he is. She is also a counterweight to Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, and other tragic heroines of the 19th century European adultery novel, as screenwriter Tom Perrotta says in the foreword to the new Penguin edition. At the end one could see Hester as a feminist heroine, but, because of the attitudes in the narrative, the whole book as a feminist novel is more difficult to argue to 21st century sensibilities.

The background material was more interesting to read than much of the book itself, which perhaps isn't the way it should be. It was quite fascinating to learn about the rumpus caused by Hawthorne's portrayal of some of his former colleagues in the curious prefatory how-I-didn't-write-this-book chapter 'The Custom House'. (Understandable - he is remarkably rude about one of them, yet doesn't actually seem to dislike the man a great deal. Why on earth not save it for the description of a fictional character?) Apparently Hester's child Pearl was closely based on Hawthorne's eldest daughter … Understanding she is drawn from coherent observations of a real person, I started to recognise and classify a number of of her eccentricities, until, reading of her "manifesting her reluctance by odd grimaces" I had the odd sensation of seeing how a detached adult might have described a characteristic of my own aspie-type meltdowns at her age. Hawthorne may have been strongly attached to his own family (especially his mother - he wrote The Scarlet Letter, or perhaps rather, he wrote Hester, in response to her death), and I had always imagined him as a writer apart from others - so it was a great surprise (as it surely wouldn't have been for an American reader) to learn of his connections with the Transcendentalists. That he was a neighbour of the (IMO) far more interesting Thoreau and Emerson gave me added motivation to finish The Scarlet Letter this time.

A huge amount has already been said about The Scarlet Letter over the last 170 years, yet it seems endlessly adaptable to contemporary concerns and playful interpretations; this is evidently why it endures, despite the numbers who find it boring. Perrotta, for one, characterises it as a coming out story. My own, mostly tongue-in-cheek interpretation is that it is one of the roots of a mass psychodrama in which millions of Americans hated being forced to read this book at school, so they collectively create a communication ecosystem - via social media - that replicates its public-shaming theme on a vast international scale. As the novel's heroine experiences something like post-traumatic growth (a positive in a literary heroine, but not necessarily a representative example of how real people manage) they are unfortunately convinced on some level that the enterprise is not as bad as it is. Once The Scarlet Letter was an analogy for McCarthyism; perhaps now it could be read alongside Jon Ronson.

(Read & reviewed November 2019) ...more

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