English 251: American Lit. (1600-1865)

INTRODUCTION + READING ASSIGNMENT + WRITING ASSIGNMENT

Assignment 21:
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (Part 2)

Back to the circumstances of "The Custom-House," just for a moment. Though Hawthorne depicts himself as seemingly above or at least standing aside of the politics of his appointment as "Surveyor of the Revenue," he was deeply involved in them. In 1846, for example, he had fired two Whig custom-house officers and replaced them with fellow Democrats; later he was involved in a kick-back scheme whereby his Democratic co-workers were given higher salaries than his Whig counterparts. When Massachusetts Whigs picked up this story, they blasted Hawthorne in the local papers and bided their time. With Taylor's 1849 inauguration, they sacked Hawthorne immediately; then, within weeks they were promising readers of the June 21, 1849, Salem Register a thorough "exposure of the rottenness of the Custom House managers," Hawthorne chief among them. This is "the besom of reform" which Hawthorne says swept him from his post. In support of him, Democrats lined up behind Hawthorne, and condemned his firing. Hawthorne, meanwhile, was worked up enough to write his friend, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: "I must confess it stirs up a little of the devil within me to find myself hunted by these political bloodhounds.... I may perhaps select a victim, and let fall a little drop of venom in his heart, that shall make him writhe before the grin of the multitude." Hawthorne was, at the time, completing the draft of The Scarlet Letter.

One point is that Hawthorne's literary masterpiece was written during disruptive times, in a climate of "reform" and factional dispute that prompted anger and revenge. Remember, too, how Hawthorne says in "The Custom-House" that he would never have been inspired to write the novel had he not been dragged "through the public prints, in my decapitated state." Readers do well, therefore, to ask: How does Hawthorne's masterful study of hidden corruption and reform reflect upon its times? Does it target a "victim," into whose heart it injects "a little drop of venom"? If so, who (or what) is that victim; and how does the venom function?

These can be rich questions for any reader of the novel. Consider, for a moment, just of few of their implications. For instance, while Arthur Dimmesdale is a clear case of hypocrisy and corruption in high places, what's more complex is the quality and effect of his reform. After meeting Hester Prynne in the forest, where the two declare their mutual love and plot an escape from Massachusetts, Dimmesdale is seen returning to town and experiencing "a total change...of moral code." He's a reformed man; yet what does that mean? In the first place we should note that he immediately begins entertaining "wicked" fantasies about people; later, to a church deacon he fantasizes about blaspheming against church rituals; to a widow in mourning he wants (cruelly) to give in irrefutable argument against the possibility of an afterlife; he's tempted to drop a licentious "germ of evil" into the heart of a young virgin who clearly idolizes him; and--still worse--he thinks of whispering evil things to children and even running off with a drunken, swearing sailor out on a binge. Is this Hawthorne's way of signifying the potential vileness in the heart of the reformed hypocrite?

Still more interesting, in giving his readers a refined form of two then-popular kinds of novels--the historical romance, and the novel about moral scandal--Hawthorne is in a sense pandering to popular tastes under the guise of high art. For example, he gives them a novel about the secret sexual escapades of preachers, which scholars tell us was a common theme in sensational fictions of the period. And the hypocrisy of its preacher, who reforms too late, is counterbalanced by a strong, morally far-sighted heroine, Hester Prynne, who has reformed early and then speaks at key moments about a new age dawning for American women. The novel's next-to-last paragraph, in fact, is filled with such reformist speculation, where Hester thinks about establishing "the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground," a new relation of which she may in fact "be the destined prophetess." That these words were published just 18 months after the Seneca Falls Convention, which galvanized the women's suffrage movement, is a historical context of key significance.

When we remember how Hawthorne, in "Wakefield," had practically erased the woman's viewpoint, his writing in The Scarlet Letter thus begins to take on more still more striking, reform-minded colorations. And yet, does his cynicism about Dimmesdale's reform also darken that of Hester? It's a tough question. As you read, keep such themes, and their complexities, in mind.

Reading Assignment

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter Chs. I-XII (pp. 1331-1391).

Writing Assignment

In Chapter I, Hawthorne stands a symbolic sentry beside Hester's debut from the prison-house door: that sentry is the rosebush, which had perhaps "sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson." What may it symbolize?
In Chapter II, what facts are hinted at, with respect to Hester's birthplace, upbringing, class-status, and marriage, before her arrival in the New World? Summarize them, and briefly speculate on their significance.
Note the number of moments, in the novel's first half, when Hawthorne's narrator compares "our days" (the mid-19th century) to Hester's time (the mid-17th). What are the main differences stressed in such moments? Do they, perhaps, serve as a commentary on "our days"? Briefly, how?
Focus for a moment on "little Pearl": How, and why, does Hester dress the child so? What other traits does Pearl embody, in the story?
When Roger Chillngworth appears, in Chapter III, where has he been, and what has he been learning during that previous time? What facts do we learn about him in subsequent chapters?
To a large extent, the plot of The Scarlet Letter hinges on Hester's refusal to "speak out the name of [her] fellow-sinner" (see Chapter II). Yet, tracing this motif of names, we can go still further: for "Roger Chillingworth" is a false, made-up name (as the first sentence of Chapter IX reminds readers); and the name "Pearl" will be differently interpreted by various speakers, including the narrator, just as Hester's "A" will be differently interpreted by all. Certainly, these signs of the absence and/or the complication of a clear, determinate meaning lead into the narrator's discussion of language, in Chapter XI ("The Interior of a Heart"), then into Dimmesdale's midnight "vigil" of Chapter XII. In those chapters we are told that Dirnmesdale's parishioners think he speaks the divine truth, with a Pentecostal "Tongue of Flame"; but does he, and in what sense does or doesn't he? Moreover, how do events in Chapter XII, especially the discussion of heavenly "hieroglyphics" and the appearance of a red letter "A" in the sky, further develop the theme of names and meanings? Discuss, in a three or four well-developed paragraphs.

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