The Scarlet LetterStudy Guide

for

Introduction through Ch. 17 (p. 559)Readings through Mar. 17

English 241, Spring 2014Tracey Creech

• Nathaniel Hawthorne, b. 1804, d. 1864• Published The Scarlet Letter in 1850• Romanticism, “Dark Romanticism,” Transcendentalism

The Salem Custom House• Introduces novel with semi-autobiographical sketch called “The Custom House”• Controversial; mentions real people, is critical• Complains about boredom, incompetence• Describes the circumstances of his firing from surveyor job• Explains his family’s history in Salem

• Painting: “Trial of George Jacobs, August 5, 1692” by Thomkins Matteson, 1855• Salem witch trials; 20 people executed• Judge John Hathorne (Hawthorne’s ancestor)

• Did Hawthorne actually find a scarlet letter A and notes about “Hester Prynne” when he worked in the Custom House?

Hawthorne's "Decapitation"• Hawthorne describes his dismissal from his job as a “decapitation”• Says the novel may be called the “Posthumous Papers of a Decapitated Surveyor”• Says the gloominess of the novel may be “due to the period of hardly accomplished revolution, and still seething turmoil, with which the story shaped itself”

• Marie Antoinette at the guillotine, Paris, France,1793

• Hester at the scaffold: 1926 silent movie still (left); book illustration by Mary Hallock Foote, 1878 (right)

• Pearl: innocent, evil, or…?• Pg. 500: “The child could not be made amenable to rules”• “the warfare of Hester’s spirit … was perpetuated in Pearl”• The flesh-and-blood evidence of Hester’s sin/lawbreaking

• Pearl’s isolation from the community• Fatherless, friendless• Loneliness, anger

• Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth• Which is worse: sin or revenge?• Secrets: privilege or curse?

• Chillingworth and Dimmesdale are

book lovers• But who is the better “reader”?• What is “written” on Dimmesdale’s heart?• Who else in this story loves books?

• The forest: What is its meaning?• A scene of freedom, sin, escape, privacy• “Not the town”

• The forest as the domain of the Native American (cf. Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans)• Chillingworth’s occupation: natural herbalist

• Why does Dimmesdale want to stand on the scaffold at night?• Why does Pearl insist on standing on the scaffold at noon?

• The problem of the gaze of the other as inherently shameful (cf. existentialism)• Pg. 541: Hester “assumed a freedom of speculation”

• Is Hester a radical revolutionary?• Pg. 540-1: “The world’s law was no law for her mind. It was an age in which the human intellect, newly emancipated, had taken a more active and a wider range than for many centuries before.

Men of the sword had overthrown nobles and kings. … Hester Prynne imbibed this spirit. She assumed a freedom of speculation, then common enough on the other side of the Atlantic, but which our forefathers, had they known of it, would have held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the scarlet letter.”

• Pg. 541: “Every thing was against her. The world was hostile.”

• “A tendency to speculation, though it may keep a woman quiet, as it does a man, yet makes her sad. She discerns, it may be, such a hopeless task before her. As a first step, the whole system of society is to be torn down, and built up anew.

… The scarlet letter had not done its office.”

• Pg. 558-9: “Leave this wreck and ruin here where it hath happened! Meddle no more with it! Begin all anew! Hast thou exhausted possibility in the failure of this one trial? Not so! The future is yet full of trial and success. There is happiness to be enjoyed! There is good to be done! … Preach! Write! Act! Do any thing, save to lie down and die! … Up, and away!