Along the Wayside, Fall 2022

Abstract

Ever since the publication in 1993 of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, scholars have been challenged to move beyond traditional frameworks for analyzing British and American literature. Gilroy’s paradigm-shifting work asked readers to consider the Atlantic as a cultural and political system emergent from transatlantic slavery, and it pushed us beyond our geographic and national comfort zones. Considering the fact that Romanticism and the global slave trade emerged simultaneously, and that many of our aesthetic, philosophical, and literary categories were predicated upon this historical coincidence, this paper explores the global afterlife of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, with attention to issues of captivity, servitude, cruelty, and belonging. In particular, the paper engages a cluster of texts written by black women, including Harriet E. Wilson’s 1859 Our Nig, Maryce Conde’s 2009 novel I, Tituba, and Toni Morrison’s novels Beloved (1987) and A Mercy (2008), which all talk back in some way to Hawthorne’s 1850 novel. Deploying what bell hooks calls “the oppositional gaze,” a gaze that interrogates whiteness and critiques its gaze at blackness, each of these authors supplements the constitutive exclusion of race in Hawthorne’s novel, an exclusion contextualized by his dependence on descriptions of slavery such as Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative of the Life and Sophia Peabody’s 1830 Letters from Cuba. This paper finds Black Atlantic reassemblages of agency, a resocializing rapport with death, and a transformational politics at work wherein the slave sublime becomes the hauntological sublime, an aesthetic mode that haunts readers with the gaps and lacunae in the historical record.Abstract: Barbara Godard, the Canadian critic, described feminist discourse as “an emancipatory practice, a political discourse directed toward the construction of new meanings and is focused on subjects becoming in/by language” (“Theorizing Feminist Discourse / Translation,” 1989). Godard explains that a feminist text should create space for new meanings and subjects that are marginalized in the society due to patriarchal oppression. Furthermore, she states that feminist discourse creates radical space through disturbing dominant language and discourse. According to Godard, translation, in this theory of feminist discourse, is production, not reproduction, since the feminist translator creates new meanings that did not exist in the male-dominated language before. Thinking through this theory, I argue that the famous Iranian author Simin Daneshvar, through her translation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, creates a new space for the marginalized feminist discourse in the male-dominated literary canon of twentieth-century Iran. Through her own words in the preface and changes she makes to the body of work in the process of translation, Daneshvar produced an “ideal” woman that was absent in Persian literature.Across the nineteenth century, translation was a growing industry in Iran. With growing literacy across the country, cultural commodities proliferated; presses were founded; books, newspapers, and magazines emerged. During the modernization period of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many authors started translating a variety of books from different languages for the sake of participating in national modernization. Works of translation created new sources that disrupted the existing paradigms of originality and translation. Among these sources of narratives of modernity, women’s fictional writings, either in the form of the short story, novel, or translation, like that of Daneshvar, offer us an alternative history of modernity that fulfills what was left unsaid by the male-dominated literary canon.Abstract: Teaching Hawthorne’s short stories in twenty-first-century China to university students necessitates multimodal engagement, reception, and response. As in the United States, Chinese university students will likely see Hawthorne’s past as another country, filled with unfamiliar customs, religious contexts, governance styles, and literary style. And, as in the US, popular adaptations of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, such as Roland Joffé’s 1995 film version with Demi Moore and Gary Oldman, will play a significant role in student impressions of Hawthorne and in their learning.We explore how students of English and American literature at Northeastern University in Shenyang, China, engage with selected Hawthorne short stories—“The Birthmark,” “Young Goodman Brown,” “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter”—in a context of contemporary film culture of China and the West, including The Scarlet Letter, and with multimodal and multigenre responses. Students in literature circles will construct historical, cultural, and geographical contexts for these stories by revising the texts for proposed film productions, examining what it means to reset Hawthorne in ways to appeal to a Chinese audience.Our team-taught, cross-continent approach to teaching Hawthorne’s short stories and guiding students in these projects will include surveys of student engagement with the stories and analysis of final projects. We will report on how creative responses to the stories lead to insights and understandings of Hawthorne across cultures and centuries.Exciting News: The Poe Studies Association and the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society, in partnership with Sorbonne Université, Université Paris Cité, and Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, will host the next joint conference—“Poe and Hawthorne in Paris”—in the City of Lights on July 2–4, 2025. More information and CFP will follow.In Concord, while participating in the Thoreau Conference during July 2022, I visited the terrific Barrow Bookstore and came across a wonderful poster with Hester suitably wearing a mask for COVID protection, with an appropriate saying: “I know it’s annoying. But after a while, you get used to wearing things you don’t like.”Barrow Bookstore creates several lines of literary-themed gifts inspired directly from the words of authors such as Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Thoreau, Emerson, and others. According to the artist, Ms. Jaimee Joroff, “The poster was our way of trying to bring some humor to the prolonged COVID response we’re all still going through. We figured if Hester could do it, so could we.”