Along the Wayside

Abstract

AMERICAN LITERATURE ASSOCIATION, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, JULY 7–11, 2021The following panels are planned:Hawthorne and FatherhoodOrganized by the Nathaniel Hawthorne SocietyChair: Charles Baraw, Southern Connecticut State University “Divided Paternity: The Scarlet Letter's Unstable American Father,” Muhammad Imran, University of Sahiwal“The Sacred Father De-gendered: Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter,’” Eitetsu Sasaki, Momoyama Gakuin University [Virtual Presentation]“‘The Death of the Father and the Death of Romance in Hawthorne,” Ariel Silver, Columbus Ohio Institute of ReligionHawthorne and AestheticsOrganized by the Nathaniel Hawthorne SocietyChair: Ariel Silver, Columbus Ohio Institute of Religion “Come Home, Dear Child—Poor Wanderer”: Hawthorne's Struggles with Theological Aesthetics,” Amy Oatis, University of the Ozarks [Virtual Presentation]“‘Playing (with) Fantasy: Hawthorne's Aesthetics of Reading in The House of the Seven Gables,” Yuta Ito, University of Utah“Hawthorne's Notebooks and The Marble Faun: The Aesthetics of Revolution,’” Sharon Worley, Houston Community CollegeKLAUS P. STITCH COMMENTS ON HESTER PRYNNE IN BERLIN AND THE SCARLET LETTER AS SUBTEXTKLAUS P. STICH, A FORMER MEMBER OF THE NHR EDITORIAL BOARD, HAS SUBMITTED THE FOLLOWING THREE PARAGRAPHS ABOUT A RECENTLY PUBLISHED BOOK, JENNIFER CHIAVERINI’S RESISTANCE WOMEN (2019), THAT MAY BE OF INTEREST TO HAWTHORNE SCHOLARS:“There is no remoteness of life and thought,” declares Hawthorne's Peaceable Man, “no hermetically sealed seclusion, …., into which the disturbing influences of this war do not penetrate.” His 1862 comments on the American Civil War are no less fitting as a response to Hitler's war against humanity. Today's readers of Hawthorne do not often chance upon connections to his work in contemporary American fiction, especially not in a historical novel about Hitler's social, cultural, and military wars. In Jennifer Chiaverini's Resistance Women (New York: William Morrow, 2019), The Scarlet Letter becomes a subtext in her delineation of the marriage in 1926 of Mildred Fish, a U. of Wisconsin graduate student, to Arvid Harnack, a visiting German scholar, their move to Berlin in 1930, and their pivotal role in the underground resistance during Hitler's rise to Power. The Harnacks and several others in the novel such as the U.S. Ambassador William Dodd and his daughter Martha are historical characters who became active in the resistance movement against Hitler.Mildred's well-received lectures at the U. of Berlin on American literature, especially her talk on “Romantic and Married Love in the Works of Hawthorne,” turn Hester Prynne into a quasi-icon of sexual and political rebellion. Her scarlet letter “A” implicitly comes to stand for Anti-authoritarianism: rejecting Hitler's ideal of “Kinder, Kirche, Kűche [Children, Church, Cuisine]” for women's social role and rebelling against his virulent totalitarianism. Moreover, the unexpected power of Hester's boldly embroidered “A” makes one of the Jewish women of the resistance toy briefly with the idea of transforming her yellow cloth star, a Star of David to be worn by Jews in public, into “a gorgeous [one] … of golden satin embellished with beads and elaborately embroidered with ebony silk thread.” Yet, what created mere outrage in the Puritans’ Boston would surely have meant death in Hitler's Berlin.Inevitably, death by execution is the fate of the Harnacks and most others in the resistance movement, except for a very few only gazing as quasi-Hawthornean bystanders at the margin of social upheaval. Side-stepping, I am thinking here of, for instance, Robin Molineux witnessing the “inflammation of the popular mind” and “trumpets vomit[ing] a horrid breath,” as well as Faith Brown's husband who, to borrow from Emily Dickinson, lacked a microscope in his emergencies. And I am certainly thinking of more than a few for whom Hester's letter “A” started Chiaverini's narrative of their resistance.