Blood Re(a)d

Abstract

Nathaniel Hawthorne isn’t the only one. Hawthorne evokes the figure of the spectral Native American by associating his primary characters with Indians; Hester Prynne and her daughter, Pearl, are two of the most recognizable characters from one of the most recognizable books in the American literary canon, and their characterizations stem as much from their percieved association with“Indianness” as they do from Hester’s blood-red “A.” Throughout the novel, Hawthorne subtly connects Hester and Pearl to notions of vanishing and otherworldly “Indianness” to emphasize their outsider status and their liminal space on the edges, literally and figuratively, of Puritan society.2 Like Hawthorne, other early American writers repeatedly invoke images of spectral, supernaturally evil, or eerily vanishing Native Americans in writings ranging from sermons, to political speeches, to personal narratives, and to fiction and poetry. These images appear in early American writings written from within the Euro-American mainstream and even from some that were written outside of it. While many early American writers include references to Native American characters or cultures in their works, several notable writers from America’s infancy and adolescence use the idea of the ghostly or otherworldly Indian explicitly, and often repeatedly. In addition to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Mary Rowlandson, and the poet Philip Freneau all build their now-canonical texts on the idea of Indian magic, evil, wildness, and ghostliness.