The Scarlet Letter—Again???

Abstract

My general subject is Hawthorne the writer and the man. I'll begin and end with that; but since if you're like me, or my children, or many of my students, you read The Scarlet Letter in high school, I'd like to focus on that book, reach out to others as they come up, then return to Hawthorne again. Chances are, even if you had a very good English teacher as I did, you "respected" The Scarlet Letter but didn't enjoy it much or see what it had to do you with you in the 20th or 21st century--Hawthorne writing in the mid-19th about the mid-17th and in a style that even in his own time seemed quaint and old-fashioned. I've titled this talk " The Scarlet Letter--Again???" to suggest a certain rolling of the eyes, as in "We know all about that. Do we really have to go through it again?" That same English teacher who taught you The Scarlet Letter may also have told you that "a great book is one that grows for you as you grow and changes with time." A cliche, but true--sometimes, with some books, to an extent. I love The Great Gatsby. I read it at 16 on my own and was smitten by it; I memorized the ending, for its sound, with only the vaguest idea what it meant. I read it again in high school English, in college, and in graduate school, and I've taught it many times since. It stopped changing for me at about age 30--the age Nick Carraway turns within the book and a year older than Fitzgerald was when he wrote it. Fitzgerald did his work so well that Gatsby's story becomes everyone's and becomes America's. Whenever I read the book I am drawn back into it and am 16 and 22 and 30 again, in addition to what I am at the time, but the book doesn't change a great deal for me, though works like Ronald Berman's" The Great Gatsby" and Modern Times can help enrich its cultural context. Gatsby is a great book, but maybe after 30 we have other concerns than what Fitzgerald called "the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world that you don't care whether they are right or wrong so long as they partake of the magical glory."' I doubt many 16 year olds memorize the ending of The Scarlet Letter or are moved by the story of Hester Prynne as they are by Gatsby's. Those of my students who read the book in high school and again a few years later in college usually like it much better the second time, not because the teaching is better but because they are better readers and have lived more. We change; cultural contexts also change. Hardly anyone in the 1950s and early '60s, a heyday of Hawthorne criticism, thought to talk about gender, sexuality, and feminism. "Presentism" is the imposition of contemporary interests and values upon a text, but these themes are prominent within the text; they were simply not, for a long time, on most peoples critical radar. As readers we also have our private radars--habits of thinking, underlinings in old editions, passages in a text that leap out at us and passages that don't. Sometimes when I come across a quotation in a student essay or read The Scarlet Letter in a fresh copy, I'll be astonished--"Hawthorne said that?"--and the book will rearrange itself for me like a landscape after a seismic shock. Hawthorne's public style is generally so quiet and formal that it is easy to overlook how much is packed into it, how filled it is with qualification and ambiguity, and how, like a Moebius strip, it can turn back on itself in irony or self-deconstruction. More than almost any American text I have taught, The Scarlet Letter continues to surprise. Hawthorne himself surprises, not least, as Melville recognized, because he lulls us into thinking he won't. From the first, readers had the illusion of comfortably "knowing" him, thanks partly to the chattiness and seeming candor of his autobiographical prefaces. Hawthorne himself mocked the idea that "a little preliminary talk" about externals amounted to anything confessional: "These things hide the man, instead of displaying him," he remarked in his Preface to The Snow-Image. …