1. As previously foreshadowed, I’ve given this book another go, having first read it in my junior year of high school for my AP Language class (which had a focus on American literature). Sometimes I think of myself as a very good student. I got good grades, and even though I self-identified as a math and physics nerd, I achieved in those other subjects, history and English. But sometimes I wonder if I really was all that. Maybe I was a stupid punk with no patience! Reading Moby Dick made me wonder if I have something in me now that I didn’t have in 2006.
2. Well, I don’t know. By any standards, the pace of The Scarlet Letter is plodding. The book is famed for “psychological depth,” which mostly takes the form of Nathaniel Hawthorne waxing poetic about the particular contours of each and every interaction between the characters. And the non-interactions, too.
For example, Hester prepares to reveal to Arthur that Roger is her husband. I am going to reproduce this unedited. I’m not quoting this because I expect you to read it closely. I just want you to see it laid out here in a great expanse of strokes and serifs:
Again she hesitated, but brought out the words with an effort.—”Thou hast long had such an enemy, and dwellest with him, under the same roof!”
The minister started to his feet, gasping for breath, and clutching at his heart, as if he would have torn it out of his bosom.
“Ha! What sayest thou!” cried he. “An enemy! And under mine own roof! What mean you?”
Hester Prynne was now fully sensible of the deep injury for which she was responsible to this unhappy man, in permitting him to lie for so many years, or, indeed, for a single moment, at the mercy of one whose purposes could not be other than malevolent. The very contiguity of his enemy, beneath whatever mask the latter might conceal himself, was enough to disturb the magnetic sphere of a being so sensitive as Arthur Dimmesdale. There had been a period when Hester was less alive to this consideration; or, perhaps, in the misanthropy of her own trouble, she left the minister to bear what she might picture to herself as a more tolerable doom. But of late, since the night of his vigil, all her sympathies towards him had been both softened and invigorated. She now read his heart more accurately. She doubted not, that the continual presence of Roger Chillingworth,—the secret poison of his malignity, infecting all the air about him,—and his authorized interference, as a physician, with the minister’s physical and spiritual infirmities,—that these bad opportunities had been turned to a cruel purpose. By means of them, the sufferer’s conscience had been kept in an irritated state, the tendency of which was, not to cure by wholesome pain, but to disorganize and corrupt his spiritual being. Its result, on earth, could hardly fail to be insanity, and hereafter, that eternal alienation from the Good and True, of which madness is perhaps the earthly type.
Such was the ruin to which she had brought the man, once,—nay, why should we not speak it?—still so passionately loved! Hester felt that the sacrifice of the clergyman’s good name, and death itself, as she had already told Roger Chillingworth, would have been infinitely preferable to the alternative which she had taken upon herself to choose. And now, rather than have had this grievous wrong to confess, she would gladly have lain down on the forest-leaves, and died there, at Arthur Dimmesdale’s feet.
“O Arthur,” cried she, “forgive me! In all things else, I have striven to be true! Truth was the one virtue which I might have held fast, and did hold fast, through all extremity; save when thy good,—thy life,—thy fame,—were put in question! Then I consented to a deception. But a lie is never good, even though death threaten on the other side! Dost thou not see what I would say? That old man!—the physician!—he whom they call Roger Chillingworth!—he was my husband!”
Did you notice it? The way Hester, rather than actually doing the thing, delivers a prelude that she’s going to do the thing, and then we examine at length the entire context of having not previously done the thing, and then she finally does the thing? I think I have it in me to forgive my 20-years-past self. This is really not the kind of thing a high schooler can be forced to enjoy.
3. One of the parts that stuck out to me the most as a student was the introduction, The Customs-House, an autobiographical account of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s time as an inspector at the U.S. Customs House in Salem. Because it’s long, it has very little directly to do with the story, and it’s long, and it’s just so long.
Two things made it marginally more interesting this go-around. First, I’ve just come off of What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, a comprehensive history of the era (The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850 and the story of Hester and Arthur is circa 1642; the customs house segment covers 1846-1849). So I got to inhabit that context with some interest.
Second, I have a much deeper reading background now, and there’s an interesting commonality I can see now: framing narratives! The whole ostensible reason for the inclusion of the customs house tedium is to tell the story of how Hawthorne came across a set of documents outlining Hester Prynne’s trials and travails. Framing narratives and somewhat intrusive, prominently-voiced narrators seem to be common in this part of the romantic literary tradition. See also: Frankenstein (a set of letters from Robert Walton, arctic explorer, recounting a story he had heard told by Victor), and only a little later Carmilla (epistolary, with a prologue external to the letters) and Dracula (epistolary with a diegetic editor). Oh, uh. I’m seeing a pattern here. That might just be my interests showing, though.
4. Hawthorne complains that Salem and employment at the customs house are stifling his creative passions:
My imagination was a tarnished mirror. It would not reflect, or only with miserable dimness, the figures with which I did my best to people it. The characters of the narrative would not be warmed and rendered malleable by any heat that I could kindle at my intellectual forge. They would take neither the glow of passion nor the tenderness of sentiment, but retained all the rigidity of dead corpses, and stared me in the face with a fixed and ghastly grin of contemptuous defiance.
The very next paragraph:
It was not merely during the three hours and a half, which Uncle Sam claimed as his share of my daily life, that this wretched numbness held possession of me.
Look. I want to sympathize. I’ve lived in uninspiring small-town America before. If you’re the kind of guy who needs to draw vigor from your surroundings, it must be a real drag sometimes.
But dude. If you have a job that works you, at the most, 25 hours a week, you can write. What is this weenie shit?
According to Wikipedia, Hawthorne did have two very young children at the time (born 1844 and 1846). But that’s not the excuse on offer here! And given the era we might make some guesses as to how the labor of child-rearing was distributed in the family.
5. Alright, let’s leave all that behind. Now, the meat of it: I think I have a clear understanding of what confounded me as a high schooler about the story. And that is: what the hell is Roger Chillingworth doing?
You can reread that big honking blockquote above if you want Hawthorne’s description of it. Put more concisely, Roger is supposed to be psychologically torturing Arthur. But how, man? We get a few other metaphors for what’s happening:
“He now dug into the poor clergyman’s heart, like a miner searching for gold”
“… You burrow and rankle in his heart! Your clutch is on his life, and you cause him to die daily a living death; and still he knows you not.”
“… He has felt an influence dwelling always upon him like a curse. He knew, by some spiritual sense,—for the Creator never made another being so sensitive as this,—he knew that no friendly hand was pulling at his heart-strings, and that an eye was looking curiously into him, which sought only evil, and found it.”
But what is he doing?! Nobody says!
And perhaps that’s one of the central conceits of the novel. Hawthorne asks us to accept his dramatic convention here. He asks us to take on faith that Roger is psychologically torturing Arthur, and he doesn’t want us to dwell on the details. In this way he can complete both the necessary functions of the character drama (Roger does nothing that would activate Arthur’s suspicions and cut short the narrative) and of the potential metaphors (Roger as Satan, Roger as the doom of revenge-seekers, Roger as the misguided obsessions of human learning). And sure. We can take this bargain. But I don’t think I enjoy having to do it.
There’s a spectrum of dramatic conventions. There are things that are honestly just plausible: Sherlock Holmes is exceedingly attentive and clever. There are things that are fantastical in a way that is pleasing to the imagination: Victor Frankenstein can create a living man from parts. There are things that are deliberately challenging in their interpretation in ways that even interact with the idea of suspending our disbelief: the Ghost from Hamlet, subject to both interpretive and theological debates.
I don’t know, man. “Roger is torturing Arthur but in a super special way that causes Arthur to suffer extravagantly without ever noticing why, trust” just sort of sticks in my craw. Hawthorne dangles some possibilities about Roger having learned medicine from the Native Americans living near the colony (in the heathen darkness and beyond the bounds of civilization etc. etc., you know, 1850s stuff) but never comes particularly close to substantiating them.
Does this really affect the impact of the story? No, not really. I gotta respect the craft, and this complaint of mine basically has no bearing on what Hawthorne was actually working at.
6. Outside the text: I’ve come across some assertions over the years that Hawthorne was smearing the poor Puritans in his characterization of them as joyless, overzealous prosecutors of scriptural regulation (I know, I know, it’s low-hanging fruit, but here’s a citation for you). “But the Puritans were very pro-sex within marriage!” they say. “The Catholics were the ones who were weird about virginity being even more holy than matrimony!” But guys, that’s not what’s being asserted here. Hawthorne claims in the Scarlet Letter that the statutory penalty for adultery is death (Chapter 3, The Recognition) and that the town magistrates have reduced the sentence to imprisonment and humiliation for extenuating factors. And, uh, they did that. Primary sources attest! John Winthrop wrote about it in his diary!
At this court of assistants one James Britton, a man ill affected both to our church discipline and civil government, and one Mary Latham, a proper young woman about 18 years of age, whose father was a godly man and had brought her up well, were condemned to die for adultery, upon a law formerly made and published in print.
[…]
1. (March) 21.] They were both executed, they both died very penitently, especially the woman, who had some comfortable hope of pardon of her sin, and gave good exhortation to all young maids to be obedient to their parents, and to take heed of evil company, etc.
The twenty-nine year old man and the eighteen year old woman died very penitently. She gave good exhortation, with her last words, it is supposed. This is the pen of John Winthrop! The City on a Hill guy! A novelist laboring under the most fevered prejudices against the church could hardly give voice to a more baleful villain.
I adjudicate the points to Hawthorne on this one.
7. The book is good, I think. The layers of metaphor are fun and interesting (see the discussion of Roger above; these varied roles are even explicitly acknowledged in the text), though the price paid is a truly agonizing pace. I think there’s also something fun about reading this from the craftsman’s point of view, being able to look at this story, appreciate it, and recognize that I would never, ever make most of these creative choices, even if I were to really swing for the artistic fences.
