The Scarlet Letter review notes

REVIEW NOTES ON THE SCARLET LETTER

As promised, here are some notes on our discussion of The Scarlet Letter. In class, we spent some time considering the way Hawthorne plays with history, and with the relationship between history and fiction. We looked at the narrator’s description of his method in "The Custom-house," playing particular attention to the moments in which Hawthorne seems to be almost joking with us about the status of the narrative. We also looked at a passage from the preface to The House of the Seven Gables in which Hawthorne discusses the relationship between the novel and the romance (see pp. 1386-7 of the Norton Anthology; note that we’re not so much concerned with distinguishing between the novel and the romance as with Hawthorne’s ideas on the subject).

We also considered a few historicist readings of The Scarlet Letter, and some of you expressed interest in further reading on the topic. Here are the citations for the essays we discussed in class:

Colacurcio, Michael J. "Footsteps of Ann Hutchinson: The Context of The Scarlet Letter." ELH: A Journal of English Literary History 39.3 (Sept. 1972): 459-494.
This essay considers The Scarlet Letter against the background of the Antinomian Controversy.

---. "‘The Woman's Own Choice’: Sex, Metaphor, and the Puritan ‘Sources’ of The Scarlet Letter." New Essays on The Scarlet Letter. Ed. Michael J. Colacurcio. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.
This essay considers The Scarlet Letter against John Winthrop’s account of the period that the novel describes, with particular attention to questions of gender, marriage, and Puritan theology.

Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Office of The Scarlet Letter. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991.
This book-length study considers The Scarlet Letter’s nineteenth-century backgrounds, reading it against the political situation in mid-nineteenth-century America, with attention to issues of woman suffrage, abolition, and sectionalism. We focused on Bercovitch’s comments on why Hester resumes the A at the end of the novel.

There have been several more historicist readings of the text published more recently, but these should suffice to get you started.

We also spent some time on the A itself. We listed some of the A words in the text, and considered the multiple meanings that the A accumulates in the course of the text. We also considered the other As in the text, for example the A in the sky and the mysterious mark (is it an A?) on Dimmesdale’s chest. As you review, you might consider how the meanings of these symbols are construed by the various characters, and by us as readers. Are symbols in this text fundamentally unstable? Are their meanings determined by communities of readers?

We also talked about various other issues, including the character of Pearl and the ways in which other characters interpret her, the relationship between nature and society, the rosebush at the text’s opening, and the ways in which some of you heard echoes of Margaret Fuller in Hawthorne’s description of Hester. I enjoyed our discussions, and hope that you did as well.

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