Historia literatury amerykańskiej 19.01.2012

“The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne

1. “Hawthorne’s preface to The Scarlet Letter is regarded as essential to its understanding.”

Discuss the importance/function of “The Custom House”.

The Custom House represents the past. The narrator is surrounded by the elderly people and
feels tired and bored of working there. The place itself suggests the place is dead. It is said
that it is dusty, uncared, there’s sand on the floor. The narrator himself doesn’t really fit in
that place. In the place of the past he’s the odd one, out. He doesn’t really belong. There’s
similarity between the narrator and Hester Prynne as both of them do not fit to the
communities they are in. The most important thing about the introduction is that it
introduces the story of the Scarlet Letter. He founds an old manuscript with the scarlet “A”
on the cover. It is a story of Hester Prynne which tells about her sin of the adultery. The
narrator presents the difference between the story and history. The author is the author.
Hawthorne did have one ancestor who was one of the judges in Salem. He even changed his
name (adding ‘w’). It is written from the 19

th

perspective but this is the story of the past, of

the puritan community 200 hundred years ago. It is a sort of a critic of the puritan society.

2+3. Define the most important themes of Hawthorne’s novel. What is the story about?
What are the symbolic meanings of the scarlet letter? Discuss the symbol with reference
to Pearl, Dimmesdale, Chillingworth. What does it mean that ‘The Scarlet Letter’ is a
symbolist novel.

This story is about the sin of adultery, knowledge, revenge, alienation. ‘A’ stands for adultery
but there’s more meaning of the letter which reveals during the story. Pearl, Hester’s
daughter is a fruit of the sin, she is inscribed into a natural world. At the same time she is the
truth-telling. Symbolists novel is a story about the symbols (many of).

Quotations:

Ad. 4.: What do we associate Puritanism with? Puritans believed in the simplicity, they were opposite
to the hierarchy. They didn’t even build churches, just a simple houses of meeting. It hardly didn’t
have any connection with the religion, the power of the institution was left behind. The idea was to
create a sort of the model community. They wanted to create something pure.
The Puritans in “The Scarlet Letter”. Work is the most important value in the life straight after God.
They were extremely radical in their views – when they saw Hester leaving the prison they were
whispering she should be punished for death. The community is about what is visible and invisible,
about what you can see and about you cannot see. The worst part of Hester’s sin was that she
couldn’t hide it. The puritan community kinda transformed into the society that in fact they were
trying to escape from (hypocrisy, hierarchy, the struggle of power).

Ad. 5.: Hester was a sinner and Pearl was a fruit of her sin. That’s why they were scorn, rejected from
the society. Because of the distance Hester can see more, she can observe the society from the

other, own perspective. She is different from the ordinary Puritan woman. She doesn’t associate with
the people that are also condemned. She draws everyone’s attention because once she’s seen
everybody knows her sin (the scarlet letter indicates her sin). She lives between the culture and
nature. Puritans believed in the civilization but at that time the wilderness was stronger. Natives
were being devilish. The margins is the space of interesting, it is the place where the things are
changing. Why are the Puritans scared of wilderness? Because they’re afraid witchcraft and they
considered it this way. The wilderness represents nature and it’s the opposite of the civilization, it is
a place where the devil and witches reside.

Ad. 6.: Sending the sinners to the wilderness was sentencing them to death because nobody could
survive in the wilderness. People who were sent there did not disappear but they simply start
residing in the margins of the society. Hester is marked as a sinner and she’s exposited, shown to
everybody, surrounded by the members of the community who gaze at the scarlet letter on her
breast. They do not see her present but her past in which she has committed her sin. Shame needs
audience.

Ad. 9.: Mistress Hibbins is a widow who lives with her brother, Governor Bellingham, in a luxurious
mansion. She is commonly known to be a witch who ventures into the forest at night to ride with the
“Black Man.” Her appearances at public occasions remind the reader of the hypocrisy and hidden evil
in Puritan society.



Next time
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman