The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne

   1850; 190 pages, not counting the 40-page Introduction called “The Custom House”.  New Author? : Yes.  Complete Title: “The Scarlet Letter: A Romance”.  Genre : Highbrow Lit; Classic Literature; Romance; Historical Fiction.  Overall Rating : 7½*/10.

    The Puritan colony in Massachusetts is caught in a moral dilemma.  What should they do about one of their citizens who has fallen into sin?  Hester Prynne recently gave birth to a baby girl.  Unfortunately, it was out of wedlock, and scripture condemns that.  Even worse, Hester refuses to say who the father is.  That's a sure sign that she hasn’t repented.

    All the Puritans agree that Hester needs to be disciplined, but exactly what would be appropriate?  Execution by stoning seems a bit extreme.  One of the colony’s older matrons has suggested branding Hester on the forehead, but that seems like geezer jealousy showing through.

    Still, something must be done to prevent the fine upstanding citizens of Boston from being led astray by Hester’s waywardness.  The last thing the godly settlement needs is for more illegitimate babies to start popping out.

    So let’s force Hester to embroider a big red “A” on the garment covering her bodice.  And let’s tell every good citizen to shun her like she has a contagious disease.  Which is kind of the truth anyway.

    Now we just have to figure out what to do with the child.

What’s To Like...

    The Scarlet Letter is, as everyone who’s ever taken a high school English Lit class, the epitome of American highbrow literature.  It was a smash hit when Nathaniel Hawthorne published it in 1850, undoubtedly helped in no small way (according to Wikipedia) by being one of the first books to be mass-produced in America.

    The main themes of the book are sin, guilt, and religious hypocrisy.  The fact that these were major topics in mid-19^th century was a pleasant surprise to me, and of course, Hawthorne is further pointing out that they were equally prevalent in the Puritan days, when America was in the habit of burning people, especially women, at the stake in the belief that they were witches.  I enjoyed The Scarlet Letter from a historical fiction angle as well.  Hawthorne’s world in the 1840’s was quite different from mine, and his portrayal of Massachusetts life 200 years before that was equally eye-opening.

    I knew the rudiments of the storyline going in, but ran across a lot of events and characters that were unfamiliar to me.  I wasn’t aware of Hawthorne’s complex character development of Hester’s daughter, Pearl.  Roger Chillingworth was totally new to me, as was Mistress Hibbins, who I found to be very intriguing.  Yes, this is fiction, but how could a “freethinker” like her survive, and even thrive, in a Puritan settlement?

    The writing is masterful, complex, and at times difficult to grasp.  Reading Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way a couple weeks ago (reviewed here) was a good way to “get in shape” for Hawthorne.  The book was a lot shorter than I’d always assumed, just 24 chapters covering the 190 pages of the main story, plus a 40-page introduction by Hawthorne which I skimmed briefly, then skipped.  There are some footnotes, presumably added by the modern-day publishing house's editor, to help you with the archaic terms.  But they aren’t “Discworldian” witty, so I mostly ignored them.  You have very few characters to keep track of, and the only setting is Boston in the years 1642-1649.

    The ending (Chapter 23) is dynamic, and includes a bit of a plot twist, which was another pleasant surprise.  Chapter 24 is essentially an epilogue, and I thought it was powerful too.  There’s also a romance angle of course, but not to where male readers will be tempted to quit the book.  And the book isn’t meant to be a mystery either; the identity of Pearl’s father is revealed about halfway through.

Kewlest New Word ...

Nugatory (adj.) : of no value or importance; useless or futile

Others: Contumaciously (adv.); Irrefragable (adj.); and a bunch of archaic words as well.

Excerpts...

    “Worthy Sir,” answered the physician, who had now advanced to the foot of the platform.  “Pious Master Dimmesdale, can this be you?  Well, well, indeed!  We men of study, whose heads are in our books, have need to be straitly looked after!  We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.  Come, good Sir, and my dear friend, I pray you, let me lead you home!”  (pg. 142)

    Heretofore, the mother, while loving her child with the intensity of a sole affection, had schooled herself to hope for little other return than the waywardness of an April breeze; which spends its time in airy sport, and has its gusts of inexplicable passion, and is petulant in its best of moods, and chills oftener than caresses you, when you take it to your bosom; in requital of which misdemeanors, it will sometimes, of its own vague purpose, kiss your cheek with a kind of tenderness, and play gently with your hair, and then be gone about its other idle business, leaving a dreamy pleasure at your heart.  (pg. 162.  One sentence, 12 commas, 2 semicolons, and a period)

“Be true!  Be true!  Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!”  (pg. 231, and cited by the author as the moral of this story)

    Hawthorne’s writing style, although excellent, takes some getting used to.  Like Proust, he goes batshit crazy with commas, an example of which is given in the excerpts, above.  He also seems obsessed with the words “tremulous” and “preternaturally”.  If you decide to read The Scarlet Letter on your Kindle, it would be interesting to see just how frequently these two words appear.  I read it in paperback, so couldn’t check on this.

    Hawthorne also uses a lot of “period” vocabulary and spellings, such as: trode, betokened, fain, betwixt, subtile, adown, bedizen, clew, plash, agone, veriest, cumber, gayety, betimes, ledst, animadversion, galliard, practicable, and tost.  I’m not sure how much of this is 19^th-century lingo, and how much is from the 17^th century.  I note that of those 19 words, spellchecker is okay with all but six of them.  Maybe I’m just vocabulary-deficient.

    7½ Stars.  I’ve been meaning to tackle The Scarlet Letter since last Christmas, when my son pointed out that it is a much shorter novel than I thought.  Serendipitously, when I discovered a local “Free Little Library” in our neighborhood a couple months ago this was one of the few books it contained.  I took it as a cosmic omen.

    One other note.  The Goodreads rating for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is 3.39.  The Goodreads rating for E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey is 3.67.  This tells you something about the literary tastes and sophistication of 21^st-century American readers.