The Reading List: The Scarlet Letter

It must have been a work of vast ability in the somniferous school of literature.

-- p. 142

The Scarlet Letter is an gloomy, slow-moving, and arguably overwritten tale about sin, stigma, remorse, and social judgement. Like a classic opera, it revolves around five central characters:

Hester: Her husband hasn't been seen in years, and yet she's just had a baby. That adds up to bad news in Puritan Boston, so she's condemned to wear a Scarlet "A" on her chest so that the good Christians of the town will remember to scorn and mock her. She turns into a defiant loner. We are told that she is generous and kind to the unfortunate, but never actually see her in the act.

Pearl: Hester's daughter. Hawthorne is continually in raptures about wonderful elven Pearl, wild, free, sharp, and spirited. This is in contrast to her actions, however, which reveal her as kind of a pain in the butt.

[Spoilers follow for the next few paragraphs, kind of.]

The Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale: At first, it seems like the book has an incredibly poorly kept surprise in store: that the Reverend had something to do with Pearl's mysterious conception! But at some point, Hawthorne just begins writing as though we've known it all along. We have, of course, but I do not recall ever actually being told. Maybe I missed a page or something. The Reverend is of course wracked with guilt for his terrible sin, and over the seven years of the book is in a steep physical decline.

The Husband, Roger Chillingworth: Thought lost at sea years ago, he awkwardly shows up just as Hestor is being pilloried. Sizing up the situation, he decides to do what any thoughtful person of good judgement would: remain incognito, figure out who the father is, and become his roommate.

The Puritan Society: Embodied by any number of cameo representatives, the Puritan Society is the villain of the book. It hypocritically shuns Hester, lets Pearl (who is obnoxious, but innocent by any standard) take the collateral shunning, embroils the Reverend in an unresolvable crisis, and provides the cover for the Husband to be a grade-A jerk.

So that's the set-up for our drama, which consists for much of the book of Hester remaining proud despite the scorn of her neighbors and of the Reverend gradually cracking up. Eventually, they meet in the primeval wilderness outside of town to see if they can figure a way out of their plight. The plot begins to move a little in the final quarter, as a plan is hatched and complications ensue.

But Why Is It Classic?

Vida, casting a vote back when The Reading List was was being assembled, suggested that "The Scarlet Letter is great, but not one of those 'can’t put it down' books." I agree wholeheartedly. It is not by any means badly written, and although the style is a touch heavy-handed it is not especially difficult reading. It has passages of considerable grace and occasional wit. Yet at the end of a chapter one is not dragged helplessly onward, and once put down the book does not cry out to be picked up again. It took me several weeks to get through it, but only because I read three or four more engaging books in the interim.

Now doubtless there are any number of websites just itching to tell me why The Scarlet Letter is the best book ever, but I wish that as an educated amateur reader I could suss it out for myself. But no such luck. My instinct tells me that Scarlet Letter is much ado about relatively little, a short story's worth of soap opera that has been filled out to novel length by a narrator who would just as soon deliver pronouncements as develop his tale.*

My best guess is that the novel is well-regarded because it is either (1) a fairly clear-eyed look, for 1850, at the American past, and/or (2) a "psychological" novel. As a historical novel, Scarlet Letter is reasonably impressive. Hawthorne was writing in a country that was still far from comfortable with its own national identity, and yet he takes a pretty broad swipe at the received mythology of pilgrims, founding fathers, and the like. The psychology of the novel, on the other hand, feels a bit overwraught to me, though, and if anyone really is congratulating Hawthorne for his insights into human conciousness, I'd have to point out that he's writing a good three decades after Jane Austen and doesn't seem to have an equivalent grasp of human behavior.

As with most other novels, it would be shooting fish in a barrel to write a sophomore lit paper claiming that The Scarlet Letter is "really about" the dichotomy of nature and culture, but we'll leave that idea to the sophomores I think.

Looking for a hint, I checked out the back flap, a place where publishers traditionally try to line up the strongest arguments for you to read, or at least purchase, their product. Here's what I found, in its entirety:

"[The Scarlet Letter's] Hester was the creation of someone who loved Woman, saw her, as Verdi did, as necessarily tragic and alone, but emotionally sacred in a diminished world... Hester is the only character in the book big enough to sustain a conflict -- with the harsh Puritan world -- equal to Hawthorne's own. In a book without heroes, Hester is a unique literary heroine." -- From the Introduction by Alfred Kazin

Huh. I'm guessing the book jacket designer has since lost her job. And if this has something to do with what underlies The Scarlet Letter's enduring presence on the cultural map, I'd have to dissent. I don't know who "Woman" is, and I don't know what "emotionally sacred in a diminished world" might mean, but I can say with confidence that Hester is by no means a "big" character. To the extent that she's developed, it would be fair to call her smart, resourceful, stubborn, and strong, and one hell of a seamstress to boot. But she's hardly a vividly drawn or especially memorable character; she simply isn't given enough to do in the novel to render her so.

Enlighten Me!

In sum, The Scarlet Letter seems a representative piece of good-quality Nineteenth Century fiction. It's fine. But, why all the fuss? Why has it endured? What qualities of excellence, overlooked by me, landed it on the short-list of name-brand classics? Discuss.

Link: A good discussion of The Scarlet Letter at Amateur Reader's "Wuthering Expectations."

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* But this from a reader who considers the technical chapters of Moby Dick (an otherwise fabulous book) to be pointless, self-indulgent digressions that should have been (and perhaps still should be) excised to the novel's benefit by a good editor. So I might not be your go-to guy for 19th Century American letters.