Tuesday, March 16, 2010

This Day in Literary History (Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter” Published)


March 16, 1850—Nathaniel Hawthorne, born on the Fourth of July, became the first author of a truly great novel with an American setting and themes with The Scarlet Letter, which was published on this date by William D. Ticknor & Co. (later renamed Ticknor & Fields).

His classic—expanded, at the suggestion of his publisher, from a short story into longer form—described one quintessentially American dilemma—the conflict between community mores and individual freedom—and was written in the face of another with particular relevance today: how to make money when you’ve lost your job.

Unlike 21st-century Americans, Hawthorne did not lose his job because of lying, cheating Wall Street types but because of lying, cheating political hacks. True, he wasn’t the convivial type in his post at the Salem Customs House. But, as Louise Hall Tharp noted in The Peabody Sisters of Salem, Hawthorne was innocent of the unsubstantiated complaints used to oust him from his job: that he had preferred fellow Democrats to Whigs; that his writings were overtly political; and even that he had been “loafing around with hard drinkers.”

Remarkably, the loss of employment freed Hawthorne to pursue his bliss. In six weeks, wearing what wife Sophia called the “shining look” he had in the throes of creative inspiration, he had crafted a “romance” (a term he preferred to “novel”) carefully plotted, deep with psychological overtones, and pointing the way toward a different form of national fiction that exchanged the simple form of allegory for the more ambiguous but richer mode of symbolism.

In the last decade, I’ve visited two Massachusetts sites associated with Hawthorne: the “Old Manse” in Concord, occupied by him and Sophia right after they were married, and the “House of the Seven Gables” in Salem, the inspiration for his follow-up to The Scarlet Letter.

Hawthorne was never really at home anywhere, though. In Concord, he was ideologically unsuited to the Transcendentalist impulse of fellow residents Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Bronson Alcott.

And Salem may have been where Hawthorne was born, where he worked (at the Customs House, in the late 1840s) and where the Puritan ancestors who haunted his imagination (including one of the hanging judges of the Witchcraft Trials) had settled. But the novelist wanted to be rid of it at all costs. "I detest this town so much that I hate to go into the streets or to have the people see me,” he wrote.

That’s the kind of Gloomy Gus the melancholic writer was. Why was he so sensitive about having “the people see me”? A large proportion of those people, I gather, were women so startled by his good looks that they had to restrain themselves from openly staring. I can just hear all my male readers saying, “I don’t understand—what’s the problem with that?”

A college professor of mine who taught Hawthorne in an American literature class posted in his office a cartoon that depicted a crowd of Puritan women with dour faces and scarlet A’s on the breasts of their gowns—except for one female at the center, smelling broadly. She had an A+.

The humor aside, The Scarlet Letter features one of the most vibrant heroines in our entire national canon. In the triangle involving Hester Prynne, her lover, the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, and her husband Roger Chillingworth, Hester alone emerges as persistently resilient, brave and unrevengful.

In her collective biography of the Concord literati, American Bloomsbury, Susan Cheever offers up editor and pioneering feminist Margaret Fuller as a possible model for Hester. Both women were outsiders because of scandalous affairs that produced children out of wedlock, but by the time he wrote his novel Hawthorne looked on Fuller with a good less sympathy than he did his fictional heroine.

A character is often far more an admixture of different real-life elements than biographers might admit. For certain aspects of Hester’s persona—her deep and abiding passion, her selflessness, the sense of initiative that sustains a sensitive, haunted lover—Hawthorne need have looked no further than Sophia.

This talented artist from a progressive family devoted herself to Hawthorne's needs and those of their three children. No better example can be found than in her reaction to her husband’s dismissal from his job.

Sophia more than fulfilled Nathaniel’s expectation that she would take the bad news “better than a man.” Once he finished telling her, according to Tharp, she opened up a drawer in her desk and presented him with $150, which she had managed to save through creating lamp shades and fire screens. She assured him that additional household economies she would practice would keep them going.

And so it occurred. Hawthorne was able to concentrate on a work that sold out its first-edition run of 2,500 copies in a mere two weeks, and that remains an indispensable text on the sinful, morally murky American past, with sins--sexuality that creates individual chaos, vengefulness and hypocrisy in the larger community--difficult, perhaps impossible, to expiate.

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