Lecture 92 THE SCARLET LETTER Honestly, did your fifteen-year-old self really appreciate this insanely great classic

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Listeners, readers, welcome to the Foxed Page, where we dive
deep into the very best books. You'll come away with
a richer understanding of the text at hand, all while
learning to read everything a little better. I'm kimberly Ford,
one time adjunct professor, Berkeley best selling author, and PhD
in complet Today we are diving into The Scarlet Letter.

(00:25):
We always begin with this question of why read Why
am I talking to you about this? Why am I
reading this book now? And honestly, I don't know the
answer to that question. But all I can say is
I'm really happy that I dove back into this classic.
This is a book that I read in high school.
I know in fact that I read it in high school,
because I mean, there were some books that I was
assigned in high school that I did not read, But

(00:46):
I know that I read this one because I was very,
very proud of a term paper that I wrote in
like eleventh grade English, which is usually American Lit, which
is when I read this book. I wrote a term
paper on the symbolism of plants in the book The
Scarlet Letter. It's honestly kind of a touchstone in my
academic career, which is funny because I think back then

(01:06):
you could just get away with just pointing out that
something was symbolic. It was like all you had to
do was identify in fact that something was symbolic, and
that was enough for an eleventh grade high school teacher
back in nineteen eighty six. Today, we're going to go
a little deeper and in a tiny departure from how
we normally operate. I want to tell you about my
goals today, which is just to remind you of how

(01:28):
amazing this book is. If you are American, chances are
that you read this in eleventh grade for American Lit,
and this is one of those high school books that
people seem to have loved. It's a little like Gatsby
or To Kill a Mockingbird. I get kind of mixed
reviews from people on like Catcher and The Rye. I
think a lot of the Shakespeare that we were made
to read in high school was not everybody's favorite. But

(01:49):
this is a book that people remember loving, which is
so great because honestly, this is an incredible, incredible book.
So I want to remind you of all the ways
that is great, and in fact, I want to kind
of dig into some of those ways, because I am
going to hazard to guess that most of us do
not remember this book particularly well from high school. I

(02:10):
don't think i've read it since then. And if you
are with me, you can just listen in today and
kind of, you know, take a walk down literary memory
lane and enjoy hearing about all of the ways that
this book is so good, or perhaps today will entice
you to go back to this classic. You are also
going to pick up today on a subtext that will
surprise none of you longtime listeners of the Foxed Page,

(02:33):
which is going to be a very serious anti puritanical subtext.
I was so happy to realize time and time again
that Hawthorne himself is actually very anti puritanical. This book,
in many ways is not a promotion of what was
happening in the middle of the seventeenth century in our
very young country, and I loved some of the ways
that he articulated. I have this long held belief that,

(02:56):
like many many, many of our faults as a nation
come from the fact that we were founded by people
who really believed in a lot of like fire and brimstone,
and who were very stern, and who were all about shame,
and who were all about repression, and who were all
about rules and very rigid morality. As someone who grew
up in northern California in the seventies, that's like kind

(03:18):
of anathema to everything that I experienced. I'm really happy
that somehow my parents had really moved far away from
the Puritan ethic. But I really do think that a
lot of the ways that our country was built on
these tenants has these very very long term ramifications. I
also think that perhaps I picked this book up because

(03:38):
I'm interested in Boston at the moment. For those of
you who are listening to the Fox Page and are
maybe not sports fans, or at least not Boston sports fans,
you might not know that recently my family has become
owners of the Boston Celtics, which sounds absurd even as
I am saying it, and honestly it still feels totally absurd.
This is a lifelong dream for my husband and I too,

(04:01):
am growing up in a household that is not a
sports loving household. I just had no appreciation for sports whatsoever.
Met my husband when we were very young and became
a Boston sports fan, particularly a Celtics fan, when I
was like twenty, so honestly, it's been thirty five years
of loving the Celtics. It's the beginning of a really
interesting chapter for us, and I'm really excited about it.

(04:21):
And one of the ways, of course, that I'm wanting
to experience all of this is by digging into Boston
through a literary lens. And let me tell you, it
has been funny to me because what it has come
up with so far. You know, when you very first
think of Boston and literature, Scarlet Letter, the Crucible, Moby Dick.
I mean, this is like a very puritanical, like Fire
and Brimstone, like witch hunt kind of a situation. And

(04:44):
I'm looking forward to some other things. I really want
to read Dennis Lahane, I've never read him before. I'm
going to read Small Mercies. There are a bunch of
different things that I want to look into. I was
even thinking maybe we do a seminar on Bill Simmons
book about basketball, but I don't even know if that
book is like something that we would even tackle, given
that we're not huge into nonfiction here and certainly not
into nonfiction books about sports. But I was thinking that

(05:07):
I should have a playlist on the YouTube channel that
is all books about Boston, which will be just like
anti puritanical propaganda for the most part. The other thing
that I wanted to do is have a playlist on
the YouTube channel that is like all of the books
that we read as fifteen year olds that were totally
lost on us. It's going to be like it's going
to be like all the classics that were wasted on

(05:28):
you in high school English. These books are so good,
and I mean, honestly, every single one of the ones
that's sort of part of the big American lit cannon.
They are all worth going back to and are so interesting,
of course, because when you read them as an adult,
it is very different than reading them when you are
fourteen years old. Okay, for those of you who have
an agenda today, we're going to start talking about plot,

(05:51):
which is so interesting. I'm not sure that the Scarlet
Letter conjures the idea of really well done plot, but
I was absolutely struck by this. We're going to take
quick look at that. We're then going to look at
the fact that this book is a romance. It is
not in fact a novel, and Hawthorne was very clear
about that. The subtitle of this volume is a romance.
It is The Scarlet Letter a romance, And obviously, I mean,

(06:14):
I hope you're understanding that that's not like a harlequin romance.
That is a different genre of prose. And we're going
to talk about why that's important. And I can bet
that that is something that your eleventh grade English teacher
did not dive into. We're then going to talk about
the frame that sits around the main story of The
Scarlet Letter. Some of you did not probably read that
in high school, even if you were meant to, But

(06:35):
it is a fascinating way that Hawthorne is adding all
of this verisimilitude and doing all of this kind of
very modern meta stuff even in eighteen fifty. We're then
going to talk about history. Speaking of eighteen fifty, it's
so interesting. I mean, this is a novel that's written
in the middle of the nineteenth century, but it is
harkening back to the middle of the seventeenth century. So

(06:56):
here we are, you know, in twenty twenty five, twenty six,
twenty six, oh god, anyway, we're well into the twenty
first century, and this is something that essentially two hundred
years ago was writing about two hundred years before that.
It's a fascinating way to look at history. That will
be an excellent segue into talking about this book as
this kind of gothic novel and asking some questions about like,

(07:19):
so what why is it part of that tradition and
what was Hawthorne doing with all of that imagery and
all of those tropes. We're then going to talk about
women in the novel, and we're going to close with
a very optimistic look at the way that Hawthorne was
really empowering people, particularly women. I mean, for a book
that's very dark, I mean I think people remember this

(07:41):
as being a very dark book, there is such a
strong message of optimism, which is a really good place
to close. I actually lied before we dive into the plot.
I want to orient us just very quickly because I
think that having an understanding of the period when the
book was written, and a couple of other important details,
it was very helpful when we think back about it. So,

(08:03):
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on the fourth of July, which
kind of killed me. He was born in eighteen o four,
which is crazy to think about. Eighteen oh four doesn't
sound like that that old. But this is when our
country was eighteen years old. I did that math actually
before before I prepared the lecture, or while I was
preparing the lecture, so I'm fairly certain that that math
is correct. He was born in Salem, which is also

(08:24):
funny to me. I mean, if there is any city
that you know in Massachusetts other than Boston, it is
likely Salem, famously known for its witch trials. Salem is
twenty two miles away from Boston. Nathaniel Hawthorne married a
woman named Sophia, had a couple of kids. They lived
in a place called the Old Manse, and he wrote
a bunch of sketches about the Old Mans that are
very famous. They also spent a lot of time in Boston.

(08:47):
He was a writer, as I just mentioned. He wrote
a lot of sketches though which were kind of in
vogue and actually made him a small amount of money.
He always had some money problems, and he complimented those
sketches with a couple of very important romances, the most
important of which, of course, being the Scarlet Letter. He
also worked in the Salem custom House, and the reason
why that is important is because that has a lot

(09:09):
to do with this framing device that sits around the
main story of the Scarlet Letter. This is this kind
of cushy job that he had, and it was I
don't think it was an elected job, but it was
very politically established, and he was writing the Scarlet Letter
in a very dark time for himself. The Whig Party,
which were the revolutionary people who were originally kind of

(09:30):
the original revolutionaries, and then that party was in turmoil
and it was growing more conservative in a bunch of ways.
They passed that horrible Fugitive Slave Act where if you
knew that a person was enslaved, you had to return
that enslaved person to the person that was enslaving them
in the South, so things were getting more and more
conservative in the kind of eighteen forty eight to fifty period,

(09:53):
which is when Hawthorne is writing the Scarlet Letter, and
suddenly this cushy job that he had in the Salem
custom House where he just kind of chill and did
his writing, where that job was in jeopardy. So it
was a time of actually some pretty significant personal turmoil
for him. So the Scarlet Letter, as you might gather
from what I just said, it was published in eighteen fifty.

(10:13):
It has never been out of print. Almost immediately it
went into the American canon, and I think, you know,
the canon is one of these things that we begin
to read when we were in high school. It's really interesting,
actually to think about what the American literary canon looked like.
And I actually did a little snoopy and around on.
I mean, I probably could have come up with a
bunch of this, although I would have thrown in some

(10:34):
things that are probably not in the canon, which would
have been wishful thinking. But I did kind of an
amalgam of what was popping up on a couple of
different lists, obviously Gatsby, Moby Dick, To Kill a Mockingbird,
Huckleberry Finn, Grapes of Wrath, Invisible man Light in August,
which any Faulkner in high school is a little ambitious.
Kudos to anyone who's tackling Faulkner in high school. Beloved

(10:57):
is a novel that obviously more recently has been joining
the canon, and certainly that would be hopefully a more
graduate experience. That is a book that I think would
be lost on many a high school student, largely because
they just would have to read it sort of quickly
and that is not a book to be read quickly.
So the Scarlet Letter is very firmly part of the
American canon, always has been. It's also very interesting to

(11:19):
situate it in history. Anyone who's listened to the Fox Page,
you know that eighteen fifty to nineteen hundred is the
Victorian era, which maps pretty accurately onto the rise and
the heyday of the realist novel. So we have the
publication of Madam Bowery in eighteen fifty one for lots
of people, that's kind of the start of the realist novel.

(11:42):
And it's so interesting to take a look here at
what came before as sort of the predecessor and in fact,
like the very proximate predecessor of the realist novel. I
think most of us think of it as a novel,
but in fact it is kind of a different specimen.
It's also important to note that this is a very
you know, you think of the Victorian era, which was

(12:02):
really not great for women. This is when women were
really viewed as decorative and fragile and frail. I talk
a lot about the Victorian rest cure, which you know
is when like, as a woman, you know, you would
be thought hysterical if you like displayed any emotion and
they would make you go like in a dark room
by yourself. That does not sound good to me. The

(12:23):
Victorian rest cure that I sometimes have like fantasies about
is the one where they wheel you out in like
a wicker chair and you get to spend like, I
don't know, a couple of weeks sitting out on a
beautiful lawn with like a blanket over your lap, and
hopefully with a book. But the Victorian era famously not
great for women, which made it all the more interesting

(12:44):
to be so heartened by the fact that Hawthorne in
many ways is very pro woman. My reading of the novel, Wow,
I'm going to keep saying that my reading of the book.
The Romance was also heavily influenced this time by the
idea of the Transcendentalists. So when you think of Emerson
and Throw and Walden, all of that kind of utopian

(13:04):
thinking that was happening in the middle of the nineteenth
century in the United States, it is such a great
counterpoint to the Puritans. And it's so cool because Hawthorne
was literally like hanging out with Throw and Emerson throw
in particular, he like lived across town. They would hang out.
Apparently thought Hawthorne was like a little mystified by a
lot of their thinking and couldn't really follow them all

(13:27):
the way to the conclusion that these Transcendentalists were coming
into which you know, was a lot about the power
of the individual, the power of the individual in nature,
the idea of kind of self actualization. That's a very
like nineteen seventies word to put onto the Transcendentalists. And
I'm not an expert in this area, but in many ways,

(13:48):
I mean, I think of what Whitman and like all
of the like nudity that was going on in these
utopian societies, and to me it seems very anti puritanical
in a way that I love speaking of utopian communities.
Hawthorne did live at Brook Farm, Yes, Brook Farm Community,
which was one of these utopian communities. I like that

(14:08):
in the introduction they keep using the word mystified, because
these things were also kind of mystical in many ways,
the transcendental things. But as I was reading through, and
as we look at the book today, I think you'll
hear echoes of this idea of nature as being this
very powerful force and one that stands a little bit
in opposition to sort of the predominance of like this

(14:29):
very punitive god figure. I would be totally remiss also
if I did not mention the fact that there's a
lot of really important feminism going on at this point.
We have Margaret Fuller, who was a very early feminist
writing in the middle of the nineteenth century. She was
someone who also had a real influence on Hawthorn, and
I don't actually know the relationship between Fuller and Hawthorne,

(14:51):
although he definitely would have known her work. But in
many ways, the Scarlet Letter is deeply feminist, and I
think some of that would have had to do with
the idea of all of this kind of feminist thinking
that was kind of in the ether at that moment. Okay,
so now we're going to dive a little bit more
concretely into the book itself, and this is a departure
for me. We are going to start by taking a

(15:12):
look at some aspects of the novel. I'm not going
to have any spoilers here. I'm not going to tell
you how things resolve in the end. Of course, with
my shitty memory, I just couldn't remember anything that happened
in the book except for a couple of the scenes
which I had written about in my term paper, which really,
you know, I had those very firmly in mind, but
the plot, predictably, it was sort of lost on me.

(15:35):
He is so good at plot. This is a book
talk about pacing. I mean, any of you who are
writers out there, you should read this book just in
terms of plot and pacing. What I mean by pacing
is how he is sort of meeting out this information
and even when you just look at it in terms
of page numbers, it is so impressive. So this is
both going to jar your memory, Jack jar jar your memory. Yes,

(15:57):
it's going to jar your memory as to some of
the elements of the book in a non spoilery kind
of way. I'm also hoping it maybe will wet your
appetite because these are some of the big questions that
arise in terms of plot, and for those of you
who read for plot, they would really like keep you,
you know, keep you reading. I think we all remember
the basic premise hester Prynne has in the very beginning.

(16:19):
She comes out of the prison and she has this
tiny baby and is doomed to wear this letter for
the rest of her life. And then one of the
questions that becomes fairly quickly apparent is like, is she
going to reveal the identity of her lover? If you
remember who the lover is from high school, it seems
like that would have been kind of obvious from the beginning,
but it is not. There is a lot of tension

(16:39):
in this book, and I did actually remember who her
lover was, and it is something that is revealed, you know,
maybe like a third of the way into the romance,
but in the beginning of the book, like if you've
never read this before, there is so much excellent tension
about this question of like will she reveal her partner
in crime? And then about twenty pages after one of

(17:02):
the more kind of pointed moments, when we are like, wait,
is she going to tell us who the lover is?
S Twenty pages after that, suddenly we are made to
feel very concerned about the future of this child. So
Pearl is a baby in the beginning, and then we
see her when she's about three years old, and when
she's about seven years old. This also speaks to the
excellent pacing on the part of Hawthorne. He jumps ahead

(17:25):
in time with just like very little explanation, but a
way that is organic and seamless and really saves us,
in fact, from a lot of tedium. And it is
actually when Pearl is three years old that suddenly this
kind of threat comes to her and you're like, oh
my god, what is going to happen with Pearl? And
actually by that point we already I think it is
fairly clearer to any reader who the lover is. So

(17:47):
there's this excellent thing where one of the questions is resolved,
but then this other crisis about the future of the
child comes into play and keeps us reading, and then
another sort of fifty pages later, we have this other
important plot point, which is we have this relationship between
two men, Roger Chillingworth and Arthur Dimmesdale. Roger Chillingworth we

(18:09):
find out very early on is Hester Prinn's. He was
married to Hester Prinn back in the Old World in England,
and he sent Hester Prynn to the United States to
kind of like set up camp for them there. He's
much older, he's got like a hunchback, it's actually very Gothic.
He's like all kind of grizzled and not attractive, and
she's like young and has you know, this beautiful hair

(18:29):
and complexion and whatnot. They're very seriously mismatched. And I
actually think that Hawthorne does such a good job of
explaining why Roger Chillingworth like thinks that that might have worked,
and he goes into this thing about like how how
sorrowful he is that he kind of like made this
young woman be his help meet and wife. I mean,
it's very for someone who could be just like a

(18:51):
black and white villain. There is quite a bit of
complexity drawn in Roger Chillingworth, which is amazing. But in
terms of plot, we come to this point where he
and Hester's lover have become a sort of entwined in
this interesting way, and there's this big question about what
is going to happen with the two of them, how
is this going to resolve itself? So I'm not going

(19:13):
to go on much further with other plot points because
I don't want to spoil anything in case people have
not read it, But I think this gives you an
idea that sort of every twenty pages or so, we
have this new concern that Hawthorne articulates in this very
clear and actually like very intriguing in kind of enticing way,
which is exactly the way you want plot to work.

(19:34):
I mean, of course, plot, we usually have an inciting incident,
we have rising action, we have climax, we have falling action,
and the denument. In this case it is really I mean,
we do have that, we have that same fry Tag triangle.
Things are rising toward a climax, certainly that is set
up at the very beginning, but they're also all of
these smaller arcs, these smaller triangles that are leading us

(19:56):
upward in this way that really keeps us reading and
makes this story you feel very taut Okay, So now
we're going to dive a little bit more. Okay, We're
going to move on from plot and talk about this
idea of the difference between a romance and a novel.
And often, you know, if in the past we've talked
about whether something is a realist novel or magic realism,
and I've wanted to situate things in terms of their

(20:17):
literary movement. And I like to think that I only
do that when it is important. In this case, it
is really important, and it's a fascinating lens through which
to see the novel. Wow, the romance so both of
them are prose fiction as opposed to being like essayistic
or being some sort of long poetry. Ode they're in prose.

(20:38):
They both tend to be fairly long and well developed.
But the novel is different, and the novel really is
coming into the four right around the time of the
publication of the Scarlet Letter. But a novel is kind
of wider in scope, and the realist novel, which really
is coming into its own right then, is doing this
thing where it's wanting to provide a world that is

(20:58):
all encompassing and the reader can enter into and really
believe in the way that that is achieved is by
lots and lots of detail, and detail that is sort
of mundane in ways. It should be interesting, of course,
but that is trying to give you a full picture
of someone's life and in fact, the life of an
entire society. In contrast, a romance really has to do

(21:21):
with matters of the heart, which is obvious I think
from the word romance, but it is a very significant thing.
I mean that they almost all have to do and often,
you know, with these crazy love triangles and all sorts
of unrequited love and terribly harrowing love very much like
the love in this case, but a romance is concerned
with matters of the heart. It is also often exaggerated.

(21:44):
There tends to be lots of hyperbole. It's a genre
that really leans into symbolism, which makes me feel a
little bit less proud of my term paper back in
high school, because I really was proud of looking at
symbolism in the Scarlet Letter, which is one of the
easiest things I am sure to really grasp about the novel.
The romance, as opposed to the realist novel, also has

(22:04):
a lot of elements, not a lot, but can have
many elements of the supernatural. We do see quite a
few elements of the supernatural in the Scarlet Letter, and
we are going to look at that. There's a lot
of overlap also between the romance and the gothic novel.
So I'm gonna just whip down a list of the
elements of the gothic novel. Often there's an element of mystery,

(22:26):
often like sort of horror or terror is kind of
mixed into that mystery. There are lots of ghosts, lots
of spirits, that kind of thing. We have a lot
of very dark imagery in the Gothic thing. I mean,
think of Frankenstein and think of like, you know, a
dark and stormy night and you know, castles on craggy
rocks in the middle of the night during a thunderstorm,
that sort of thing. Gothic books often really tend to

(22:48):
look at good and evil, which I mean the Scarlet Letter. Well,
it's interesting the Scarlet Letter is looking at the idea
of good and evil. But I think Hawthorne's you know,
as opposed to the Puritans, is sort of coming down
on this idea of like it's not that straightforward, and
certainly society's idea of like who is evil is not
always indicative of who actually is, you know, a good citizen.

(23:10):
Gothic novels like The Romance tend to deal with a
lot of very intense emotion that goes along with this
idea of hyperbole and exaggeration, and lots of times they
have a lot of psychological suspense. So the Gothic novel
was kind of coming into the for at the very
end of the eighteenth century, so sort of you know,
end of the seventeen hundreds into the eighteen hundreds, so
it's kind of right on time that we have this

(23:32):
romance at the end of the period, you know, the
heyday of the Gothic novel. Because we have this this
idea of you know, a book length piece of prose
that is leaning pretty heavily on the Gothic tradition. But
I would move it into the romance. Well, partially because
he called it a romance, but also because it's it's
much more concerned with love and with relationships among people,

(23:53):
not so much about the wider scope of the Gothic novel. Okay,
moving right along to the idea of this framing device
that is actually a very big and I think a
very impressive element of the scarlet letter. So a framing device,
it's so interesting. In my MFA program we realized that,
well this came from a very wise professor, that a

(24:16):
lot of writing will start with some sort of framing device,
and then you'll realize that, in fact, whatever this framing
device was, it's really not the point, and the point
is what's sort of happening inside the limits of that frame.
But in this case it's very important. So let me
back up and explain what a framing device is. Then
this is the perfect example. So we have this long

(24:37):
section at the beginning of the romance that comes after
the preface. It's very much a part of the book itself.
It is called this the custom House Introductory, so it's
kind of an introduction, which I mean some people skip,
and frankly, I think a lot of high school teachers
just are like, Okay, don't bother yourself with that. But
it is forty pages of the like two hundred and

(24:58):
forty of the book. It's not a small part. And
what it is is it's a description of Nathaniel Hawthorne
working in the custom house in Salem. And we see
in these forty pages there are a bunch of sketches
of people and of kind of life in Massachusetts in
eighteen forty eight to eighteen fifty. And what happens very famously,

(25:20):
and I think a lot of people remember this is
that he you know, it's a kind of a cushy job,
as I've mentioned before, and he goes up into this,
you know, the upper stories of it, kind of an
attic space, and he's looking through all of these different
manuscripts and whatnot, and he finds the Scarlet Letter. He
finds this manuscript that is kind of the germ of
what he will turn into this this romance that he

(25:41):
is going to write. And we're going to take a
look very quickly before we talk about the importance of
this framing device at two different parts, just so that
you have, you know, a very clear context of what
we are talking about. So on page five it says this,
it is a little remarkable that though disinclined to talk
over much of myself and my affairs at the fireside

(26:03):
and to my personal friends, an autobiographical impulse should twice
in my life have taken possession of me. So what
this is doing here is just very firmly saying that
this is autobiographical. And when someone says autobiographical, you know,
even as opposed to memoir, it really is something factual.
So Nathaniel Hawthorne is kicking us off with this idea

(26:23):
that like this is his real life and he's going
to share something with us. He's not accustomed to doing this.
This is something that is remarkable, and right away we
have this first person idea. It's very intimate and it
is really resting on this idea of like truth. So
then we moved through this these many sketches of all
of these people. And what is important is as he

(26:44):
is sketching his job here at the custom house, we
have all of these people who were actual people. So
in my copy of the book, which is like a
Penguin classic, we have a lot of very good notes
on the part of some old krusty dude American lit professor.
We have the very helpful little notes that tell us like, oh,
this guy was a very important, you know, member of

(27:05):
the Whig Party, or this guy was the governor. So
the entire first part, this introductory part, is very, very
firmly set in the actual moment in history in Massachusetts
in eighteen fifty and this actually bleeds into the manuscript itself.
So one of the things that happens that's a real
echo of this framing device is at one point in

(27:28):
the romance, Hester Prynne is having interactions actually a couple
of times with the governor at the time, which is
so remarkable. This is like somebody writing a novel and
then having like the character in the novel like have
you know have like Governor Newsom stop by. It's such
an interesting device because you have something that is firmly fictional,

(27:50):
but from the very start, and then throughout the whole piece.
Using actual historical people and events allows Hawthorne to make
it feel very, very real in this very tangible way,
and it's important to ask kind of like, so what
about that? And in this case, I think it is
such an important element of like a very important statement

(28:10):
that he is making about women's rights and about the
way that the Puritan legacy is really impactful in terms
of how people see each other and how we are
punitive and ultimately, you know, the ways that despite all
of the trappings of American society, that the human spirit
can prevail. So now we're going to talk about the

(28:31):
big moment in this framing device when our author Nathaniel Hawthorne,
which importantly our narrator here is the same as our author.
Very clearly he's not even inviting us to conflate the two.
He actually is the narrator. So on about page thirty
of the framing device, we have him coming across this

(28:52):
manuscript in the custom house. And even on this page
we have a couple of different notes. There's mention of
a mister Pugh, who was a history figure at that time.
He thinks about putting some of these other manuscripts in
the Essex historical society, which was a real thing. So
you have to think about the impact of that if
you are a reader in eighteen fifty two who is

(29:13):
reading this book, all of these things are real places.
I mean, I think it could be like a little
bit of an Orwellian thing where you're like, wait, is
this story true? Because it is so firmly embedded in
your moments. Of course, all of that is lost on
most readers unless you have all of the notes, and
certainly probably lost on high school readers. But one of
the things I love the most is we have this novel. Again,

(29:35):
it's not a novel, it's a romance. We have this
romance that is really embedded in this kind of tangible
historical moment. But it is so kind of high flying
in the sense that there's all of this hyperbolean exaggeration
and like drama and supernatural stuff. Even here in the
framing device, we have this kind of supernatural thing that

(29:57):
happens right when he is finding this manuscript. Hawthorne has
this incredible melding of this factual framing device together with
this kind of drama that comes with the romance. So
on page thirty we have this. The object that most
drew my attention in the mysterious package was a certain
affair of fine red cloth, much worn and faded. There

(30:21):
were traces about it of gold embroidery, which, however, it
was greatly frayed and defaced, so that none or very
little of the glitter was left. It had been wrought,
as was easy to perceive, with wonderful skill of needlework,
and the stitch, as I am assured by ladies conversant
with such mysteries, gives evidence of a now forgotten art,

(30:41):
not to be recovered even by the process of picking
out the threads. This rag of scarlet cloth for time
and wear, and a sacrilegious moth, which that was so
funny to me, I mean, the sacrilegious moth. Wow, what
an excellent little detail, and what a irreverent way to
talk about it. But I'm going to reread that whole sentence,
because this is momentous. This rag of scarlet cloth for

(31:05):
time and where and a sacrilegious moth had reduced it
to little other than a rag on careful examination, assumed
the shape of a letter. It was the capital letter A.
So here we have this really beautiful and detailed discovery
that our actual Nathaniel Hawthorne is finding at his job,
his actual job, in his actual workplace, in actual Boston,

(31:29):
in actual eighteen fifty And I want to read this
very quickly. On a little further down here, I experienced
a sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of
burning heat, and as if the letter were not of
red cloth but red hot iron. I shuddered and involuntarily
let it fall upon the floor. I mean, here we

(31:50):
have this like very mundane and very factual thing, and
then suddenly we have him finding this piece of fabric
that is so like red hot in his head hands
that he is dropping it to the floor. This is
the genius of this book. You have really dramatic, exciting
things happening in a way that is really convincing and interesting.

(32:11):
So we're going to take a quick moment and just ask, like, so,
what is the point of this framing device. And one
of the things that is doing, of course, is providing
that juxtaposition between reality, facts and fiction. But the other
thing that it is doing, which is crucial, and it's
something that Nathaniel Hawthorne really leans into in the framing
device is that he is situating us very very specifically

(32:34):
in a moment in time in Massachusetts in eighteen forty
eight to eighteen fifty. But what he is talking about,
what he is finding is a relic from sixteen fifty. Notably,
also this fabric, this moth eaten fabric, is wrapped around
a manuscript. It is not I loved this part. Actually
it is not a full manuscript that Nathaniel Hawthorne is

(32:56):
going to transcribed for his readers. He describes it as
like maybe like an outline of some facts or like
a list of some facts about this woman in the
middle of the seventeenth century. And what he promised, what
he promises the reader is that he's going to turn
this into this moving romance. But so we have this

(33:16):
moment where we have transcendentalism, we have feminism. We also
have that tempered with a lot of kind of reactionary
stuff in terms of the fugitive slave law and in
terms of some of the original founders becoming in fact
very conservative. We have all of that turmoil happening in
the beginning of the book, and in many ways that

(33:36):
is hearkening back. It's like it's mirrored so well in
this depiction of all of the politics and all of
the kind of Puritan underpinnings that we are seeing very specifically,
and it is fascinating to look at the parallels between
the two. Very briefly, in the middle of the seventeenth century,
in kind of the sixteen fifty era, obviously, Massachusetts Colony

(33:58):
is very young at that point. It was the Massachusetts
Bay Colony. It existed between sixteen twenty eight and sixteen ninety.
It was one of the original thirteen colonies. Probably most
of you remembered that. I actually had to look that up.
Probably some of you are also thinking of the Crucible,
which is another example of a time. You know, it
was Arthur Miller writing in the nineteen fifties, right at

(34:19):
the beginning of the really heated part of the Mcarthy era,
when many many Americans were being unfairly treated and unfairly
like interrogated and punished because people suspected that they had
Communist leanings. And what Arthur Miller provided was this mirror
of the Salem witch trials, where innocent women were being

(34:40):
you know, hanged and drowned because people suspected them of witchcraft.
So I love this idea of these two pieces of Well,
we're going to get to the Crucible later, and we're
going to look at it in terms of the important
play right now that's happening in New York. John Proctor
is the villain. I think that's the name of it.
But in nineteen fifty three, Arthur Miller is writing about

(35:00):
something that was happening, you know, most pointedly in sixteen
ninety two, and in many ways that kind of mirroring
was happening exactly in the Scarlet Letter with eighteen fifty
and sixteen fifty. So I want to take a look
at history in the novel because it's also just a
great way to look at Nathaniel Hawthorne's amazing prose. So
this is about twenty pages and hester Prinn is still

(35:23):
like up on the pillary, you know, getting punished as
she is leaving the jail for the first time with
her young baby, and our narrator, who is Nathaniel Hawthorne,
says this on the bottom of page sixty. It has
already been noticed that directly over the platform on which
hester Prinn stood was a kind of balcony or open

(35:43):
gallery appended to the meetinghouse. It was the place whence
proclamations were wont to be made amidst an assemblage of
the magistracy, with all the ceremonial that attended such public
observances in those days. Here to witness the scene which
we are describing, sat Governor Bellingham himself with four sergeants
about his chair, bearing halbirds as a guard of honor.

(36:07):
So again this is like as if you just like
wrote Governor Newsom just like right into your novel. It
adds this real gravitas. It also does make the thing
feel much more realistic. It's kind of a shortcut to
making the world feel like an actual world because this
is an actual person who is in it. So a
little further down on the page, we have the perfect
segue into this idea of the Gothic elements of this novel,

(36:29):
because we have this guy who is an actual historical figure.
His name is John Wilson, and this is relatively early
in the romance, and this is a very Gothic description
which will give us a little foundation to look at
the Gothic elements. You also get a sense here of
the way that Hawthorne is narrating this thing. I mean,
in some ways it feels like a newspaper article or
like a historical document, which makes a lot of sense,

(36:50):
because he found these pieces of information and he is
putting them into what is both a romance but also
kind of a historical document. On the bottom of six,
the voice which had called her attention was that of
the Reverend and famous John Wilson, the eldest clergyman of Boston,
a great scholar, like most of his contemporaries in the profession,

(37:12):
and withal a man of kind and genial spirit. This
last attribute, however, had been less carefully developed than his
intellectual gifts, and was, in truth, rather a matter of
shame than self congratulation. With him, there's the shame. I mean,
there's a Puritan stuff, man. It is everywhere in this book.
There he stood with a border of grizzled locks beneath

(37:34):
his skull cap, while his gray eyes, accustomed to the
shaded light of his study, were winking like those of
Hester's infant. In the unadulterated sunshine. He looked like the
darkly engraved portraits which we see fixed to old volumes
of sermons, and had no more right than one of
those portraits would have to step forth as he now did,

(37:56):
and meddle with a question of human guilt, passion, and anger.
This really is a great indicator of the Gothic. So
if nothing else, the Gothic is concerned with guilt, passion,
and agony. Oh not agony, anguish. So we have a
lot of things here. We have this like you know,
we have the contrast between the light and the dark.

(38:17):
We have the ideal of sermons which bring up the
idea of good and evil. We have the idea here
even of the sunshine. So this unadulterated sunshine is it's
actually foreshadowing because in many ways this book ends up
being deeply optimistic. But in the Gothic novel, mostly what
we have is like dark, stormy skies. We have a
lot of pathetic fallacy, which is simply when the sort

(38:38):
of natural when the weather of a novel is like
a manifestation of what is happening with our characters. And
we have some of this exaggeration. I mean, this guy
is like, you know, he's a renowned person, and then
we have this description of him that is very dramatic
in many ways. So I want to talk briefly about
why the Gothic novel is so well suited to a

(38:58):
book that is about pure to America. So just quickly
to review to jog your memory about the Puritan era.
You know, this was the Tenets. These were the tenets
upon which our entire country was built. But so the
Puritans believed that we have a direct line to God.
It was very much, you know, in reaction to a
lot of the kind of pomp and circumstance of certainly

(39:19):
of Catholicism, but also of like the Church of England.
I mean, it was about as like stripped down and
bear as you could get. It's a religion that that
really adheres and promotes a very strict moral code, and
along with that a lot of very severe discipline. There
were laws. I actually did, of course, have to look
this up. There were laws against certain clothing, laws against

(39:42):
swearing obviously, laws against drinking. There were laws against laziness.
And when I say that these are laws, it's like
these things were deeply punishable, like they would put you
up on the pillory or make you wear, you know,
some sort of letter to shame you publicly for the
rest of your life. The Puritans believe that salvation had
to be earned. It was one of these things. I mean,

(40:02):
you know, this goes back to a very very serious
religious question that is sort of you know, it's a
large question in every litter in every religion, which is
this question of like, are are people born good? Or
are people born evil? And not evil but like bad?
And in the Puritan world, people are born with original
sin because you know, Adam and Eve and what we

(40:25):
have to do throughout our lives is like earn our salvation.
Certainly it rests on this foundation that like our life
on earth is just toil, and all we are doing
the whole time we are here is trying to get
ourselves a place in heaven and more importantly, trying to
save ourselves from going to hell. One of the laws
that shocked me, and it should not have is that

(40:47):
they did not celebrate Christmas, which was so sad, but
it also makes total sense. Also importantly, and lastly, Puritans
believed in predestination. So there was this idea which is
actually slightly contrary the idea of earning your salvation. There
was this idea that everybody was like fated to have
a certain life. Everything was predestined, and throughout the book

(41:09):
the word providence comes up again and again and again,
so it has a capital P. And I read that
a little bit like like some sort of agent of predestination,
and in fact, some ways like a stand in for
the word God. I was interested that the word God
was not used more in the book. But this idea
of Providence as being this controlling force is very palpable

(41:31):
throughout the book, because in fact, it would have been
extremely palpable in Puritan America. So all of this is
to say that the Gothic novel, which would have also
been in vogue when Hawthorne was young, is perfect for
the Puritan setting because really, you know, the Gothic novel
is concerned with good and evil. It's concerned with the supernatural,

(41:53):
which often can have to do with religion. It's really
interested in drama, which you know, the Puritans in some
ways it seems like they aren't very dramatic, but man,
things were very high stakes, and they may not have
had like a dramatic good time, but there certainly was
like a lot of dramatic punishing happening. So in order
to look a little more carefully at the prose, we're
going to look at a couple of elements that are

(42:14):
kind of concrete examples of the Gothic in the novel.
So one of the things is symbolism. The title of
the Romance is the Scarlet Letter, which is a symbol.
I mean, we are literally having the Puritan people put
a symbol of adultery and humiliation on the chest of
a woman. And not only that, but Hawthorne is focusing
all of our attention on this letter as a symbol

(42:37):
of her like ignominy. I don't know if that's how
you pronounce that word. That's one of those words. I
don't think I've ever heard anyone say it, but it
is certainly one that you read in this book a lot.
We also have talked about the weather as being very
symbolic in this book, and I want to touch very
quickly on the subject of my term paper, which are plants.
So honestly, some of the symbolism in the book, which

(42:59):
is very Gothic, can sort of feel heavy handed. But
if you're really buying into the idea of the romance,
then you're kind of expecting that kind of thing, and
then it's delightful because it's just this very organic underscoring
of what's going on. So, for example, when Hester leaves
the prison and comes out into the light with her daughter,
right next to the prison is a rose bush, and

(43:21):
it's a red rose that is blooming. And I'm going
to take this symbolism thing a step further and not
just mention that that is symbolic, but I'm also going
to say that what we are talking about here, what
it is symbolizing, is this idea of growth, of blooming,
of the fact that in the Scarlet Letter there is
potentially something beautiful, which there is and which Hawthorne actually

(43:42):
pretty quickly leans into. We find out from the beginning,
and partially we know this because of the symbolism of
the red rose that is blooming as she is walking
out of the prison. That she becomes this incredibly important
person in the community. People see her as as someone
that can commiserate with just by a look, by being
like sort of like sharing a sin or a secret

(44:04):
just by a glance, but also people come to her
with questions. She becomes this incredibly skilled seamstress and is
someone who is really invested in serving other people, partially
because you know she's being penitent, but also it just
seems to be very much part of her nature. So
you have this idea of the scarlet letter as blooming
into something else that's very symbolic. We also have things

(44:26):
like at one point, these black flowers grow out of
a grave, which is a pretty heavy handed symbol for
you know, evil or regret or sin as following us
even after we have died. But the subject of my
term paper was the different times when Pearl, the young
child uses plant elements to mimic or underscore the letter A.

(44:49):
So at one point early in the novel, she takes
all of these burrs off of a plant and she
fits them. She like sticks these little burrs to Hester's
letter A, which of course is symbolic of the fact
that the existence of both Hester and Pearl is this
kind of prickly existence. It's also symbolic of the ways
that Pearl herself is wanting to stick herself to her mother,

(45:11):
this idea of adhering, and of course also just the
idea that the child is paying attention and is recreating
this letter A. There's always kind of the threat that
in fact Hester's ignominy is going to rub off on
her daughter, and that Pearl is in fact going to
repeat her mother's sins. But then later we have a
moment when Pearl takes this seaweed, it's green, fresh seaweed,

(45:35):
and she makes a letter A on her own chest.
And what we have here, which I am not sure
that I argued in my paper, was the idea of
the child as in making the mother in certain ways
and in many ways. At this point in the novel,
in the romance, that is, the letter A has already
become a symbol of strength. And so what we have

(45:55):
is cute little Pearl making it again on her own chest,
this symbol of both shame and power. But she's making
it out of this green material, and the green, of course,
and the seaweed, the living plant, having everything to do
with freshness and growth, green very famously having to do
with freshness and growth. It also, of course has to

(46:15):
do with envy. But I don't think in the Small
Child we're seeing a lot of envy. Yet we also
the fact that it is seaweed speaks to the idea
of the ocean as being this kind of maternal force,
this feminine force. You can always kind of suspect the
ocean as being like a feminist element, partially because you know,
our women's twenty eight day cycle has to do with

(46:35):
the lunar cycle, the idea of the sea as a
place to return to in a very kind of like
maternal way, kind of womb like way. So when we
have young Pearl making the green letter A, it's a
reversal in many ways of what her mother is doing,
but it's also kind of a refashioning of that. Then
the third thing I talked about, because of course you
had to have three things in your like five paragraph essay.

(46:57):
This was a term paper, so it was longer than
a five pair essay, but you definitely needed three different elements.
The third was when she takes all of these flowers
Pearl does, and she is adorning herself with all of
these flowers that are in bloom. They're things of beauty,
they are things of optimism. And when she is adorning
herself with the flowers, she is not in fact making

(47:18):
an A. So what I argued in my paper was
in fact that this was real evolution because she was
not as concerned with the A, with her plant elements,
but in fact she was moving beyond into her own
kind of blooming vision of herself. So before we move
away from symbolism. I want to take a look at
a short little passage that really digs into this idea

(47:39):
of symbolism. It also has everything to do with nature,
which again I think we can read as a sort
of echo of the Transcendentalists. I also you might pay
attention here. I'm interested in the ways that the narrator
here is really speaking with this very authoritative voice and
is explaining things in a way that seems very straightforward,
even when they are supernatural or when they are in

(48:01):
fact a little heavy handed. I mean, this whole section
is remarkable because it's told in this very sort of
plain way, but it's speaking about something that is very
kind of dramatic and hyperbolic. So at the bottom of
eighty we have this sorry bottom of eighty eight, he's
talking about pearl The unlikeliest materials, A stick, a bunch
of rags, a flower were the puppets of Pearls witchcraft,

(48:25):
and without undergoing any outward change, became spiritually adapted to
whatever drama occupied the stage of her inner world. Her
one baby voice served as a multitude of imaginary personages
old and young, to talk with all the pine trees,
aged black and solemn and flinging groans and other melancholy

(48:47):
utterances on the breeze needed little transformation to figure as
Puritan elders. The ugliest weeds of the garden were their children,
whom Pearls smote down and uprooted, most unmercifully. It is
wonderful the vast variety of forms into which she threw
her intellect, with no continuity, indeed, but darting up and dancing,

(49:08):
always in a state of preternatural activity, soon sinking down,
as if exhausted by so rapid and feverish a tide
of life, and succeeded by other shapes of a similar
wild energy. This is such an important little chunk I liked,
of course, the anti puritanical thing. What's powerful in some

(49:29):
ways is that the scene where Pearl is sort of
imagining these trees as coming to life, there's this kind
of showcasing of symbolism, of the way that we think
about things as symbolic, and in many ways all of
the symbolizing stuff is just like an externalizing of what
we think. It's kind of making something manifest. And when
he has her doing it here, then when we see

(49:51):
it elsewhere in the novel, we have a context to
just sort of accept what is happening. This is also
a very good example of Pearl as just this like
totally un unstoppable, little force of a creature. From the beginning,
you know, she's talked about as being kind of witchy,
and she's like an elf, and she's like a little demon.
She has so much agency and so much power. From

(50:12):
the very beginning, everybody's a little bit afraid of Pearl,
and when we get to the end of the book
you will understand why I love that so much. This
is an excellent time to talk very quickly about the names.
So speaking of symbolism, the idea of pearl is very symbolic.
In fact, can seem very heavy handed if you think
about it even just for a second. Here, So obviously,

(50:33):
a pearl is something that is grown in an oyster,
when you have like a little grain of sand that
is an irritant, and then around it is grown this
kind of you know, beautiful thing. So pearl, obviously here
is this kind of irritant that, through the course of
the novel, you know, sort of in the oyster of
her mother, grows into this beautiful thing. In addition to Pearl,

(50:57):
we also have Hester Prynne. So Hester's interest to me,
I think of like hest At like the behest of something,
this idea. There's so much archaic writing in here, because
he's quoting a lot of Puritanical stuff. There's a lot
of like thither and withther and, which is actually kind
of fun. There's also a ton of thou and thee
and thy, which I love that. What has happened in

(51:19):
English is we we used to have a familiar you,
like a familiar second person. If you think of Spanish
or French, it would be like using tu instead of USTe.
We used to have that whole thing, and it was
so fun for me to kind of like purse whether
things were, you know, a subject pronoun or an object
pronoun or possessive pronoun. But so we have this idea

(51:40):
of hest which is this kind of archaic English and
hest Her. It was like it hest her, I mean,
I'm tipping my hand there. It was kind of like
the idea that like we should like push her like
at her behest, like at her urging that we should
urge her to do something. Hester and then for me,
Priyn sounds very close to prim which is kind of
like this deforma of the idea of something being prim

(52:01):
and it's also I think a little ironic because she
is a lot of things and prim is not one
of them. We also have Arthur Dimsdale, so Arthur means bear,
but of course we all associate it with King Arthur,
who is this very important figure you know, in all
of literature and certainly in English history. And then Dimsdale,

(52:23):
I mean the idea of Dimsdale like a little dale
being sort of a private space in nature, but the
idea of it being dim And then we have Roger Chillingworth,
who is Hester's husband from back in England. I mean
Chillingworth is like, again it is so heavy handed that
we should be like, oh my gosh. But in fact,
and it does a little bit. I mean, when we
find out that this guy is named Roger Chillingworth, it

(52:45):
really kind of forces you to make this leap where
you're like, Okay, I'm gonna I'm going to really buy
into the idea of the Gothic here and the fact
that he has like he's all grizzled and he's got
this hunch back, like you really have to kind of
let yourself join this world where things might feel a
little over the top, but the general fabric of the
thing is so good that that element just adds more

(53:08):
to the prose. So I want to take a quick
look at a couple of the supernatural elements. So obviously
the Gothic novel has lots to do with ghosts and
spirits coming back to haunt us, and we see lots
of ghosts in this romance. We also have a lot
of shadows, but we also have some like just like
very clearly supernatural things happening. And what's interesting is these

(53:29):
supernatural elements are happening in a book that is very
firmly situated in like an actual historical moment, like in
the real world. And what's nice in this situation in particular,
and a little bit throughout, is that Hawthorne is sort
of speaking to the fact that these were these were
events that were believed to be true, and that may

(53:51):
or may not have been true. But there is a
little bit of a questioning of the sort of puritanical mindset.
So on page this, But before mister Dimsdale had done speaking,
a light gleamed far and wide over all the muffled sky.
It was doubtless caused by one of those meteors which

(54:12):
the night watchers may so often observe burning out to
waste in the vacant regions of the atmosphere. So obviously
he's like trying to explain why this might be happening.
But then things get a little weirder, and then we
have a little discussion of like, of how this might
have been received. Nothing was more common in those days
than to interpret all meteoric appearances and other natural phenomena

(54:36):
that occurred with less regularity than the rise and set
of the sun and moon as so many revelations from
a supernatural source. I like that he actually uses the
word supernatural. Then a little further down, it was indeed
a majestic idea that the destiny of nations should be
revealed in these awful hieroglyphics on the cope of heaven.

(54:58):
A scroll so wide might not be deemed too expansive
for Providence to write a people's doom upon. So there's
that example of providence, And I like the fact that
it's linked here with doom. Very puritanical. And then the
belief was a favorite one with our forefathers, as betokening
that their infant commonwealth was under a celestial guardianship of

(55:19):
peculiar intimacy and strictness. Again very puritanical. And then we
have this last part where this event that originally he says,
has this very concrete explanation is becoming less and less explicable,
and so we've sort of followed along with our skepticism.
And then the narrator is giving us, in a very

(55:40):
straightforward way, a description of how this kind of normal
site has actually become something entirely else, which really does
push us toward the idea that you know, he was skeptical,
but this thing actually happened, so we as readers should
also leave some of our skepticism aside. So this is
still up in the sky, it says this, the minister

(56:01):
looking upward to the zenith beheld there the appearance of
an immense letter, the letter a marked out in lines
of dull red light. It's so well done. I want
to read one more quick section that is actually very
much like this, the idea that we have something that's
kind of normal and mundane, and then it gets to
be somewhat supernatural, and it allows the reader to put

(56:24):
aside a little bit of her skepticism. This also echoes
some of the things that we were talking about earlier. Again,
this is Pearl in the forest. Pearl had not found
the hour pass wearisomely while her mother sat talking with
the clergyman. The great black forest stern as it showed
itself to those who brought the guilt and troubles of
the world into its bosom, became the playmate of the

(56:45):
lonely infant as well as it knew. How So, this
is the perfect explanation, by the way of pathetic fallacy,
this idea that a forest would seem black if you
were someone who had a lot of guilt and trouble.
I just love the ways that he is both showing
us these things and then also kind of explaining them
to us. So then right across the page we have

(57:08):
further description of Pearl, and this is kind of this
list of these different creatures who are interacting with Pearl.
A partridge ran forward threateningly. A pigeon uttered a sound
of such greeting as alarm. A squirrel chattered either in
anger or a merriment. So I find it very interesting
here that what's happening with these creatures is not positive.

(57:29):
I mean the pigeon is sounding an alarm. But then
we have this thing where the squirrel, the way that
he's chattering. I don't know why. I think he's a hey,
I don't know why I gendered the squirrel. But this
chattering is either in anger or merriment. That does speak
to this thing over and over where Hawthorne is giving
us these symbols that we can read in both ways
and what's happening. I mean, oftentimes it is very clearly

(57:52):
the one or the other, but there is a lot
of complexity and gray area throughout the whole entire book.
I mean, for a room mants that is really involved
with like good and evil that is very Manichean, meaning
like it's just all sort of either good or evil.
There's actually quite a bit of this kind of middle
ground or kind of ambiguity. And this is the perfect

(58:12):
example that we have. You know, these kind of threatening animals,
but one of them, in fact, might be chattering at
her with merriment. So then we're moving down a little further.
A wolf, it is said, but here the tail has
surely lapsed into the improbable, came up and smelt Pearl's
robe and offered his savage head to be padded by
her hand. So I of course love this kind of

(58:35):
meta moment here where he's saying the tail has surely
lapsed into the improbable. So he again he's talking about
our skepticism, but then he's just sort of reporting it
to us. And I love the idea here of this
savage head, this idea of this savage and like and
scary wild you know, predatory creature, but sort of communing
with Pearl because she is so powerful. And then we

(58:56):
have just this final sentence. The true seems to be, however,
that the mother forest and these wild things which it
nourished all recognized a kindred wilderness in the human child.
Love it, love it. I mean, this is a I
said this earlier. This is a very wild child, and
this idea of pairing her often with nature is extra

(59:19):
important if you think of the Transcendentalists. This is a
moment when nature is seen as almost kind of an
antidote for God, or like a replacement for God. It's
a very powerful moment, and it is no surprise that
we see Pearl again and again, because in fact, she
herself is very powerful. So one of the biggest elements
of the romance is the idea of matters of the

(59:41):
heart as being first and foremost, and that is certainly
the case here. So this whole entire book is a
love story. And it is actually so funny to me
because every single time we see Hester together with Dimsdale,
suddenly Roger Chillingworth is also there. And this is one
of those moments where you kind of have to just
lean into just something that is slightly improbable. But the

(01:00:01):
entire book rests on the idea of well, it rests
on a lot of guilt and a lot of shame,
But the whole entire thing has to do with this
love affair, and certainly with this love triangle between Hester Prynne,
her lover and her husband. And along with this idea
of focusing just on matters of the heart, we have
this kind of drama, this high drama that emerges from that. So,

(01:00:23):
I mean from the start to the very finish, like
very significantly, in the very first scene and in the
very last scene, all of this like drama, in this
love triangle is playing out on this gigantic public stage.
Especially at the very end we have Dimsdale at the end.
I mean, it's kind of ridiculous, like what a public

(01:00:45):
spectacle he makes of the whole thing, which is also
kind of in line with the like Puritan idea of
punishment and like really making people humiliated. But there is
so much drama throughout the whole thing, and also not
just in these big public displays, but just in terms
of the excessive emotion. I mean, there is people no
one is having, you know, kind of mild feelings about anything.

(01:01:08):
And one of the ways that you see that most clearly,
And I loved this. I started keeping kind of like
halfway through the novel. I started keeping track of these
words that seemed like very much about the romance and
about meaning like the romance as a genre, which of
course is also a little bit like the Gothic novel
as a genre. And these are words that, like, I
started keeping track of and tallying how often I was

(01:01:29):
seeing them. And again I didn't even start till the
middle of the book. And there are so many examples.
These are words that are repeated over and over and
over again, and they really tell us so much about
the tone of the thing. So here are the words
on my list. Tremulous, shudder, shadows, ecstasy, and in some
of them, I have like parentheses afterward, like the adjective

(01:01:52):
that went with this. In this case, it was extravagant, ecstasy, passion,
hot passion, agony, a throb of agony, horror, evil, horror,
really doubling down on horror. Then we have anguish, doom, grotesque, dread, gloomy,

(01:02:14):
and ghastly. So you see so much exaggeration and so
much emotion in all of these different words. And again,
these are words that are repeated over and over and over,
and it's kind of that idea of really like leaning
into the drama of it. And it's I like also
that it was antiquated, which is actually a great segue
into this next little section which was so fun for me,

(01:02:36):
which is that, honestly, you guys, this is one of
the books that they took to pull all of our
SAT words. So if you are in your fifties, I
think you know what I mean by an SAT word.
There were all of these words that we had to
really that we had to memorize, which honestly, like that
is at the core of why the SAT used to
be still probably is so elitist and so classist and

(01:02:59):
so ridiculously geared toward people who could afford tutors for
the SAT and people who had the leisure to study
their little, you know, flash cards with all of these
words on them. And they were very specific words that
were not even in the parlance when I was in
high school. And it turns out that they are coming
from books exactly like this. So I'm going to read

(01:03:19):
these to you as a little quiz. You can see
if you remember these SAT words. Calumny, I'm going to
leave a little gap for you to guess, so if
you recall that means slander. Interestingly, we also have contumely,
and we also have scurrillous, which are a noun an adjective,
but both of those also mean slander. It is significant

(01:03:40):
that in this book we have calumny, contumely, and scurriless,
which all have to do with slander, which actually is
not surprising at all, it's very fitting. Then we have vituperative.
I think you'll remember that we have ignominy, which I
don't even know if that really deserves to be on
the SAT word list, because it seems like that one's
still in the parlance. Then we have visage, which is

(01:04:01):
of course a face, you know, like it's a French
word for visage, like the face propinquity sari ser meaning
like very dried up. That was probably when we were
talking about the burrs sedulous asperity. I think asperities when
we use anyway, mollified, indefatigable. So those are just a

(01:04:22):
few of them. I have to say that mostly I
loved coming across them, because in fact I did remember them.
This is the kind of thing I'm going to remember
when I'm very very old and I don't remember anything else.
But if you are someone who might in fact enjoy
running across those words and feeling like all of those
hours that you spent studying in high school were not
for not, that may be another reason to dive in.
So we're going to close, I think, very fittingly by

(01:04:44):
looking at the very like pro woman statements in this book,
and then with a very brief comment about the end,
which is truly the most optimistic thing in the romance.
So it's important to remind ourselves at the end here.
I mean, this is someone who it's a man who's
writing in eighteen fifty about something that was happening in
sixteen fifty. It was so surprising to me and frankly delightful,

(01:05:07):
how absolutely feminist this novel is. And I think we
all remember this was an absolute pillar of strength. This
is someone who was meant to be humiliated, but very
quickly we see her exhibiting nothing but strength, and in fact,
we see people around her responding to her strength in
really important ways. And one of the things that I
thought was like so satisfying in this is that her

(01:05:31):
partner in crime, her lover, is so weak. He's such
a loser. First of all, he's a crazy hypocrite because
he is in a position where he is acting like
he has not committed adultery, and he's supposed to be
this person of incredible like moral fabric, and yet he
has done this crime and Hester, at least, you know,
has been forced to be upfront about it. He's totally

(01:05:52):
not He's totally hypocritical. He's also like physically and morally
so weak. Every time we see him, he's like literally
just like practically fainting, and he's always shuddering, and he's
always just looking so ill. And obviously that's an important
statement about hypocrisy and about this man, but it's also
an important statement about the strength of Hester. Prynne, and

(01:06:13):
he often often whenever her lover. You know, as the
book goes on, they're interacting more. He's always relying on
her strength in a way that is really underscoring his
weakness and her agency. So I want to read a
couple of these very quickly. On page forty eight. So
this is only eight pages into the novel. So at

(01:06:33):
first he's talking about the English women and then moves
on to talk about Americans. Throughout that chain of ancestry,
every successive mother has transmitted to her child a fainter bloom,
a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame,
if not a character of less force and solidity than
her own. That's also very Victorian, this idea of women

(01:06:55):
as being very like weak. But then we have this.
The women who were now standing about the prison door
stood within less than half a century of the period
when the man like Elizabeth had been the not altogether
unsuitable representative of the sex. So fascinating that he is
hearkening back to Queen Elizabeth the First and really underscoring

(01:07:18):
the ways that her strength was very comparable to a man's.
They were her countrywomen and the beef and ale of
their native land, with a moral diet not a whit
more refined, entered largely into their composition. The bright morning
sun therefore shone on broad shoulders and well developed busts,
and on round and ruddy cheeks that had ripened in

(01:07:40):
the far off island and had hardly yet grown paler
or thinner in the atmosphere of New England. There was moreover,
a boldness and retundity of speech among these matrons, as
most of them seemed to be, that would startle us
at the present day, whether in respect to its purport
or its volume of tone. So we have the this
really bold description of these very powerful women in sixteen fifty,

(01:08:04):
and they're standing a little bit in opposition to Hester,
but they're also, you know, the kind of stock that
she grew out of. And then on page seventy three
things get a little more specific about her. He starts
out by, you know, with sort of her ignominy. Again,
I hope I'm saying that correctly, and then we very quickly,
even in the very beginning when she's first emerging, we
see her strength emerging. Hester Prynne's term of confinement was

(01:08:29):
now at an end, her prison door was thrown open,
and she came forth into the sunshine, which, falling on
all alike, seemed to her sick and morbid heart, as
if meant for no other purpose than to reveal the
scarlet letter on her breast, and then a little below that.
Then she was supported by an unnatural tension of the
nerves and by all other combative energy of her character,

(01:08:52):
which enabled her to convert the scene into a kind
of lurid triumph. So literally, you know, she's just come
out of the jail, and it's already a triumph. It's remarkable.
Then a couple of pages later, on seventy six, we
have like an even more fulsome description of the way
that she really turns this whole thing into a real boon.

(01:09:13):
I mean, it's not great for her, but she's certainly
making the best of a not great situation. On seventy six,
lonely as was Hester's situation, and without a friend on
earth who dared to show himself. She however, incurred no
risk of want. She possessed an art that sufficed, even
in a land that afforded comparatively little scope for its exercise,

(01:09:34):
to supply of food for her thriving infant and herself.
It was the art, then as now, almost the only
one within a woman's grasp of needlework. Of course, as
a fiber artist, I loved this, But I also here
I love the fact she is providing for her family
very much like a man would do. And I love

(01:09:55):
the fact that right from the start Pearl is thriving.
You could argue that it's a little heavy handed, the
way that Pearl, from the very beginning to the very
end is just this like very powerful creature, but I
loved it. On page eighty her breast, with its badge
of shame, was but the softer pillow for the head
that needed one. She was self ordained a sister of mercy,

(01:10:17):
or we may rather say the world's heavy hand had
so ordained her. When neither the world nor she looked
forward to this result, the letter was the symbol of
her calling. Such helpfulness was found in her, so much
power to do and power to sympathize that many people
refused to interpret the scarlet a by its original signification.

(01:10:39):
They said that it meant able. So strong was hester Prynne,
with a woman's strength. So I love this, and we're
going to leave off this discussion of feminism and Hester
prinn here with that, because it's very important there that
he's saying that she has a woman's strength and that
it is very potent. And I love the idea here
of the a not only as you know, people sort

(01:11:00):
of looking at it differently, but the fact that people
really are seeing it as able. She is showing so
much not only agency for herself, but really becoming, you know,
sort of a pillar in the community. I actually lied.
I had one more note here, and we have to
read this because it is a slightly different point. On
one eighty two, we have this statement from Arthur Dimmesdale,

(01:11:21):
and I how am I to live longer? Breathing the
same air with this deadly enemy? Exclaimed Arthur Dimmesdale, shrinking
within himself and pressing his hand nervously against his heart,
a gesture that had grown involuntary with him. Think for me, Hester,
thou art strong, resolve for me. I mean, I love it.
I love it that Hawthorne is just like making him say, like, Hester,

(01:11:43):
you're so much stronger than I am. I need you
to think for me and resolve for me, Like a
real demonstration of a very subversive sort of feminist figure.
It is so excellent. But where I really want to
end is with the idea of Pearl. So again from
the very beginning, she's been this very strong, very competent

(01:12:03):
little creature who in many ways is the embodiment, well
she is in fact the actual, like biological embodiment of
this passion. So she might be read as like this
terrible proof of like a sin, but instead, throughout the
whole entire book, she's just like literally like a ray

(01:12:23):
of sunshine. She's constantly a little ray of sunshine. She
has intelligence, she has agency, she has confidence, she has candor.
Like she's just like this incredible creature. And so then
at the end of the book we have her fate,
and I think when we read the fate of Pearl,
we are meant to read, you know, a much idealized

(01:12:44):
fate of someone who lives that way, of someone who
lives outside of puritanical law, and someone who has all
of those attributes I just named. And it's excellent because
Hawthorne really wants that person to have success, and this
is a very concrete thing that he does at the
end here, and this is where we are going to end.
On page two forty three. Leaving the discussion apart, we

(01:13:06):
have a matter of business to communicate to the reader.
At Old Roger Chillingworth's decease, which took place within the year,
and by his last will and testament, of which Governor
Bellingham and the Reverend mister Wilson were executors, he bequeathed
a very considerable amount of property, both here and in England,
to Little Pearl, the daughter of Hester Prynne, so Pearl,

(01:13:29):
the elf child, the demon offspring, as some people up
to that epoch persisted in considering her, became the richest
heiress of her day in the New world. Love it,
love it, I mean. Not only is Pearl all of
those things, but she then is given the power of money,
which is kind of this irrefutable and in some ways
very kind of male power. She's someone who will have money,

(01:13:52):
she can survive by herself. She will be able to
continue her independence both in England and in America. She
has this in credible resource. So this is a character
whose spirit has been endorsed again and again throughout the novel.
And then at the very end we see her really
become not not the hero, but she is the one
who has the extreme reward, and I love that idea.

(01:14:17):
So we're going to close there. I want to thank
you so much for tuning in. Maybe this has wetted
your appetite, and maybe you're going to go back and
read the Scarlet Letter. But even if you don't, I'm
hoping that you're remembering things from eleventh grade. You know,
if you're on the YouTube and you remember your high
school term paper, put it in the comments, And I
think we should all feel it very wholesome for having

(01:14:38):
revisited one of these classics that really has a lot
to do with the fabric of this nation and happily
has left us with a very optimistic message. So thanks
very much for listening. Happy reading.