Tradition, Modernity and Form

Hi, I'm Nick Lawrence.

I teach American literature and culture at the University of Warrick,

and I'm going to be lecturing a little

bit about Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter,

published in 18 50

still taught widely in schools today.

So in discussing this letter

now, that is the early 21st century.

We may need to begin by stressing

the modernity of Hawthorne's novel.

Despite the archaic diction,

it sounds old fashioned and the subject matter

set in the 17th century in colonial New England.

It's worth recalling that Hester Prynne Hawthorne's heroin is a single mother,

an abandoned wife and lover,

a freethinker, uh,

well ahead of her time in terms of her challenge to the social basis of

norms of marriage and gender relations.

And eventually she becomes a counsellor to other Desperate Housewives,

somewhat like the, uh, culture of self help and advice that we have today.

So if her story seems to prefigure

the rise of early feminism,

and that's because Hawthorn

intentionally positions her

as a figure of an emergent, not a residual or um, dominant patriarchal culture,

she is in some ways a pre figuration of what's going to happen in the 19th century,

when Hawthorne is writing the novel.

And although he does his homework on the cultural history of the Puritans,

full of their very seemingly distant, uh, rules and regulations and foibles,

his primary focus is addressing.

And this is important. Um, I think to a reading of the novel,

uh, is addressing an audience that is contemporary, um, to the writing of the novel,

so it may seem as if it is somewhat clunky and archaic.

But the novel itself addresses urgent concerns

of the mid 19th century and arguably,

um, concerns that we still have today.

So what was distinctive about Hawthorne's engagement with his time?

I think we can get a better sense of what Hoffman is doing

if we realise that he is something of a pioneer of UM,

genre that's going to become dominant in the 19th century,

and that's the adultery novel.

Prior to that, there were

a number of novels in the 18th century by Samuel Richardson, among others, Um,

that fell into the category of the so called seduction

novel where feminine virtue is under assault by masculine cunning,

and that novel implicitly takes the position of upholding social norms um,

societal mores.

But the adultery novel

invites our sympathy for adulterous lovers and thereby challenges.

Those norms were implicitly put in the position of, um, dissenters against, um,

what you would think of as as patriarchal law.

So although adultery is never mentioned in the novel, there's only one brief, uh,

encoding of the term adultery.

When Hester steps out of the prison door

into what the narrator calls unadulterated sunlight,

that's the only clue that we ever get.

This is actually about adultery.

Uh,

this is a novel that tries to take on what has become a

matter of of staging the tensions and the contradictions in middle class um,

marital relations in a time of rapid historical change.

So, like Flaubert's Madame Bovary, like Tolstoy's Anna Karenina,

like Fontana's Every Broadcast,

The Scarlet Letter

attempts to

track the way that romantic feeling

becomes at odds with patriarchal law.

But it does so in a very different way from those European examples,

and that may be something that's distinctively American about it.

So one aspect of the difference of Hawthorne's novel from other

examples of the adultery genre is the strangeness of its form.

It's not in any recognisable way what we think of as 1/19 century realist novel.

To put it another way, it's really a deformed novel.

It's not about well formed, um, naturalistic recounting of, uh,

of the present day and it's, um,

and its difficulties and intentions.

Instead,

it takes a very particular approach to narrating this 17th century morality tale.

Most criticism of the novel turns on the question of whether

Hawthorne is upholding or challenging the dominant ideologies of its day,

usually including some model of the, uh,

the map of gender relations known as separate spheres.

Men inhabiting one sphere over here in the public realm,

women confined to the domestic sphere,

or whether perhaps author is challenging those ideologies,

subverting them in some way, covert or direct.

One critic who compares the Scarlet Letter with another novel written

at the same time Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin,

has called it propaganda not to change your life, because at the end,

the patriarchal system is intact.

Hester Prynne has not mounted a serious um, act of dissent against it.

She actually comes back after

a period of of returning to England,

she comes back to the colony and takes up her

role as a kind of agony aunt for unhappy women,

Um, in, uh, the Boston area.

So it's it's not a novel it seems to solicit. Um

uh, rallying to the barricades,

even though the energy is that it contains are profoundly revolutionary.

They elicit all kinds of anticipation, expectation about huge change,

even apocalyptic change.

What I want to suggest, though, is that even though the novel itself does not incite,

uh, towards, uh, an activist model of challenging social norms,

it does profoundly upend social norms.

At the level of, um,

the novels form the way that it aesthetically

encodes the questions that it's taking on.

So there's the moral plot, and the moral plot ends in a certain way.

But then there's also

the

machinery that Hawthorne uses to, uh, encapsulate that plot.

And that's again very counterintuitive. It's not realist.

He has a very strange, uh, method of narrating the story through the static,

emblematic chapters, almost like 17th century woodcuts, um,

in their kind of cartoon reductive nous.

And they're very stiff figured, uh, descriptive nous.

So you could think about, um, Hawthorne,

Almost as a kind of contemporary 19th century cartoonist in the way that he's, um,

telling the story as a series of images or pictures

rather than a conventional realist unfolding of the plot.

And then there's a strange way that he sort of commingles the antique in the modern.

Um, so that you have this quite, um, profound depth psychology at work,

and characters like Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale,

the preacher who is her secret lover.

And then you'll have characters like Mistress Higgins,

the sister of the governor of Massachusetts,

who has figured as a kind of cartoonish witch who is

likely to take off into the skies on her broomstick,

um, and and joined the devil in the Forest.

It's hard to know how we're supposed to read those two things together,

is often being serious when he talks about witchcraft and black men in the forest.

And, um,

the supernatural is a kind of constant presence in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Um and especially, how do we square that with this kind of, uh,

quite inward looking psychological penetration when

he's addressing his primary characters?

There is a description of Roger chilling worths, um, deformed,

shoulders chilling Worth Hester's husband,

who is a physician and who makes it his life's project.

To find out whether Arthur Dimmesdale is, in fact, guilty of adultery.

His deformed shoulder is in some ways an emblem for the novel as a whole.

It's misshapen. It's not aligned.

It doesn't square with the realist protocols that we

come to expect with 19th century novel writing.

But in a way it is the entry point for understanding how Hawthorne's method, um,

allows us to see things that we wouldn't see

if he was writing a straightforward realist novel.

So I want to suggest that there's a

Hollywood recipe for producing a so called sleeper.

Uh, that's an unexpected hit.

Dont simply reproduce what survey say the audience wants.

You're not going to get hit that way. You just stick to the formula.

Instead,

try to engage something that your audience is in denial about but

wants to see you take the risk of expressing encoded form.

So, for example, the nuclear families in trouble,

in part because the traditional model of the family is obsolete.

Instead of making a bleakly realist film about a family that's falling apart,

which would bomb at the box office.

Instead,

you might make a film about how family is threatened

by an external force like aliens or ghosts or poltergeists.

Or you can set the film in the historical past, and that's what Hawthorne does.

It allows some crucial distance from the very

contemporary matters that he's trying to engage.

And that's how in some ways,

you could say The Scarlet Letter is a sleeper hit in American literature.