Author’s note: This is not only a review of The Scarlet Letter, but also of its author, to a small but important extent. Long ago, a college professor told me that sophisticated readers look beyond the written word to the author and the author’s motivation. Doing so with Nathaniel Hawthorne is revealing.
Hester Prynne is publicly shamed and forced to wear a scarlet “A” on her garment forever for her adultery with a lover she refuses to name. We see her struggles with guilt, her isolation, the isolation of her illegitimate daughter, and her relationships with her estranged, bitter, elderly husband and with Dimmesdale, the father of her child. Dimmesdale eventually confesses and dies. Hester goes on to lead a relatively successful remainder of her life.
The book was originally banned when published in the 1850s due to outrage at the moral arc of its heroine, Hester Prynne. There were complaints that she was not punished enough: that being almost completely ostracized after extreme public humiliation, and having her daughter shunned, denied playmates, and forbidden a normal childhood, were still not enough. There were complaints of pornography, but that is not even a stretch; it is simply untrue. Some felt that the author challenged the authority of our Puritan founders, which I think can only be a good thing, though his contemporaries did not see it that way.
In Mason’s Banned Book Club, there was somewhat lively discussion about whether the father of Hester’s child, the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, truly loved Hester. Some felt that yes, though he was weak, he truly loved her. The other side said no: had he understood what love is, he would never have allowed her to suffer, nor would he have allowed his child to be treated so harshly.
What we did not discuss, because I, for one, was unaware of it at the time, was the author’s misogynistic take on his contemporaries — specifically, on the female authors of his era.
“America is now wholly given over to a d — d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash — and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed. What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of the Lamplighter, and other books neither better nor worse? — worse they could not be, and better they need not be, when they sell by 100,000.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Letter to William D. Ticknor (January 9, 1855)
This, from a man whose books were being outsold by the likes of Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall, and Maria Susan Cummings’ The Lamplighter.
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So, a white male author was complaining that the reading public chose “trash” over his own work. Hmm. That “trash” was written by women, and Hawthorne made no secret of his disdain for their accomplishments.
This, more than anything he ever wrote, including the banned book The Scarlet Letter, would make me never pick up another thing he had published. The problem with that approach is that then I would miss some pretty valid themes, storylines, and life lessons.
Once again, I am faced with the dilemma of separating the art from the artist, and that’s sticky territory. I find that easier to do in some situations and complicated in others. The list keeps growing, of artists whose lives or statements offend me, yet their works delight me.
I wish there were an easy answer.
