The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel Hawthorne
The story, not bad. The style, unreadable.
Here is who I would recommend this book to - people who like sentences with 4 or 5 thoughts, and that are paragraph length - so that they are nearly impossible to understand - because by the time the end, of the sentence, has been reached the beginning, and whatever meaning it contained, has been forgotten and the point is lost. Paperback The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter: A Romance, an 1850 novel, is a work of historical fiction, written by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is considered his masterwork.
Set in 17th-century Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony, during the years 1642 to 1649, it tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter through an affair and struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. Throughout the book, Hawthorne explores themes of legalism, sin, and guilt.
عنوانهای چاپ شده در ایران: «داغ ننگ»؛ «حرفی به رنگ عشق»؛ «زنی با نشان قرمز»؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز ششم ماه آگوست سال 1976میلادی
عنوان: داغ ننگ؛ اثر: ناثانیل هاثورن؛ مترجم: سیمین دانشور؛ مشخصات نشر تهران، نیل، 1334، در 240ص، چاپ دوم فرانکلین 1346، در224ص، سوم 1357؛ چاپ چهارم، نشر خوارزمی؛ 1369؛ در 252ص؛ چاپ پنجم 1385؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده 19م
مترجم: مرضیه مهردوست؛ تهران، پیام پویا؛ 1387؛ در 56ص؛
مترجم: محمدصادق شریعتی؛ در 86 ص؛ تهران، گویش نو؛ 1387؛ با عنوان: زنی با نشان قرمز؛ در 127ص؛ روشنگران؛
چکیده داستان: «هستر پرین (شخصیت اصلی داستان)» زن جوان و متاهلی است، که گفته می‌شود «همسرش سالها پیش به مسافرتی رفته، ولی هرگز برنگشته است، و همگان به یقین رسیده اند، که وی مرده است»؛ داستان از جایی آغاز می‌شود، که «هستر» به علت ارتکاب زنا، با مهم‌ترین کشیش شهر «آرتور دیمزدیل»؛ صاحب بچه ای به نام «پرل»، شده، همان بچه، رسوایی و جرم و گناه بزرگ او را، آشکار ساخته، بنابراین «هستر» در زندان است؛ از او میخواهند که نام پدر بچه را افشا کند، تا او نیز محاکمه گردد؛ اما «هستر» بسیار وفادار و شجاع است، و از انجام آنکار، خودداری میکند؛ حکم مجازاتش این است، که میبایست همراه با فرزند حرامزاده ی خویش، در وسط شهر، و در پیشگاه عموم، بر روی سکوی اعدام بایستد، تا همگان او را ببینند، و نیز تا پایان عمر خویش، همواره باید، «داغ ننگ» یا «اسکارلت لتر» را بر روی سینه، و تن خویش داشته باشد، تا همیشه، به عنوان یک زناکار، میان مردم شناخته شود؛ او مجازات را با افتخار میپذیرد، و در زیر بار رسوایی، و تحقیراتی که جامعه به او تحمیل میکند، شکست را نمی‌پذیرد، تا اینکه رفته رفته، با اعمال خیرخواهانه اش، نگاه جامعه را به سوی خود تغییر داده، در انتهای داستان حرف «آ» بر روی سینه اش، بجای نماینده ی واژه ی «آدالترس»، نمایانگر کلمه «آنجل» به معنی فرشته، تجلی میکند
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 23/06/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 24/05/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی Paperback oh god.
hawthorne is that perpetually needy manchild of a writer, you know the one who peers over your shoulder while youre trying to read and keeps pointing out the parts of his own writing that he finds particularly good and/or moving.
yeah, see? do you see? see how i talked about how the rose is red, and then i talk about how hesters 'a' is red, too? do you see what im trying to do here, with the symbolism?
and its like that all the way through the book.
*edit 12 september 2008: im tutoring with this for of my students, as her AP english teacher is teaching it as part of his curriculum. and yes, it still sucks as badly as i remember. actually, even more so, because now i have to teach it. Paperback THIS BOOK IS ABOUT A PREECHERS SPERM IT HAS UPTIGHT PEOPLE IN IT Paperback Hester walked across the room. She stepped upon her left foot, her right foot, and then her left foot again. One wonders, why doth she, in this instance of walking across the room, begin her journey upon the left foot and not the right? Could it be her terrible sin, that the devil informeth the left foot just as he informeth the left hand and those bewitched, left-handed persons amongst us? Why, forsooth, doth the left foot of sin draggeth the innocent right foot along its wretched journey from one side of the room to the other? She walked across the room, I tell you! Guilty feet hath got no rhythm... Paperback
Behold, verily, there is the women of the Scarlet Letter; and, of a truth, moreover, there is the likeness of the scarlet letter running alongside her”
Let’s talk a little bit about self-fulfilling prophecy. If an entire community, and religious sect, brand a girl’s mother as a sinner, whether justly or unjustly, then surely the girl will take some of this to heart? If the only world she has ever known is one when he only parent is considered ungodly, blasphemous and full of sin, then surely she will begin to reflect some of these ideals? When the Puritans branded Hester with the Scarlet Letter, they also branded her daughter (metaphorically speaking, of course.)
This novel is a political message directly pointed at the Puritans of early America. In their blind devoutness they almost cause the very thing they are actually preaching against. Ultimately, Hawthorne portrays the religious sect as hypocrites who are completely self-defeating in their actions. What’s the point in preaching a religion if you don’t fully adhere to its doctrine? There’s none. Actions have consequences, so does unjustified damnation. Indeed, in this the author establishes how some extreme piety can almost cause impiety. Religion can be taken too far. Christianity is built upon the principals of forgiveness, and repentance, not punishment and the shaming of the guilty. Well, what the Puritans perceive as guilty. Then there is the entire separate issue of the fact that those men of the cloth can be guilty too. Nobody is completely pure despite what they think.
Hester’s biggest sin is getting pregnant outside of marriage. In their persecution of her they don’t consider how she could be the victim in all this. I’m not saying that she is, in this regard, but to the best of their knowledge she could well be. She could have been raped. They’re also unforgivingly sexist; they, again, consider Hester to be the guilty party without recognising that it takes two to do the deed. Their ignorance knows no bounds to the realities of life; they shield themselves with their religious virtue and do not consider that there is a harsh world out there. Men like this are dangerous, and in this Hawthorne establishes his message.
“I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!”
This is a very accomplished novel; it provides an interesting perspective on a crucial part of American history. It was an enlightening read, but toward the middle it’s focus did begin to dwindle. I felt like there were a few passages of convoluted and unnecessary narration. I mean this was short, though it could have been a little shorter. The middle was drawn out with some irrelevant events thrown in. I’m not entirely sure of their point. The language combination was also a little odd at times; it felt like the author had lifted certain expressions straight from Shakespeare’s vocabulary and infused it with his own. The result was a very disjointed and hard to read combination.
The overall message of this piece of literature is what makes it a worthy read even if its delivery was a little pedantic at times. Overall, though, I do attest that this is a rather undervalued novel. The socio-historical context it provides is tremendous. This is a classic I’m very glad I read. The overall message of this piece of literature is what makes it a worthy read even if its delivery was a little pedantic at times. Paperback Actually, I've read this book twice, the first time when I was in high school. Reading it again after some thirty years, I was amazed at the amount of meaning I'd missed the first time!
Most modern readers don't realize (and certainly aren't taught in school) that Hawthorne --as his fiction, essays and journals make clear-- was a strong Christian, though he steadfastly refused to join a denomination; and here his central subject is the central subject of the Christian gospel: sin's guilt and forgiveness. (Unlike many moderns, Hawthorne doesn't regard Hester's adultery as perfectly okay and excusable --though he also doesn't regard it as an unforgivable sin.) But his faith was of a firmly Arminian sort; and as he makes abundantly clear, it's very hard for sinners mired in the opposite, Calvinist tradition to lay hold of repentance and redemption when their religious beliefs tell them they may not be among the pre-chosen elect. (It's no accident that his setting is 17th-century New England --the heartland of an unadulterated, unquestioned Calvinism whose hold on people's minds was far more iron-clad than it had become in his day.) If you aren't put off by 19th-century diction, this book is a wonderful read, with its marvelous symbolism and masterful evocation of the atmosphere of the setting (the occasional hints of the possibly supernatural add flavor to the whole like salt in a stew). Highly recommended! Paperback “No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true…”
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
When I think of The Scarlet Letter, I think of all the things I hated about high school English. Indeed, I think of all the things I see as wrongheaded in the way we teach literature to kids.
I’ve loved reading for as long as I can remember. Yet, when I entered high school, it did not take long for that love to shrivel like autumnal leaves, there to break and scatter beneath the heels of a succession of well-meaning teachers trotting out their oh-so-familiar-syllabi. Despite being a prolific, above-age-level reader throughout middle school, I doubt I finished more than a handful of titles during those four years.
The reason, at least in part, is Nathaniel Hawthorne, an author who wrote dense prose about complicated themes, with little regard for pacing or dramatic set pieces. It is a style found in many of the titles that make up the bulk of required reading lists.
When you are handed The Scarlet Letter at the age of fourteen or fifteen, and you open those pages, you are not about to enter a realm of wonder and enchantment. Rather, you are thrust into a ruthless psychological excavation, not unlike the dissection of that fetal pig you did in biology. You must trudge through sentences that cling like brambles, and divine meaning from Hawthorne’s gratuitous use of colors and symbols. By the time it’s over, it’s hard not to hate the very idea of picking up a book.
Any book.
Lost are any of the simple joys of a well-told story.
Sure, there is good reason to study literature, and the important, lifelong tools you thereby gain such as critical thinking, attention to detail, and sitting still long enough to finish a page (especially in this age of constant swiping). I’m certainly not calling for the abolition of English class.
For my money, though, it’s more important to get impressionable, distracted youngsters to love reading in the first place. Drug dealers know all about getting their clients hooked on the good stuff. In this area, English teachers are lagging.
If I ran the world, I’d be assigning popular contemporary fiction in high school, subjecting them to the same analyses with half the pain.
As you might have noticed, I don’t run the world. Furthermore, in the universe in which we happen to coexist, The Scarlet Letter remains a classic, though it grows dustier with each passing year. Thus, it was with a need for catharsis, as well as a sense of unfinished business, that I picked this up twenty-five years after I last set it down.
(Full disclosure: I set it down in 1994 in order to pick up the Cliffs Notes version).
The big surprise here: I sort of loved it.
Like all literary masterpieces, The Scarlet Letter requires little by way of introduction. It is the story of a “fallen” woman, her vengeful (and incognito) husband, and a charismatic young minister harboring a terrible secret.
When the novel opens, the heroine, Hester Prynne, is stepping through the prison door, on her way to a scaffold where she is to be publicly shamed. She wears the titular red “A” on her breast, marking her as an adulteress. In her arms she bears Pearl, the daughter born of sin. Hester’s affair is well over by the time we meet her, and little mention is made of it. (I can’t even recall Hawthorne explicitly stating the meaning of the “A”). The focus here is not on the sin, but on the sinner, and her road to redemption.
(My version of The Scarlet Letter opens with a thirty-plus page “introductory” called The Custom-House. This is a meandering, long-winded, semi-autobiographical sketch of Hawthorne’s time as a surveyor at the Custom-House in Salem, Massachusetts. During this time, Hawthorne claims that he came across the “true” story of Hester Prynne, which he goes on to relate in the actual novel. I’m not sure if The Custom-House is technically part of The Scarlet Letter or not. I think not. Nevertheless, I read it, since I am a bit anal about things like that. Anyway, no part of this reading experience brought me closer to my impatient, high-school self than slogging through this unnecessary opening act).
Hester refuses to name her partner-in-lust, even after the arrival of her much-older husband, who now calls himself Roger Chillingworth (excellent name, by the by). Chillingworth is a physician who has spent time among the Indians. He takes it upon himself to discover the identity of Hester’s paramour, so that he can enact his revenge.
The third character in The Scarlet Letter’s triad is Arthur Dimmesdale, a popular preacher much loved by the Boston town-folk. He uses his clout to defend Hester when he can. He also happens to be wasting away for some inexplicable reason.
The Scarlet Letter is set in 1642, and features a number of real-life personages and allusions to actual events, which is Hawthorne���s attempt to lend this verity. Despite being just over two-hundred pages long, The Scarlet Letter spans some seven years, as the stoic, isolated Hester proudly bears her shame, and gradually works herself back into the good graces of her community. (Since her community is made up of Puritans, this results in little more than a slightly-less-grim frown as she passes through town).
Hawthorne’s prose requires your attention. He tends towards long, clause-studded sentences, in which he uses both commas and hyphens to pack in as much information, digressionary or not, as he possibly can. Though he has the short-story writer’s knowledge of exactly where he is going, Hawthorne also displays a Dickensian tendency towards using five words when a period would have sufficed. And of course, there is the Puritan-Speak, especially in the dialogue, which is clotted with thees, thous, hithers and yons.
With all that said, he can sure describe a place. I really appreciated his ability to conjure a precolonial Massachusetts as an island in the midst of a wilderness that is both Edenic and forbidding.
The core story itself is so iconic that it is difficult to judge objectively. If this was written today, would anyone care? I’m not sure. In any event, the interplay between Hester, Arthur, and Roger is fascinating. Roger, especially, deserves a special guest star award, for enlivening every scene of which he is a part. Hester, too, holds her own. Though she is not quite a proto-feminist bucking the patriarchy while blasting Liz Phair, she is tough, resilient, and hearteningly indifferent to the judgments of others.
The Scarlet Letter famously ends with scenes that are so overwrought and melodramatic that they bear little resemblance to reality. Even taking into consideration the setting – a period in which otherwise-normal men and women believed that witches were flying over their heads on a nightly basis – Hester, Roger, and especially Arthur are extremely operatic. They are so histrionic that one can be excused for thinking he or she has wandered away from Hawthorne’s haunted New England and stumbled into Dostoyevsky’s St. Petersburg.
That said, I actually found the over-the-top denouement to be…fun. I know, I’m as surprised as you. All it took was an acceptance that this was a world ruled by emotion, in which reason and rationality have no place. Unlike the Puritans themselves, I just went with the flow.
The irony, of course, is that I have come to enjoy this book about emotionally volatile adults so long after high school, where emotional volatility is the engine of the machine. It is only with the (relative) calm that comes with age that I recognize how this is sort of the perfect novel to match the mental state of a typical teenager.
Not that your typical teenager is ever going to voluntarily read this. Paperback
Maybe 2.5 stars if I were just rating this on how much I actually enjoyed reading it. The 40 page Custom-House introduction was pure pain to plow through, no lie, and there are a lot of slow spots where Hawthorne gets hung up in the details.
But. 5 stars for the richness of Hawthorne's language, the intriguing symbolism, and the way he delves into the human heart. So I'll compromise at 4 stars.
The Custom-House part (which is just a framing device; seriously, I'll skip it if I ever read this again) tells of a man who finds the fateful scrap of red cloth: a scarlet A, beautifully embroidered with gold thread, along with a 200 year old manuscript telling the story of Hester Prynne. This man then retells her story ...
In the mid-1600s Boston is a Puritan settlement, so adultery was a huge scandal. Hester Prynne is led out of jail in front of a crowd, her baby daughter Pearl in her arms, and with the scarlet A on her dress, standing for Adultress.
She's put in a scaffold and publicly shamed. Her elderly husband has been missing for years, so it's clear he's not the father of Pearl. But Hester resolutely refuses to name the actual father. What she doesn't realize at first is that her long-lost husband is in the crowd, hiding his identity from everyone. Going by the name of Roger Chillingworth (*shivers*), he settles in and patiently waits for his chance for revenge.
Boston officials try to take Pearl away from Hester, but a young minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, pleads her case. The popular Dimmesdale has his own problems: a mysterious wasting disease and heart trouble. Maybe - just maybe - his problems are mostly psychological? And then (the secretly suspicious) Chillingworth decides to befriend Dimmesdale.
The use of a scarlet letter on clothing to publicly brand adulterers is a historic fact, but Hawthorne turns it into a potent symbol. I loved this take on it, from an excellent critical review and analysis in The Atlantic:
We may realize its value, in the present case, by imagining the book with the scarlet letter omitted. It is not practically essential to the plot. But the scarlet letter uplifts the theme from the material to the spiritual level. It is the concentration and type of the whole argument. It transmutes the prose into poetry. It serves as a formula for the conveyance of ideas otherwise too subtle for words, as well as to enhance the gloomy picturesqueness of the moral scenery. It burns upon its wearer's breast, it casts a lurid glow along her pathway, it isolates her among mankind, and is at the same time the mystic talisman to reveal to her the guilt hidden in other hearts.The entire story - each character, each event, people's appearances, even objects - is filled with symbolism. Light and darkness, sin and secrecy, suffering and redemption, all have a role. It can be a little - or a lot - hard to wade through the old-fashioned language and viewpoint of The Scarlet Letter, but it really rewards the reader who's willing to look deeper. Paperback It's great to finally get back to the classics. It's been far too long since I read a book with careful intensity, noting throwaway lines that are likely to show up on a multiple choice or short answer test that misses the main themes of a book entirely while managing to ask lots of questions like, In the fourth chapter, what kind of shoes was [character you don't even remember] wearing?
I was thinking maybe it would be nice to read a book like this without worrying about that stuff, just absorbing it for what it was and then moving on through my life drunk.
Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
It's hard to know where to start with this thing.
The prose itself is almost unreadable. Let me give you an example of what a sentence in this book is like:
A man- who was born in a small town, which bore no resemblance to the town his parents imagined for him when they settled in the area over 40 years ago with every intention of starting a small business selling gift baskets online that sort of petered out after bigger companies like FTD caught onto the whole thing and ran the little guys out with predatory pricing- decided to go for a walk one day.
I shit you not. Whenever I saw a dash I'd skip down to find the second dash, and usually managed to cruise through half a page to find the relevant piece where the prose picked up again.
Word on the street is that Hawthorne, who published the book in 1850, actually wrote it to seem EVEN MORE old-timey than it was, which is pretty goddamn old-timey at this point. As far as I can tell, writing old-timey means:
1. Describing furniture and clothing in such exhaustive detail that royal wedding coverage appears shabby and underdeveloped.
2. Using commas wherever the fuck you feel like it.
3. Structuring the plot in such a way that you already know everything that's going to happen way before it does.
Let's talk plot while we're on the topic.
The plot is like Dynasty with all the juicy parts pulled out. I'm serious. All events could be summed up by video of a guy sitting in front of a sign that says, Banging people isn't so bad and winking from time to time. One of the characters is damned, and as she walks through the forest the bits of light that dot the trail through the canopy of trees literally vanish before she can walk into them. Now this would be fine in a book where the damned character was in the woods, say, leading an army of orcs. But in a book where the sexual and social mores of Puritan society are called into question, it kind of overdoes everything and kills the mood.
So it all begs the question: What the fuck is going on with these classics?
The Scarlet Letter, according to a recent study, is the sixth-most taught book in American high schools. It's very popular, and you can hardly enter a Barnes and Noble without seeing a new version with such awesome cover art that it almost tricks you into buying it.
I have a frequent argument with my brother regarding what makes things (movies, books, whatever) great. To him, for example, a movie might be great because it's the first movie to usher in a new era in filmmaking, really redefining an era while paying a loving homage to the past. Context is important to him, and reading the stuff on the IMDB page is part of the movie experience in his world.
For me, I don't really give a shit about context. Knowing that Hawthorne had certain feelings about Puritanism based on his ancestry doesn't really matter much to me. Finding out that the main character was based loosely on the author's wife doesn't really do a whole lot for me. In other words, I demand to be entertained on at least some level, and if the level of entertainment doesn't spur me on to dig deeper, I think that's a failure of the art and not an example of my own laziness contributing to my dislike of the art in question.
Furthermore, when the prose is TOO challenging I am constantly thinking, This is a book I am reading and here is the next line of this book. I am not at all swept up in the narrative and therefore don't enjoy it nearly as much.
I like to think of books as being like magicians. Take a David Copperfield...the magician, not the book. His schtick is to do amazing tricks that appear effortless on his part, which is why they are, well, magical. David Blaine, on the other hand, performs feats that do not appear effortless whatsoever, and therefore far less magical. It takes a great writer to write a great book. It takes an even better writer to write a great book that appears nearly effortless.
One might accuse me of rarely reading challenging books, and maybe it's true. I find myself drawn to books that compel me to finish them as opposed to those that I feel I have to slog through while other books are sitting in growing piles around my apartment, calling out to me with their promises of genuine laughs, heartbreak that is relevant to me, and prose that doesn't challenge me to the point that it's more of a barrier to the story than anything.
Perhaps most telling, at the book club meeting we were discussing this last night, and an older lady asked a pretty decent question: Why is this considered a classic?
There are two answers, one that is what the Everyman Library will tell you and one that I would tell you.
Everyman would say that the book is a classic because it is an excellent snapshot of a historical period. It has a narrative set within a framework that allows us to better understand our roots as Americans. The issues of people's perceptions of women and rights of women are still very alive today. Overall, it gives us a chance to examine our own society through the lens of fiction, therefore re-framing the conversation to make it less personal and easier to examine without bias. Blah, blah, blah.
I would say it's a classic because it was one of the more palatable books that came out during the period when classics were made. I would also point out that the canonized classics are never revised. We never go back and say which books maybe have less to say about our lives than they used to, or which might still be relevant but have been usurped by something that is closer to the lives we live today. I would also say that it continues to be taught in schools because the kind of people who end up teaching high school English are most often people who have a deep and abiding respect for these types of books and identified with these types of books at around that time in their lives. I think there are a lot of people out there who never liked these books, and rather than making their voices heard about what they think people should read they just drop out of the world of books altogether.
My point is, I think this is a bad book. It's got low readability, even for adults. The plot is melodramatic. The characters are single-dimensional crap, the women being constant victims of the time and the men being weak examples of humanity. Also, a very serious story is halted in places where we are expected to believe that magic letter A's pop up in the sky like you might see in an episode of Sesame Street.
It must have been a very exciting book in its time, without a doubt based on its sales. And if this kind of book is your thing, good for you. I don't begrudge you your joy. It's just not a book that I would ever dream of foisting on someone else, nor would I recommend reading it unless you are absolutely required.
Paperback
Characters The Scarlet Letter
If you are either learning Chinese-Simplified, or learning English as a second language (ESL) as a Chinese-Simplified speaker, this book is for you. There are many editions of The Scarlet Letter. This one is worth the price if you would like to enrich your ChineseSimplified-English vocabulary, whether for self-improvement or for preparation in advanced of college examinations. Each page is annotated with a mini-thesaurus of uncommon words highlighted in the text. Not only will you experience a great classic, but learn the richness of the English language with Chinese-Simplified synonyms at the bottom of each page. You will not see a full translation of the English text, but rather a running bilingual thesaurus to maximize the reader's exposure to the subtleties of both languages. The Scarlet Letter