The Scarlet Letter (Oxford World's Classics)

267 Pages·2007·2.02 MB·English

by  Nathaniel Hawthorne

oxford world’s classics
THE SCARLET LETTER
Nathaniel Hawthornewas born in 1804in Salem, Massachusetts,
a descendant of the William Hawthorne who had emigrated to
New England with the first generation of Puritan settlers in 1630.
Hawthorne’s interest in the history and legend of his region was
revealed in his early stories, which began to appear in print in the
1830s. New England Puritanism and its legacy provided Hawthorne
with the means of exploring many of the themes that concerned him
deeply, among them the conflict between patriarchal authority and the
impulse to a variety of freedoms, including the freedom of the artist.
Though he immersed himself in the early literature of New England,
Hawthorne’s own writings are peculiarly modern in some of their
leading characteristics. One is the self-reflexiveness of narratives
which make the telling a part of the tale. Another is the concern with
signifying practices, with the relationships between objects (a Red
Cross, a Black Veil, a Scarlet Letter) and what they come to signify.
Never willing to submit to the conventions of the realist novel,
when he abandoned the short story and the sketch for longer works,
Hawthorne claimed the imaginative freedom of the romance. His
first—The Scarlet Letter—was published in 1850and brought him
immediate critical recognition, if not financial success. In quick suc-
cession he completed two more romances—The House of the Seven
Gables(1851) and The Blithedale Romance (1852)—and consolidated
his position as a major writer of his day. After his appointment as
consul at Liverpool and Manchester in 1853Hawthorne produced
no more fiction until 1860, when The Marble Faun was published.
Returning to Massachusetts in that year after travels in France and
Italy, he struggled to finish other romances but left them uncompleted
at his death in 1864.
Brian Hardingwas a Senior Lecturer in the English Departmentof
the University of Birmingham. He is the editor of Hawthorne’s
Young Goodman Brown and Other Tales for the Oxford World’s Classics
series.
Cindy Weinsteinis Professor of English at the California Institute
of Technology. She is the author of Family, Kinship, and Sympathy
in Nineteenth-Century American Literature(Cambridge,2004) and The
Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature: Allegory in Nineteenth-
Century American Fiction(Cambridge,2004). She is the editor of The
Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe (Cambridge, 2004)
and has contributed essays to several volumes and journals.
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
The Scarlet Letter
Edited with Notes by
BRIAN HARDING
With a new Introduction by
CINDY WEINSTEIN
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox26dp
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Published in the United States
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Text © Ohio State University Press 1962
Chronology, Explanatory Notes © Brian Harding 1990
Introduction, Select Bibliography © Cindy Weinstein 2007
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First published as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 1990
New edition published 2007
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804–1864.
The scarlet letter / Nathaniel Hawthorne ; edited with notes by Brian Harding ; with a
new introduction by Cindy Weinstein.
p. cm. — (Oxford’s world classics)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978–0–19–929246–2 (alk. paper)
1. Boston (Mass.)—History—Colonial period, ca. 1600–1775—Fiction. 2. Triangles
(Interpersonal relations)—Fiction. 3. Illegitimate children—Fiction. 4. Women
immigrants—Fiction. 5. Married women—Fiction. 6. Puritans—Fiction. 7. Adultery—
Fiction. 8. Revenge—Fiction. 9. Clergy—Fiction. 10. Psychological Fiction. I. Harding,
Brian (Brian R.) II. Title.
PS1868.A2H285 2007
813′ 3—dc22
2007001813
Typeset by Cepha Imaging Private Ltd., Bangalore, India
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
ISBN978–0–19–929246–2
13579108642
CONTENTS
Abbreviations viii
Introduction ix
Note on the Text xxxiii
Select Bibliography xxxiv
A Chronology of Nathaniel Hawthorne xli
THE SCARLET LETTER
Preface to the Second Edition 3
The Custom-House—Introductory 5
i The Prison-Door 39
ii The Market-Place 41
iii The Recognition 49
iv The Interview 57
v Hester at Her Needle 63
vi Pearl 71
vii The Governor’s Hall 79
viii The Elf-Child and the Minister 85
ix The Leech 93
x The Leech and His Patient 102
xi The Interior of a Heart 110
xii The Minister’s Vigil 116
xiii Another View of Hester 125
xiv Hester and the Physician 132
xv Hester and Pearl 137
xvi A Forest Walk 143
xvii The Pastor and His Parishioner 148
xviii A Flood of Sunshine 156
vi Contents
xix The Child at the Brook-Side 161
xx The Minister in a Maze 167
xxi The New England Holiday 176
xxii The Procession 184
xxiii The Revelation of the Scarlet Letter 193
xxiv Conclusion 200
Explanatory Notes 205
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to the following friends, colleagues, and Hawthorne schol-
ars:Michael Gilmore, Dorothy Hale, Michelle Hawley, Cathy Jurca,
Robert Levine, and Arthur Riss. My thanks to Alan Jutzi and Stephen
Tabor of the Huntington Library for assistance with the cover image,
as well as Lisa Keppel of Caltech. As always, my deepest debt is to
Jim, Sarah, and Sam.
ABBREVIATIONS
AL American Literature
ALH American Literary History
AQ American Quarterly
ATQ American Transcendental Quarterly
CLAJ College Language Association Journal
EIHC Essex Institute Historical Association
ELH Journal of English Literary History
ESQ Emerson Society Quarterly
MLN Modern Language Notes
NCF Nineteenth-Century Fiction
NEQ New England Quarterly
NHR Nathaniel Hawthorne Review
PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association
TSLL Texas Studies in Literature and Language
INTRODUCTION
The scarlet letter is one of those grand symbols in antebellum American
literature that keeps company with a white whale, a pond, and leaves
of grass. Unlike these others, however, which are simultaneously ele-
ments of the natural world and sites of cultural projection, the scarlet
letter inhabits, unambiguously, the realm of culture. The scarlet letter,
either the piece of cloth embroidered and worn by the novel’s heroine,
Hester Prynne, or the text written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is a prod-
uct of artifice. Indeed, this is the only thing about the letter that is
unambiguous. Whether as the first letter of the English language, the
legal crime of adultery that Hester has committed, the red badge that
she has turned into a gorgeously aesthetic object, or the object that
Hawthorne discovers in the Salem Custom-House among the papers
of former Surveyor Jonathan Pue, the ‘A’ is a cultural marker.
But a marker of which culture? The seventeenth century or the nine-
teenth century? The world of the Puritans, who had fled religious per-
secution in England in order to found what John Winthrop famously
called in his 1630sermon aboard the Arbella, ‘a city upon a hill’? Or of
the world of the Americans for whom New England had become a place
of unconventional thinking, as represented by transcendentalism,
utopian communities, and literary experimentation? And a marker of
what? The name of Pearl’s father that Hester refuses to say, but is,
nevertheless, articulated with the A that is ArthurDimmesdale? The
stifling, though necessary framework of law as manifested through
the A that is adultery? The production (and subjection) of a free cit-
izenry via the A that is America? Like the quest for the white whale
and its meaning, the interpretative hunt for the meanings of the scar-
let letter, and the novel that bears its name, has been a matter of
intense critical debate ever since Ticknor and Fields published
Hawthorne’s novel in 1850.
One of the many fascinating aspects of Hawthorne’s most com-
mercially successful novel (twenty-two years earlier he had published
Fanshaweusing his own money, using no name, and burning all copies
of it in an attempt to wipe its existence from the record) is that it tells
at least two fictions at once. There is the tale of Hester, a fictional young
woman who in 1642must face the consequences of having forsaken