Literature ALL NOVELS
The Scarlet Letter (1850) by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
EXAM:
- factual: no dates, names for the genesis of the novels important
- essay questions
- also comparative questions: themes across books
Background (19th century):
The novel was written in ‘The American Renaissance’. Americans felt second-hand
Europeans and hadn’t found their own voice yet. The educated people feared that the
American culture was doomed to be derivative, like they were a second-hand Jane Austen or
second-hand Dickens. They wondered what they could do that was not being done (better)
by the Brits. This was a cultural anxiety of “what are we?”. Suddenly, a bunch of people show
up that seem to reach a certain level of art. It was the first generation of genuinely
outstanding American artists. For example: Hawthorne, Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson (who
created an American voice), Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau…
These authors shared:
1) The preoccupation with American experiment of democracy: they lived in a new country,
they claimed to be different, but had to figure out in which sense they were different. They
had to figure out what their relevance was. This is reflected in the world exhibitions; “How
are we going to compete with the Flemish, the French…?”
2) None of the authors had children, their love lives were not good, so they wondered if they
belonged to a redundant futile society.
In the 19th century, America had its own problems; slavery was one of them. It was a free
country, but started enslaving African people; it was an anomaly. Witch trials and slavery
were problems at the core of the culture of different centuries. White Americans in the 19 th
century were doing to the black population what the Puritans were doing to girls/women
who were ‘witches’. On both occasions, the fate of America was at stake, both almost tore
the country apart.
The Puritans were determined to find a religious utopia in the new world. They created a
cruel, somber and authoritarian society and culture. They made life very unpleasant for
certain people. Witch trials in Salem created mass hysteria for years; it was the beginning of
the end for Puritans. One of their key elements was the suppression of the private self; they
prevented people from having a private life. It was up to the priests to tell you what to think
and it was a legalistic (= giving to much attention to strictly following the rules) society.
Everything a person did, had to be confessed and you had to listen to what the priest said
you should do as a punishment. The Puritans thought the world was a rotten place, they felt
they had to bring civilization to the world. Everyone that did not obey them, became an
outsider.
,Literature ALL NOVELS
Tituba was a West-Indian slave girl who was asked around Salem to babysit. She would tell
the kids voodoo tales and the girls started having nightmares. Rumors started to spread that
the girls were possessed by ‘the black man’, the devil. The whole town was hypnotized by
this wild and nutty idea. They started organizing witch trials, and 19 convicted witches were
hanged, 150 young girls were imprisoned. To find out whether or not someone was a witch,
they did the drowning test. If a body starts floating after more or less five minutes, she is a
witch and has to die. If the body doesn’t float, she is not a witch, just dead.
Puritanism, which was the religious framework and ground of New England, had gone
completely nuts.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Hawthorne was born in Salem, in 1804. He belonged to a Puritan family and arrived on the
Arbella in 1630. One of the three judges of the Salem Witch Trials was John Hathorne, a
predecessor of Hawthorne. He changed his surname from Hathorne to Hawthorne, probably
to distance himself from this cruel period in the history of America.
In 1825, he graduated from Bowdoin College. He wrote his first novel, Fanshawe, in 1827. He
published the novel anonymously; authors were often reluctant to own up their ownership
of a text. In 1837, he wrote Twice-Told Tales. In 1841, he went to live on Brook Farm, which
was a utopian settlement and a transcendentalist community. America was designed as a
utopia. Hawthorne’s short, unhappy stay there inspired his later critique of utopian ideals in
The Blithedale Romance, published in 1852.
In 1842, he married Sophia Peabody. Her sister was Elizabeth Peabody and she was the first
person to open a kindergarten in America.
From 1846 until 1849 he was surveyor at Salem Custom House. In 1849 his mother died;
Hawthorne recovers from this by writing The Scarlet Letter.
The Scarlet Letter
The novel has a triple time frame. The narrated time is 1642-1649. Hawthorne presents the
novel as is one day, in the year 1752, he was walking around and stumbled upon a
manuscript about the 17th century in the attic with a red letter A holding it together. He
edited this manuscript, written by Jonathan Pue, into the Scarlet Letter. He published the
novel in 1849. He did this to avoid censorship by making it clear that whatever the characters
say is not his point of view.
“What I wrote is based on what I found in the Custom House written by Jonathan Pue. I am
reworking his notes to write a novel.”
The protagonist is Hester Prynne. She is the first strong female individual in American
literature (= proto feminist). She is a single mother of her daughter Pearl. Pearl is a born
outcast of the infantile world; she is an emblem and product of sin. She does not want to
reveal who Pearl’s father is; this is the beginning of individualism. Arthur Dimmesdale wants
Hester to reveal who the father is; he is the religious authority. Roger Chillingworth was
Hester’s husband. They used to live in Amsterdam, but he still has some business to do so he
tells Hester to go without him. 2 years later, he gets to Salem too and he sees his wife
standing at the pillory holding a child, that clearly is not his, since he was taken prison by
Indians.
,Literature ALL NOVELS
In 1638, Hester walks out of prison, on her way to her punishment, as single mother of Pearl
in Puritan Salem. She wears an embroidered scarlet letter A on her chest all the time; she is
stigmatized. However, the meaning of the letter has never been explained, so it is
ambiguous; there is room for interpretation. The first impression is of course A from
adultery. She is not only punished for being an adulteress, but also for not revealing the
identity of the father. This is seen as an act of social rebellion. She is exposed to the public
gaze as punishment; she has to stand on the scaffold for 3 hours with ‘her baby of sin’.
The town is a very important character in the novel.
Hester turns the letter A into a force of social admiration. She decides not to run away,
although the town loathes her, and moves into a cottage at the outside of the town like an
outcast. She and Pearl survive because of her needle work; gradually she becomes socially
accepted by the same people who despised her. She becomes the seamstress of the town
after making a robe for the governor, John Winthrope; she is laying puritanism to rest. People
starting seeing that she is a nice person and makes very nice clothes. There is a big change in
the perception of who she is. The letter A changes from being a curse to being a part of her
identity. After a few years, people forgot what the A actually stood for. They begin to wonder
whether it stands for Angel or Able.
Chillingworth visits her in prison after she had to stand at the scaffold, because he is a doctor.
He also wants Hester to keep her identity a secret. It was because he felt ashamed that his
wife cheated on him. He felt like a cuckold and that he would be the target of laughter in the
town. Chillingworth was a pseudonym, but it is never clear why.
At the end of the novel, Hester and Pearl disappear, but Hester returns without Pearl. Hester
is now the voice of a new radical feminist movement; she is conscious of her role and task in
Salem. It is where she has to be.
The Scarlet Letter was a symbol that united the town in an act of radical outsider. In the end,
it empowered Hester. The letter was a critique of the unspeakable norms and rules of the
puritan society.
, Literature ALL NOVELS
Mrs Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
Excerpts (Penguin Books)
“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” (3)
We are confronted with her social name
“She had reached the Park gates. She stood for a moment, looking at the omnibuses in
Piccadilly.
She would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt
very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at
the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi
cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very,
very dangerous to live even one day. (...) She knew nothing; no language, no history; she
scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing;
all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am
this, I am that.” (8-9)
Mental distancing herself from wherever she is, whatever surroundings that make her
an outsider; loss of identity
“She would have been, like Lady Bexborough, slow and stately; rather large; interested in
politics like a man; with a country house; very dignified, very sincere. Instead of which she
had a narrow peastick figure; a ridiculous little face, beaked like a bird’s. That she held herself
well was true; and had nice hands and feet; and dressed well, considering that she spent
little. But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body,
with all its capacities, seemed nothing – nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being
herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of
children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up
Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard
Dalloway.” (11)
She vanishes into the wife of an important man. At one point, Walsh sees a young
woman on the stress and wonders who she is and how it would be to be with her. The
woman goes into a building and is gone.
“By conviction an atheist perhaps, he is taken by surprise with moments of extraordinary
exaltation. Nothing exists outside us except a state of mind he thinks; a desire for solace, for
relief, for something outside these miserable pigmies, these feeble, ugly, these craven men
and women.” (62)
Mrs. Brown
“(..) she knew nothing about them, only jumped to conclusions, as one does, for what can
one know even of the people one lives with every day? she asked. Are we not all prisoners?
She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell, and she
had felt that was true of life – one scratched on the wall.” (211)
The Scarlet Letter (1850) by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
EXAM:
- factual: no dates, names for the genesis of the novels important
- essay questions
- also comparative questions: themes across books
Background (19th century):
The novel was written in ‘The American Renaissance’. Americans felt second-hand
Europeans and hadn’t found their own voice yet. The educated people feared that the
American culture was doomed to be derivative, like they were a second-hand Jane Austen or
second-hand Dickens. They wondered what they could do that was not being done (better)
by the Brits. This was a cultural anxiety of “what are we?”. Suddenly, a bunch of people show
up that seem to reach a certain level of art. It was the first generation of genuinely
outstanding American artists. For example: Hawthorne, Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson (who
created an American voice), Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau…
These authors shared:
1) The preoccupation with American experiment of democracy: they lived in a new country,
they claimed to be different, but had to figure out in which sense they were different. They
had to figure out what their relevance was. This is reflected in the world exhibitions; “How
are we going to compete with the Flemish, the French…?”
2) None of the authors had children, their love lives were not good, so they wondered if they
belonged to a redundant futile society.
In the 19th century, America had its own problems; slavery was one of them. It was a free
country, but started enslaving African people; it was an anomaly. Witch trials and slavery
were problems at the core of the culture of different centuries. White Americans in the 19 th
century were doing to the black population what the Puritans were doing to girls/women
who were ‘witches’. On both occasions, the fate of America was at stake, both almost tore
the country apart.
The Puritans were determined to find a religious utopia in the new world. They created a
cruel, somber and authoritarian society and culture. They made life very unpleasant for
certain people. Witch trials in Salem created mass hysteria for years; it was the beginning of
the end for Puritans. One of their key elements was the suppression of the private self; they
prevented people from having a private life. It was up to the priests to tell you what to think
and it was a legalistic (= giving to much attention to strictly following the rules) society.
Everything a person did, had to be confessed and you had to listen to what the priest said
you should do as a punishment. The Puritans thought the world was a rotten place, they felt
they had to bring civilization to the world. Everyone that did not obey them, became an
outsider.
,Literature ALL NOVELS
Tituba was a West-Indian slave girl who was asked around Salem to babysit. She would tell
the kids voodoo tales and the girls started having nightmares. Rumors started to spread that
the girls were possessed by ‘the black man’, the devil. The whole town was hypnotized by
this wild and nutty idea. They started organizing witch trials, and 19 convicted witches were
hanged, 150 young girls were imprisoned. To find out whether or not someone was a witch,
they did the drowning test. If a body starts floating after more or less five minutes, she is a
witch and has to die. If the body doesn’t float, she is not a witch, just dead.
Puritanism, which was the religious framework and ground of New England, had gone
completely nuts.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Hawthorne was born in Salem, in 1804. He belonged to a Puritan family and arrived on the
Arbella in 1630. One of the three judges of the Salem Witch Trials was John Hathorne, a
predecessor of Hawthorne. He changed his surname from Hathorne to Hawthorne, probably
to distance himself from this cruel period in the history of America.
In 1825, he graduated from Bowdoin College. He wrote his first novel, Fanshawe, in 1827. He
published the novel anonymously; authors were often reluctant to own up their ownership
of a text. In 1837, he wrote Twice-Told Tales. In 1841, he went to live on Brook Farm, which
was a utopian settlement and a transcendentalist community. America was designed as a
utopia. Hawthorne’s short, unhappy stay there inspired his later critique of utopian ideals in
The Blithedale Romance, published in 1852.
In 1842, he married Sophia Peabody. Her sister was Elizabeth Peabody and she was the first
person to open a kindergarten in America.
From 1846 until 1849 he was surveyor at Salem Custom House. In 1849 his mother died;
Hawthorne recovers from this by writing The Scarlet Letter.
The Scarlet Letter
The novel has a triple time frame. The narrated time is 1642-1649. Hawthorne presents the
novel as is one day, in the year 1752, he was walking around and stumbled upon a
manuscript about the 17th century in the attic with a red letter A holding it together. He
edited this manuscript, written by Jonathan Pue, into the Scarlet Letter. He published the
novel in 1849. He did this to avoid censorship by making it clear that whatever the characters
say is not his point of view.
“What I wrote is based on what I found in the Custom House written by Jonathan Pue. I am
reworking his notes to write a novel.”
The protagonist is Hester Prynne. She is the first strong female individual in American
literature (= proto feminist). She is a single mother of her daughter Pearl. Pearl is a born
outcast of the infantile world; she is an emblem and product of sin. She does not want to
reveal who Pearl’s father is; this is the beginning of individualism. Arthur Dimmesdale wants
Hester to reveal who the father is; he is the religious authority. Roger Chillingworth was
Hester’s husband. They used to live in Amsterdam, but he still has some business to do so he
tells Hester to go without him. 2 years later, he gets to Salem too and he sees his wife
standing at the pillory holding a child, that clearly is not his, since he was taken prison by
Indians.
,Literature ALL NOVELS
In 1638, Hester walks out of prison, on her way to her punishment, as single mother of Pearl
in Puritan Salem. She wears an embroidered scarlet letter A on her chest all the time; she is
stigmatized. However, the meaning of the letter has never been explained, so it is
ambiguous; there is room for interpretation. The first impression is of course A from
adultery. She is not only punished for being an adulteress, but also for not revealing the
identity of the father. This is seen as an act of social rebellion. She is exposed to the public
gaze as punishment; she has to stand on the scaffold for 3 hours with ‘her baby of sin’.
The town is a very important character in the novel.
Hester turns the letter A into a force of social admiration. She decides not to run away,
although the town loathes her, and moves into a cottage at the outside of the town like an
outcast. She and Pearl survive because of her needle work; gradually she becomes socially
accepted by the same people who despised her. She becomes the seamstress of the town
after making a robe for the governor, John Winthrope; she is laying puritanism to rest. People
starting seeing that she is a nice person and makes very nice clothes. There is a big change in
the perception of who she is. The letter A changes from being a curse to being a part of her
identity. After a few years, people forgot what the A actually stood for. They begin to wonder
whether it stands for Angel or Able.
Chillingworth visits her in prison after she had to stand at the scaffold, because he is a doctor.
He also wants Hester to keep her identity a secret. It was because he felt ashamed that his
wife cheated on him. He felt like a cuckold and that he would be the target of laughter in the
town. Chillingworth was a pseudonym, but it is never clear why.
At the end of the novel, Hester and Pearl disappear, but Hester returns without Pearl. Hester
is now the voice of a new radical feminist movement; she is conscious of her role and task in
Salem. It is where she has to be.
The Scarlet Letter was a symbol that united the town in an act of radical outsider. In the end,
it empowered Hester. The letter was a critique of the unspeakable norms and rules of the
puritan society.
, Literature ALL NOVELS
Mrs Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
Excerpts (Penguin Books)
“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” (3)
We are confronted with her social name
“She had reached the Park gates. She stood for a moment, looking at the omnibuses in
Piccadilly.
She would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt
very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at
the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi
cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very,
very dangerous to live even one day. (...) She knew nothing; no language, no history; she
scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing;
all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am
this, I am that.” (8-9)
Mental distancing herself from wherever she is, whatever surroundings that make her
an outsider; loss of identity
“She would have been, like Lady Bexborough, slow and stately; rather large; interested in
politics like a man; with a country house; very dignified, very sincere. Instead of which she
had a narrow peastick figure; a ridiculous little face, beaked like a bird’s. That she held herself
well was true; and had nice hands and feet; and dressed well, considering that she spent
little. But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body,
with all its capacities, seemed nothing – nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being
herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of
children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up
Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard
Dalloway.” (11)
She vanishes into the wife of an important man. At one point, Walsh sees a young
woman on the stress and wonders who she is and how it would be to be with her. The
woman goes into a building and is gone.
“By conviction an atheist perhaps, he is taken by surprise with moments of extraordinary
exaltation. Nothing exists outside us except a state of mind he thinks; a desire for solace, for
relief, for something outside these miserable pigmies, these feeble, ugly, these craven men
and women.” (62)
Mrs. Brown
“(..) she knew nothing about them, only jumped to conclusions, as one does, for what can
one know even of the people one lives with every day? she asked. Are we not all prisoners?
She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell, and she
had felt that was true of life – one scratched on the wall.” (211)
