Short summaries
Bartleby
by Herman Melville
published in 1856
Melville
● also wrote Moby Dick (actually about democracy)
book
● “I would prefer not to”
● full title: Bartleby, the Scrivener: a Story of Wall Street
● we know Bartleby only through the lawyer
● some obsession with the number 3 in the story
● ironic reversal of the power relation
● Dead Letter office
notes the outsider in global anglophone literature (2025)
1
, notes the outsider in global anglophone literature (2025)
The Scarlet Letter
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
published in 1850
Hawthorne
● friend of Melville
● Brook Farm → The Blithedale Romance (1852)
● lived in Salem (family’s involvement in the Salem witch trials)
● married Sophia Peabody (sister → Elizabeth)
book
● Hester Prynne, daughter is Pearl
● reverend Arthur Dimmesdale
● Roger Chillingworth
● Jonathan Pue Surveyor/’internal’ author (custom house)
● meaning of the A
Salem witch trials (John Hathorne)
Concord years: transcendentalism
puritanism (suppression of the private self)
antinomianism (Anne Hutchinson)
notes the outsider in global anglophone literature (2025)
2