Читать книгу The Scarlet Letter - Натаниель Готорн - Страница 4
ОглавлениеAbout the Author
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804, with the surname Hathorne. It is widely thought that the reason for the spelling change was that he hailed from the town of Salem, where a number of his relatives had been involved with the infamous witch trials that took place in the closing decade of the 1600s. In fact, his great grandfather, John, had been an executioner. Nathaniel did publish some early material using his original surname however, so it seems more likely that he changed it to save confusion over spelling as it was pronounced in a similar way to ‘Hawthorne’ anyway.
Hawthorne was unsure of his abilities as a writer initially, publishing his first novel Fanshawe anonymously in 1828. In addition, there was no established market for novels so he remained only locally known as a writer until he published The Scarlet Letter in 1850. By then it was possible to mass produce books and this title was one of the first in American literary history. The book also sold well and enabled Hawthorne to become a professional author at a time when one could count them all on one hand.
In a more competitive environment Hawthorne may not have done so well, but as it was he had a ready market waiting to buy his books. Despite their morbidity and intensity they sold well because people had developed a taste for reading fiction. In part this was due to the establishment of stable and polite society in America since the dust had settled from the revolution. It became fashionable to be seen to have the time to read and it gave like-minded people a talking point over dinner and during other social occasions.
Hawthorne was undoubtedly skilled at his craft. He wrote well, had an eye for literary detail and understood that allegory was a useful devise in ensuring that readers got more from his books than just a good story. In this regard he was at odds with Edgar Allan Poe, who was more freeform with his words, indulging in prose that explored the recesses of his imagination without being moralistic or allegorical. One might say that Poe used writing as an art form, while Hawthorne used it as a craft. He took a pragmatic approach by being more mindful of what his readership would wish to read. Poe worked with creative abandon, coming up with ever more challenging visions.
Hawthorne took a wife, Sophia Peabody, with whom he had three children. Sophia moved to England with her children following Hawthorne’s death in 1864. She was an accomplished artist and a member of the American transcendentalist movement, which promoted the idea of individualistic spiritualism as a means of attaining a heightened state of mind, as opposed to indoctrination by organized religion. This was not something that her husband particularly concurred with and he used his later writing to criticize its principles.
The Themes of the Novel
Nathaniel Hawthorne was given to writing extremely intense and dark prose. The Scarlet Letter is rather like the recollection of a feverish nightmare. It doesn’t so much invite the reader in, as pull them in, and then attempt to suffocate them with depressing allegory about what can happen to people when they break the moral and ethical codes of civilized society.
This is an American novel, yet it is more puritanical than most Victorian novels, of which it was contemporaneous, being published in 1850. Hawthorne seems not to have been overly religious himself, but he explores themes of strict doctrine by setting the book in a 17th-century Boston, where Puritanism is in its heyday. So, this book is a period novel of its day, harking back to an era when misbehaviour could have dire consequences
The Puritans were, in essence, very conservative Protestants with intransigent beliefs about good and bad behaviour. This censorious moral view was especially stern when it came to matters of pleasure, including sex. The Protestant church had risen in reaction to the lax excesses of the Catholic Church, which either drew a blind eye to behavioural weakness or allowed people to confess their sins. The Puritans took things as far as they could the other way, so that punishment and penance were the outcome for anyone who broke the rules. Of course, one had to share the same belief system in order to understand and agree to such measures. This seems to be the central theme that Hawthorne is addressing and exploring in The Scarlet Letter.
Some literary scholars have interpreted the book as an expression of Hawthorne’s own view that 19th-society was sliding into a moral and ethical morass, and therefore in need of reform. Others have taken it the other way, by suggesting that Hawthorne was fundamentally a liberal thinker and was actually celebrating a more open-minded modernity by reminding society of how repressive things used to be. Either way, The Scarlet Letter is not a book to be taken lightly, which is why Hawthorne’s genre is often described as ‘dark romanticism’.
Unlike in England, professional novel writing was not well established in America during the first half of the 19th century. The agenda for early American writers was somehow different, perhaps because of the relative lack of historical context and a ubiquitously defined cultural identity. American Independence had only been declared in 1776 and the nation was a melting pot of old and new settlers. This meant that certain themes for novels would have specific readerships. To write something that captured the ‘American’ imagination more generally was a tall order.
As a consequence of this, Hawthorne retreated into an imagined world of extremes with his literature. Other American writers, such as Edgar Allan Poe, were doing similar things in their attempts to emerge as novelists. The Scarlet Letter is set in pre-independent America, so that it carries a sense of history and legacy, as well as it being an allegorical tale about the moral fortitude of American founders.
In fact, it also criticizes the enemy, the English, as the central characters plan to escape their tormentors by travelling across the Atlantic to a new life free from persecution. This is clearly a statement suggesting that England is a place of refuge because it is relatively iniquitous. As it goes, that was quite true by definition, for the majority of early American settlers had travelled to the New World precisely because they wished to establish colonies run by firm religious regime, away from those who lacked the suitable fibre. What they hadn’t reckoned on was that society naturally comprises a spectrum of personality types whatever the intended societal ethos, as a result of nature and nurture. So, there will always be subversive individuals, who cannot and will not adhere to mores, conventions and orthodoxies imposed upon them by others.
