The Perfect Time to Read The Scarlet Letter (The Scarlet Letter, Part 1)

In Part 1 of our discussion on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, we welcome editor Justine Murison to discuss Hawthorne's life and views, the iconic symbolism in the text and how to analyze it, and the lasting relevance of The Scarlet Letter in the twenty-first century. 

Justine S. Murison is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research and teaching examine nineteenth-century American literature with special attention to its relation to the intertwined histories of health and religion. She is the author of The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2011) and Faith in Exposure: Privacy and Secularism in the Nineteenth-Century United States (2023).

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of The Scarlet Letter, go to https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393871616.

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter at @TNL_WWN and Bluesky at @nortonlibrary.bsky.social. 

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[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library Podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W.W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host, Mark Cirino, with Michael Von Cannon producing. Today, we present the first of our two episodes devoted to The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne as we interview its editor Justine S. Murison. In part one, we learn about Hawthorne's life and times and we explore the novel that secured his immortality. Justine Murison guides us through the context of the novel, the symbolism of the “A,” the idea of this novel as a romance, and how Hester Prynne is characterized. Justine S. Murison is associate professor of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She specializes in 19th century American literature, particularly the intertwined topics of health and religion. She is the author of The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, as well as Faith in Exposure: Privacy and Secularism in the Nineteenth-Century United States. We are so pleased to have her with us today. Justine Murison, welcome to the Norton Library Podcast.  

[Justine:] Thank you. 

[Mark:] It's so nice to have you aboard to discuss your new edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Maybe we can start by talking about Hawthorne himself. What do we need to know about him in order to approach this novel? Where and when did he live, etc.? 

[Justine:] Well, that's a great question, because Hawthorne was born in 1804 in Massachusetts, in New England. He grew up in Salem. He spent considerable time in Maine also because his father died when he was quite young. So, he was basically brought up by his mom and the sort of extended family of his mother's family. His father was a sea captain. So, the other thing to know is that he's descended from a prominent New England family, the Hawthorne family. He's actually the one who puts the “W” in the name. So when you go look up his, you know, ancestors are all “Hathorne” without the W. But the family had gone to seed by the time of his father's life. His father was a sea captain and he died in Suriname from yellow fever. He lived in Salem, in Maine, he went to Bowdoin College where he had the felicitous experience of meeting the future President Franklin Pierce, who became his BFF, and he wanted to be a writer. So that's the other thing to know is that some people fall into writing, but he actually pursued it and struggled. His mother and sisters basically—he lived at home after Bowdoin, and he was trying to, you know, publish anonymously in magazines and gift books. He published short fiction.  

[Mark:] Did he add the W to distinguish himself from his ancestry or was there another motivation? 

[Justine:] That's a great question. So, I don't know the actual origin of why he did it. Melville added the “E” to Melville so there’s a sense that like ,you know, a way of sort of distinguishing yourself as an author might be part of it. He had many reasons to distinguish himself. So the other reason thing I was going to bring up is that he is a descendant, I said, from a prominent Puritan New England family but his great-great great grandfather—I always forget if it's two or three—great great-grandfather John Hawthorne was a judge in the Salem witch trials. So he is also working out in a lot in his fiction that Puritan history and legacy, that sense of, you know, basically having blood on his hands. He's grappling through a lot of the fiction, including The Scarlet Letter, with the sort of dark history of New England.  

[Mark:] Is he ambivalent about his own family's involvement in that history, or does he condemn it?  

[Justine:] I think condemn and ambivalent—I think everything with Hawthorne is ambivalence. But condemn, I think you see that as part of it too, that this is not—he is not one who's building up New England as a great source for our nation and freedom. There's a real sense that this is actually a burden weighing people down. And you see this even more in some of the fiction, maybe most especially in The House of the Seven Gables, his second novel, because it is about the Pyncheon family, from the Puritan moment of them stealing land from their less prominent colonist family, the Maules, and the curse that is just weighed down on them for centuries. And that I think that emblematizes Hawthorne's way of thinking about that Puritan legacy. He also has a funny way of talking about it, too. In “The Custom-House” preface to the Scarlet Letter, he imagines the ghosts of his Puritan ancestors coming and murmuring about how like, “Who is this guy? What kind of life is this to become a writer? What kind of business in life—what type of glorifying of God is this, you know, degenerate man who is, you know, our progeny,” and so he can also wryly joke about it as well.  

[Mark:] Yeah. So you mentioned “The Custom-House" and that also has an autobiographical aspect to Hawthorne's own life in terms of jobs that he held.  

[Justine:] Absolutely. So, you can't make much money as a writer. You know, especially if you're an anonymous writer writing short fiction and trying to make your way. And, you know, in the early 1840s, he married for love. He married Sophia Peabody, who comes from a transcendentalist family. They were young artists in love. And in fact actually they were the example Margaret Fuller is pointing to in her book on Women in the Nineteenth Century as an equal marriage, what an equal marriage might look like. But he can't make ends meet and so, he's depending on the Democratic party which he's been involved with vaguely—like, he's not like a party guy, he's not a politician—but he's had attachments to the Democratic party since his time at Bowdoin. And at this time, the Civil Service doesn't exist. That doesn't exist until the 1880s. And whoever wins the presidency, that party gets everybody into local, state, and federal office. And in 1846, through the pulling of strings—because he had already been evicted from the Old Manse with his family—the pulling of strings gets him a position as a surveyor in the Salem Custom House, which helps keep his family afloat and—because I think Una's born and Julian is on the way. But just as quickly, he's kicked out in 1848 when the Whigs take the presidency, and the Salem Whigs just kind of thought, “why is this writer in this position?” And they kick him out. And so, “The Custom-House" preface is mainly a sort of wry, satiric look at life being an inspector for the Salem Custom House. It's something that I think is a little hard for readers today to read and some people have—skip over it and just get to The Scarlet Letter. There's two things it does that I love. First off, it's funny, but it's only funny if you know a lot of the references and jokes. Just like as humor—humor has a hard time traveling through history and so readers might feel alienated from this deep dive into like these sort of crusty characters, many of who have connections to the War of 1812, right? And he has a lot in it about the War of 1812. But it is also a wry look at himself. I mentioned he's imagining ghosts coming and talking about what a ridiculous dreamer he is—his stern and black-brown Puritan ancestors. But those jokes give you a real sense of his narrative voice and sort of a sense of how he's thinking about what it means to be a writer by night, whenever he can, and an inspector by day.  

[Mark:] It's like anybody else stuck in a day job that they find uninspiring — like data entry — or something along those lines.  

[Justine:] That's why it's so relatable. It's like everybody's had a job that they wish they could get out of, right?  

[Mark:] It's The Office before The Office, right?  

[Justine:] Exactly. Exactly.  

[Mark:] Before we talk about “The Custom-House”—there are a few things I want to I wanted to ask you about—but just to return to Hawthorne for one second.  

[Justine:] Yeah, absolutely.  

[Mark:] So, you're mentioning that he's born in 1804 in New England. So, The Scarlet Letter is published in 1850. Are we right or wrong to kind of associate him with the leading figures and writers of American literature at the time? We're thinking about Emerson and Thoreau, and all those transcendentalist writers. Is he part of that group or not?  

[Justine:] Well, I mean that's a great question. And if we go back to that original amazing book by F. O. Matthiessen, The American Renaissance, he has a chapter. There's only five authors that have chapters: Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman. And he lived and conquered, right? The Old Manse is, you know, was built by Emerson's grandfather, I think. And that sense that he is part of the American Renaissance, this age in which we're getting some of the major canonical authors that would become the center of, or the grounding of what American literature is. That said, Hawthorne is not a transcendentalist. He, like Melville, he’s very skeptical of the idealism. He’s a bit of a pessimist. He really thinks it's extremely hard to change society, change its norms, and he doesn't imagine an ability to get free of society’s strictures. So an idea of transcendence or freedom, he is not convinced that that is a possibility. And in fact, and when you look at some of the, sort of, passages in The Scarlet Letter, and you compare them to some in Emerson's Self-Reliance, you see Hawthorne trying to sort of show the sort of way in which Emerson is not grounded in a pragmatism about like real life or real psychology, which I think is more to the point. It's very hard to break away from society or break away from conformity. It's hard enough materially, but it's even harder for Hawthorne psychologically to imagine that break.  

[Mark:] Is this another thing he's ambivalent about?  

[Justine:] Yes, absolutely. And this is where you see in The Scarlet Letter that tension where he’s imagining. Hester, in a certain sense, is free because she's been so alienated and abjected from her society. And he talks about her, um “her lawless mind,” but that isn't something necessarily great, you know, for him. But it's not terrible either. He never takes his characters and gives you just a straight off villain or a straight off hero. No, you can't go to Hawthorne for those kinds of melodramatic touches. Everyone's in the shadowy gray area where you get amazing characters with a much deeper psychology than I think the sort of idealism that he sees in Emerson and Thoreau would allow for.  

[Mark:] So The Scarlet Letter is certainly the most famous thing that Hawthorne ever wrote, the most enduring all these years later. Are there other, either short stories or novels—you mentioned The House of the Seven Gables—but are there other works that you also think are essential to approaching Hawthorne?  

[Justine:] I think, you know, though they're not my favorite, starting with the short fiction is often everyone's entry into Hawthorne. “The Minister's Black Veil,” “The Birth-Mark,” “Young Goodman Brown,” and my favorite, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” are what he's publishing before he writes—The Scarlet Letter is his first novel and his first long fiction. And that's how he's establishing his name. But from my point of view, I agree with Edgar Alan Poe and Margaret Fuller, both of whom who've reviewed his collections and both of them name something very similar, that there's just a somewhat of an airiness, a sort of lack of grounded-ness or concreteness. It’s more “vibe” than there should be in the short fiction. And one of those, you know, quirks of history is that they both die before he writes any of his long fiction, where he really is actually sort of taking that note and really producing in The Scarlet Letter, in The House of Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, a really thorough psychological, like anatomy of people and I think fulfills the promise of the short fiction. The House of Seven Gables is one of my favorites. I teach it all the time and in part because it's a little lighter. I mentioned that it's the story of this curse handed down, but its scene is set in the 1850s with the Pyncheon family again gone to seed living in The House of Seven Gables with a daguerreotypist, an early photographer, boarding there and they open a little shop and it's just it's a delightful book to read. The darkest—and this one I would recommend if you really love Hawthorne—I would recommend diving into The Blithedale Romance.  

[Mark:] Yeah. 

[Justine:] And that's based on his time at the utopian community outside of Boston called Brook Farm where he did like a nine, I want to say nine-month stint there. It was not a year. And he thought, you know, he could, you know, become a sort of “labor artist” as these utopian communities are imagining, a get back to the land, kind of—but that will also feed your art. And it just kind of was just a lot of labor.  

[Mark:] You mentioned “The Custom-House” as the beginning of The Scarlet Letter. And then we get to The Scarlet Letter itself and all the chapters within the narrative proper. Why is “The Custom-House" necessary to the actual plot of the novel? What does one have to do with the other? Why is it not just, you know, a kind of introductory contextual essay?  

[Justine:] Two things come to mind. When it comes to the plot “The Custom-House" introduces two aspects. One is it gives you a story of how he finds archival materials: the letter “A.” And that he finds the materials had been—the story in the introduction is that a previous surveyor, Surveyor Pew, had organized and put together this collection of archival materials and he comes across it because he's just dillydallying around the custom house and he puts the A on his chest and it shocks him—not completely, because it's, again, it's a little ambiguous about what actually happens in the moment. And he wants to write this story about this woman, Hester Prynne, that Surveyor Pew has collected materials on. It's all a fiction, I mean, except for Surveyor Pew, who exists in the archives. What he's doing here is two things: one is he’s tapping into a longer formal legacy of historical romances, going all the way back to Sir Walter Scott and Maria Edgeworth in Scotland and Ireland and then James Fenimore Cooper and Catherine Maria Sedgwick in the US. But these novels mix together marriage plots with historical events like the American Revolution, or for Sir Walter Scott the Jacobite rebellion, and they mix them together to create a sort of fusion novel that brings history and novel writing and fiction together. They are filled with footnotes. If you go back and read, Scott Cooper, is always like, “I'm not doing fiction here. I'm just doing—I'm doing history. Don't expect any romance, readers.” But they're romantic. They're filled with marriage plots and they always end, you know, in that sort of happy way marriage plots do.  

[Mark:] Yeah and this has the conceit of a found document.  

[Justine:] Yeah. 

[Mark:] But nevertheless, the subtitle of The Scarlet Letter is “a romance.” 

[Justine:] Exactly. 

[Mark:] And so are we half-and-half, or in what sense are we approaching this as a romance?  

[Justine:] I think actually, I take Hawthorne's definition of romance quite seriously. And what he’s doing is—I mean, the historical romances are from a previous era— he's inheriting that. What he's distinguishing his book from is the novels of the 1840s and 50s. So we're thinking Charles Dickens, for instance, and a more realist and contemporary flavor. In “The Custom-House" as well as in the preface of The House of Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun, he’s developing a theory, his own theory of romance about how it's in more of an atmospherical medium. In “The Custom-House,” he famously calls it a “neutral territory” where the fairy land and the real can meet and mingle. Sort of like a ghost might wander in, but it's okay. It's like one of your weird dreams about a long-lost um, you know, family member. So haunting, but sometimes comforting. So romance is not meant to be full of fantasy. There’s meant to be—it can't be outside of a realist frame, but it's not the developing realism that's beginning to emerge in the 1840s and 1850s in Britain and America.  

[Mark:] On pages 32 and 33 of your edition, your beautiful new Norton Library edition of The Scarlet Letter, there's that scene that Hawthorne writes about, about coming home from a tough day at the office and sitting in a familiar room under the influence of moonlight and a fading fire, just the embers. And it produces the kind of effect that you're describing, which is: familiar things seem distorted and the imagination kicks in. So it’s this really, almost supernatural effect. 

[Justine:] Right! I often teach that moment and this is actually the part of “The Custom-House" I always teach, because I want students to really grapple with how he's defining his own novels. In that moment, I often get students to think about when you wake up in the middle of the night and the pile of clothes on a chair suddenly could be a monster. Is it a monster or is it just a pile of clothes? You know it's a pile of clothes, but you're also scared it's a monster or someone sitting in your room, you know, watching you. And that in betweenness, that was what he's describing. It's not a monster, but it's also not a pile of clothes anymore. So like, and that's where I wanted to sort of make a distinction between Hawthorne's romance and say a horror movie, you know. In the most recent movie, Sinners, right, vampires are actually there, right? In Hawthorne, you're never going to get that. It’s always in that in between. Is it or is it not a ghost? Is he or is he not dead? Right? Did the A actually appear in the sky or didn't, you know? And you're never going to get the fact that it did or didn't, you know, solved in the novel. 

[Mark:] So, does Hawthorne have some sort of conclusion as he's trying to investigate his own personal history and the country's history? Does he impart morality with this novel? Is it didactic or a polemic in any respect?  

[Justine:] Absolutely not. 

[Mark:] No. 

[Justine:] I think that that is the strongest thing that I think comes out of what he's talking about in terms of the romance. He wants room to again not didactically teach his audience. He thinks that kills the art of the novel. I think he actually explains it better in his preface to The House of the Seven Gables, where again he defines romance. And one of the things he talks about is the way in which always trying to describe your moral or hit your moral home; he metaphorizes it as impaling a butterfly with a pen, right? Taking something beautiful and sticking it on your wall. So, one of the things he's trying to do is he might say “if you need a moral,” you know, he says that at the beginning of The House of Seven Gables or at the end of The Scarlet Letter, if you were to take a moral, but it is in that subjunctive sense if you want one. As opposed to “this is the moral, and I want you to know.” And you can see it as a sort of distinction from something like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom's Cabin, which is really telling you, “slavery is wrong and you should be against it.” And it's not that he's putting that kind of novel down, but he is talking about what he's trying to do, which is something that we see a little later that Henry James will develop with The Art of the Novel, right, this idea that the novel can have an art that doesn't have to excuse itself with morality.  

[Mark:] You start your introduction in the Norton Library edition by saying that the letter “A” in The Scarlet Letter is the most ruminated about and interpreted symbol in all of American literature, maybe with the exception of Melville's White Whale. So, when you teach this or when we approach this as novice readers, should we be thinking along those kinds of symbolic modes of, “oh what does it stand for,” or is it just part of the story?  

[Justine:] That's such a great question. It used to be that Hawthorne would be the way in which a lot of teachers would teach symbolism, right? And it became so heavy-handed that I often start the class by saying, "We're not going to talk about it. We're not going to like try to pin down the ‘A.’" I mean, on a very like mundane level, the “A” is adultery, right? Like I mean, like that's what she's being punished for, but then the “A” starts to morph and change as the novel goes. So, people start calling her an angel because she's sort of ministering to the poor, and nursing people, and helping. And it's that kind of shifts in symbolism. So it’s not that he—again just like impaling the butterfly, he doesn't want you to impale his book with like what the “A” definitively means. He wants you to start to see that like interpretations of people change over time. So just as the “A” at the beginning is abjection, she becomes someone who has a place because of how she responds to that abjection. I always start my classes by saying we're not going to talk about that. In part, because I want them to be free of that sort of high school approach. Although, this is not to say that it's a bad thing. In fact, actually now I don't have to start in that way because so few students are reading it in high school now. 

[Mark:] Now before we end our first of two episodes, I was hoping we can get a little sketch of some of the major characters in The Scarlet Letter. I know it's unfair to truncate these amazingly complex characters, but Hester Prynne is such an enduring presence. What do we need to know about her in The Scarlet Letter?  

[Justine:] He is imagining what happens when, as we do in society, we push people out and punish them, right? What happens to them? In a sense, like she becomes intellectually freer than any of the other characters, even as she is constrained by this lack of community. A lot of scholars see her as based on the sort of intellectual feminist Margaret Fuller, and she is a revolutionary without a revolution to lead might be a way to put it. 

[Mark:] Is he sketching a portrait of a woman in historical times, in the times of his contemporary readers in the mid-19th century, or are we allowed to apply that to a 21st century feminist reading?  

[Justine:] You're going to hate this answer, but I would say all three. I mean, I think that he's using the setting of Puritanism, the sort of stern, disciplined community that is extremely isolated, to imagine what happens to somebody when they're isolated from that isolated community, and can't just go down the street or to another town, right? Can't just move to another state. But he is also responding to the revolutions that are happening in America, right? He's thinking about—and in the world at the time, he's thinking about the reform movements, the feminist movements, and Margaret Fuller as a great example of the women's rights woman. But at the same time he’s writing this as the 1848 revolutions are unfolding on the continent, right? So this is a revolutionary time. And I think every time we read, we interpret it by our own setting. So, thinking about Hester today as a woman who can help us think about, you know, what does it take to achieve equality, you know, and what are the limits, especially in an age of backlash? It’s the perfect time to read The Scarlet Letter.  

[Mark:] How about Dimmesdale?  

[Murison:] I love Dimmesdale. I love him but it’s to my mind, Dimmesdale is the minister, spoiler alert: Dimmesdale is of course the father of Pearl, and had the affair with Hester before the book starts. Dimmesdale is a tortured man and he is spending his whole time torturing himself and then being tortured by Chillingworth.  

[Mark:] What does Dimmesdale tell us about the way Hawthorne viewed religion?  

[Justine:] Oh, that's really interesting. I think to my mind I don't think of it as where you know we see well what Hawthorne's view of religion is so much as psychology under the sternest religion: Calvinism, a sense of total depravity and predestination and never knowing if you're saved. Dimmesdale, to my mind, both is the psychological endpoint of that kind of real strong belief; Dimmesdale believes in the Calvinist theology. At the same time, what I think he does, if we're thinking more 1850s and how we might read it today, what Dinsdale also represents is living with hypocrisy. And it's utterly relatable because who is not a hypocrite? Who has not had conflictual responses to life or done things that you are ashamed of and, but can't bring yourself to risk your standing in the community or publicly to name the sin that you're guilty of. So, I actually think Dimmesdale is one of the more complete renderings of psychology under the weights of—even secular societies demand that we become true to ourselves and always publicly be who we are privately. Dimmesdale fails this like spectacularly.  

[Mark:] You mentioned earlier that Hawthorne didn't really believe in heroes and villains in such a clear-cut way. Chillingworth is not a villain in that cut and dried way? 

[Justine:] Yeah, you know that is a great question. I've read this book so many times and I think that you know my first read was Chillingworth: total villain, right? 

[Mark:] Now you're on team Chillingworth. Is that what you're saying?  

[Murison:] No, no, no, no, no, no. Team Hester, of course, like everybody who reads the novel. But Chillingworth—there’s this moment when Hester and Chillingworth are talking and Hester takes a step back and the narrator describes what she sees, and what she sees is what happens when you agree to do the devil's work, right? Again, even Chillingworth has a moment where it's like “this isn't who she married, right?” He was an old man. He probably shouldn't have married her. He says that later. But that sense that he is changed by his desire and his anger and his resentment. So who he is also a more complicated effect than just, “he's a melodramatic villain.” 

[Mark:] So it's almost like he's physically distorted, right?  

[Justine:] And emotionally, yeah. 

[Mark:] You can that he's deteriorated as a person. 

[Justine:] Absolutely. And that sort of evil quest he's on to punish Dimmesdale, right? And to root it out and to get it public actually destroys Chillingworth as much as it destroys Dimmesdale. And in the end, he leaves all his money to Pearl, right? So that is his way of sort of atoning.  

[Mark:] And then maybe we can just end with a quick sketch of Pearl. 

[Justine:] Weird child. [Laughter.] Yeah, Pearl is well, first off, I think a lot a lot of people point to the fact that she’s a lot like Una Hawthorne, his first child.  

[Mark:] In what sense?  

[Justine:] Sort of wild, and temperamental, and very stubborn. They have a lot more difficulty with Una than they do with Julian and Rose, in raising her. And of course, it's their first child, so she's also the sort of center of their world for a little while. But Pearl is sort of described as a sort of child...What happens psychologically when you're raised so alienated and you only have one source of human contact and that's your mother, right? And that source is mediated through the shame of her sin with the “A.” So, in this wonderful moment, the narrator describes how the first thing that Pearl pays attention to is the “A” and not, you know, her mother, right? And there's a sense in which, what he describes at the end a sort of spell breaking when Dimmesdale goes on the scaffold and reveals himself and they leave. So, not Hester, Dimmesdale, and Pearl, but just Hester and Pearl leave Salem. A spell breaks, and then Pearl's allowed to grow up into—I don't want to use the word normal—but like have the kind of life that she that the average woman would have in that time.  

[Mark:] Justine Murison, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library podcast to discuss your edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Thank you, Justine.  

[Justine:] Thank you.  

[Mark:] The Norton Library edition of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by Justine S. Murison, is available now in paperback and ebook. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles. 

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