Scarlet Letter Group Notes
From 1850s
We now have a link from the classes main page to this one. That should make navigating much easier for us and those wanting to see our page. - Jason
Hey Guys. I found an article called "The Trivialization of American Literature" written in 1988 on JSTOR that outlines the problems with how Americans view American Literature via the game Trivial Pursuit. It's sort of interesting and was thinking you might pursue through it at you leisure. Though I'm not eniterly sure how to post it here. - Mariah
I've just come across a rather sizable article from 1950 that explores the Scarlet Letter 100 years after its first publication. It eludes to the different characters within the novel being different sides of Hawthorne's personality. I'll finish going through it in more depth later, but so far it seems to be very relevant to our project. -Jason
Hello all. I've just started a myspace page for Dimmesdale. If you have any ideas of what we should put on it be my guest. Ask me and I'll give you the email address and password to use. But in the meantime if you want to look at it click here. --Mariah
Hey Guys,
Here's the text for the first Review Written: This way we have it on here.
"The Whole is a Prose Poem": An Early Review of The Scarlet Letter Benjamin Lease American Literature, Vol. 44, No. 1. (Mar., 1972), pp. 128-130. [Boston Post, March 21, 1850] The Scarlet Letter, a Romance. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: Ticknor, Reed & Fields.
-Hundreds of our readers must already be conversant with this book; and as we were compelled by its attractiveness, to read every word between the covers, it is probable that our praise or blame is H little behind the times, and therefore of small account. But without going far into details, we must pass a vote of thanks for gratification received at rhe hands of Mr Hawthorne. "The Scarlet Letter" is, in essence, almost identical with the previous works of its author. It is a wild, poetical and symbolic story of remorse--of remorse and repentance in rags, of remorse and half repentance in high places. The scene is laid in Boston, some twenty years subsequent to its foundation. "The Scarlet Letter" is the "Letter A," worn on the bosom of a discovered adulteress, according to the old Puritan enactment or legend. There is no incident to the tale-it opens with the exposure of Hester prynne, and its argument relates to her sufferings and those of him who had sinned with her, to the life of the little Pearl, the child of the guilty ones, and to the revenge of the old and injured Chillingworth. The adulteress is known to the world, but her seducer is hidden from all but the husband. The merits of the book lie in its vigorous conception of scenes, its vivid master-strokes of character, and its thickly-scattered gems 'An equally early review (in the Salem Register of March 21, 1850) is reproduced in my article, "Salem vs. Hawthorne: An Early Review of The Scarlet Letter," New England Quarterly, XLIV (March, 1g71), 110-117. The earliest review cited by Bertha Faust and other commentators on the reception of The Scadet Letter is that of Evert A. Duyckinck in the New York Literary World of March 30, 1850; see Faust, Hawthorne's Contemporaneous Reputation: A Study of Literary Opinion in America and England, 1828-1864 (Philadelphia, 1g3g), 6970, and William Charvat, Introduction to The Scarlet Letter, Centenary Edition (Columbus, Ohio, 1962), p. xvii and accompanying note 7. For a review that appeared in the Salem Gazette of March 19, 1850, see C. E. Frazer Clark, Jr., "Posthumous Papers of a Decapitated Surveyor: The Scarlet Letter in the Salem Press," Studies in the Novel, I1 (Winter, 197o), 410-411. '"The preliminary chapter was what gave the Scarlet Letter its vogue," wrote Hawthorne to James T. Fields, on February 22, 1851; the letter is printed in Nancy L. Eagle, " ~ n Unpublished Hawthorne Letter," American Literature, XXIII (Nov., 1 9 5 1 ) ~3 61-362. 130 American Literature of thought and expression. It has very little dialogue. The whole is a prose poem, and must bc regarded as such, and judged by poetical standards only. In this view, Hester Prynne, Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, and the wild, beautiful and unfathomable little Pearl are as true as they are original-they are poetical embodiments of the highest, strongest, most tenacious and most inconsistent principles of our nature. As prose creations, they are unnatural-as poetic fancies, they are fixed as the pole to the truth which is in man. We think there are few if any passages in literature, which are better, in their way, than the two scenes at the pillory, the walk in the forest, the revelation, and all the chapters through which Pearl dances; to say nothing of those wherein the physician goads on the minister to madness and death. Moreover, the catastrophe is grandly wrought out. It was a fine idea to make the solitary and long repentant woman finally willing to break the bonds of society for the life's sake of her crushed idol, while the passion-ridden priest, an involuntary compound of seeming and reality, manfully overcomes, in his dying hour, the fascinating temptation by which he was entranced. Mr Hawthorne writes as a man as well as a poet, and while building his romance upon the usages of society, and thereby occupying artificial ground, his pen is above all cant and creed, and his characters are of the real stuff, either God-born or devil-born, and not the offspring of man's ceremonials. We think Mr Hawthorne has largely increased his reputation by the "Scarlet Letter." Though of the same family, it is worth a score of "Twice Told Tales," and it will be read by thousands, to whom the preceding tid-bits of quaint, mystic and eccentric literature are but caviare.
There you go.
