The Scarlet Letter
Why Hawthorne's classic is best read after high school
Every time you reread a book, you see another aspect of it. It’s not only that you recognize foreshadowing you couldn’t before, or notice details that didn’t catch your eye the first or second time. As you get older, you connect to different characters, resonate with insights that require you to have gone through life’s stages, having loved and lost, or become a parent, or got fired, or rekindled an old friendship. A classic is a book that grows with you, able to be reread at any age.
I’m hardly the first to make these observations. However, I have heard much less about another age-related reading phenomenon. Namely, books that you can’t read until a certain age.
Of course, there are the obvious restrictions: vocabulary, frame of reference, appropriateness of content. A tot could babble the words of Absalom, Absalom! but he wouldn’t understand them. A tween could read Phenomenology of Spirit, technically; her comprehension would at best be fitful.
No, I mean that you understand the meaning of each sentence, you are cognizant of the context of the book, and you aren’t being exposed to inappropriate, repellent subject matter. And yet still, somehow, you can’t understand it. The real meaning eludes you and, even worse, you may have the impression that you’ve got a real profound insight into it.
I remember being assigned Richard Wilbur’s “The Death of a Toad” in early high school and writing an essay about the lines that describe the titular demise:
He lies As if he would return to stone, And soundlessly attending, dies Toward some deep monotone, Toward misted and ebullient seas And cooling shores, toward lost Amphibia's emperies.
Cruelly misinterpreting these lines, I latched onto the word “emperies” to suggest that the frog was some kind of dictator back in its native habitat! A worse misreading of Wilbur’s tender poem, while understanding the basic sense, I can’t imagine. It was simply beyond me for some reason, at fourteen, to access the depth of feeling that might overcome a suburban homeowner to watch an animal he has accidentally maimed drag itself off to die in a corner of the backyard. I couldn’t see what the poem was about.
This is all a meandering lead-in to the feeling I had on reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850): gratitude that I hadn’t been assigned this classroom classic in high school. You have to lived some life to understand the book.
In 1879, Henry James called The Scarlet Letter “the finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth” in America. It is certainly a remarkable piece of writing. The plot is tightly paced yet feels parable-like; the characters contain depths of allegorical significance but seem fully realized, deeply and humanly imagined. The sentences, the images, the conversation are lovely, convincing. The Scarlet Letter is a pleasure to read.
The ease of reading may explain the novel’s place on countless high school English curricula. It is also eminently interpretable. Teens, dominated by the pressure of the social caste system and by raging hormones, will readily glom onto themes of hypocrisy and ostracism. Hence an adaptation like the movie Easy A (2010), which, fun as it is, turns the book’s concerns into angst over sex and status.
Now, Nathaniel Hawthorne clearly raged against Puritan morality, but he was himself a product of the Puritan tradition and preoccupied, like his ancestors, by the question of sin. The vilest character in the book isn’t a hypocritical Puritan divine, or some Salem lady, contemptuous of the fallen Hester Prynne. It is the man (spoiler alert!) that Hester has wronged: her husband. The sinned-against becomes the sinner.
Hawthorne’s real subject isn’t people’s meanness, pettiness, and love of judgement (he takes these for granted); he’s interested in what you do when society has turned its back on you, or when your loved ones betray you. He is concerned with how the desire to do good can itself be a form of evil. In short, thrown into this bitter world, will you become better or worse? Will you revel in darkness or strive for the light?
Yet the difference between the alternatives is like a thin, trembling line, frequently lost to sight, and to which, it seems, we are constantly led back and forced to re-decide. Hawthorne is a moralist without an easy moral. This quality is no doubt what Henry James admired in him, beyond his technical mastery. F. R. Leavis has explained as well as anyone James’s genius:
He creates an ideal civilized sensibility; a humanity capable of communicating by the finest shades of inflection and implication: a nuance may engage a whole complex moral economy and the perceptive response be the index of a major valuation or choice.
In this regard, I dare say, he goes farther than Hawthorne, “subtilizing,” as Leavis puts it, to an unprecedented—and as yet unmatched—degree the moral (and mortal) dance of human intercourse.
But what Hawthorne holds over his successor is a vision of human darkness so intense as to border on the supernatural. The power of sin, and hope, as manifest in human action, attain a blunt richness of effect in The Scarlet Letter that James hardly appears interested in. Hawthorne sounds the seduction of revenge at various depths, as he does the secret dreams we carry all our lives, often unrevealed, but he doesn’t relinquish by his subtlety the lurking danger that either could suddenly overwhelm, and transform, us.
None of the sin, subtlety, or danger that lurks in Hawthorne’s novel is easily understandable by young people who have hardly lived, let alone been felled or uplifted by the forces of good and evil that dwell inside us. (James’s Daisy Miller, it strikes me now, is another beautiful book that seems to have an obvious message when one is young but becomes stranger and more cryptic as one become familiar with life.) If you were assigned The Scarlet Letter in high school, or even if you weren’t, it’s worth picking the book up as an adult. Hawthorne is the reader of our dark, human hearts. Read him if you dare to know yourself.