Texts:
Selected Tales and Sketches (Penguin)
The Scarlet Letter (Bedford)
The Blithedale Romance (Bedford)

Assignments:

Feb 24/26:
A. Read all and post on at least one:
Young Goodman Brown, The Minister's Black Veil, The Birthmark, Egotism -- or the Bosom Serpent, The Artist of the Beautiful, Rappaccini's Daughter, Ethan Brand

B. Read all and post on at least one:
My Kinsman Major Molineau, Roger Malvin's Burial, Wakefield, The Hall of Fantasy, The Celestial railroad, Earth's Holocaust

March 3/5:
The Scarlet Letter (Bedford)

The Scarlet Letter: 20 questions (reposting)

From: Heyward Ehrlich
Category: Category 1
Date: 3/6/98
Time: 11:09:14 AM
Remote Name: 12.68.125.90

Comments

Originally posted 3/4/98 at 4:40:33 PM to tecn/rutgers/edu/ehrlich.

"THE SCARLET LETTER": 20 QUESTIONS (BASED ON BEDFORD TEXT)-

---1. Biography and sources: ---

[1] Hawthorne's mother was pregnant with his older sister when married.

[2] Hawthorne's father, a sea captain, spent only a few months at home during the seven years of his marriage; he died abroad when Hawthorne was four.

[3] There was animosity between the Hawthornes and the Mannings, his mother's family

[4] A woman punished with the letter A for adultery had ornamented so it could stand for Admirable in Hawthorne's story "Endicott and the Red Cross" (1837). Some related entries appeared in his journals in the 1840s. Hawthorne's known sources include Caleb H. Snow's "A History of Boston" (1825). A selection of these tests appear in the Norton Critical Edition.

[5] Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody, sister of Elizabeth Peabody, a feminist and radical, after he and Sophia lived for a few years at Brook Farm

[6] Hawthorne was appointed to a Custom House job in Salem by the Democrats after their victory in 1844 and was removed by the Whigs when they came to power after the pivotal elections of 1848

[7] Hawthorne reported to a friend after reading the concluding chapters of "The Scarlet Letter" to Sophia on February 3. 1850: "It broke her heart and sent her to bed with a grievous headache," "which I look upon as a triumphant success."

[8] Ticknor and Fields (Boston) published "The Scarlet Letter" with "The Custom House" as preface, dropping plans to include in the same volume other tales of early New England.

---2. Questions to ponder regarding the Bedford edition:---

[A]. In treating Freud's idea of fetishes, Diehl discusses displacement, the Other, castration, the mother barred from her son, and the genital representation of the diverging horizontals (with crossbar) of the typographic letter A (247). Do you agree?

[B1]. Levernenz suggests that Hester is going to hell (271). Do you agree? What in your opnion is the state of Hester's soul in 17th and 19th century terms at various moments in the book?

[B2] Furthermore, how does her fate affect (and become affected by) the state of Dimmesdale's, Chillingworth's and Pearl's spiritual states?

[C1.] Benstock takes for granted that Puritian "communitas" was rooted in "patriarchal and capitalist ideologies" (293). Although the former stems from the Old Testament, the latter seems a later myth in view of the communist and joint-stock structure of early Puritan settlements in New England. How do 17th and 19th century view of Puritan society and politics differ? What is the role of women in each?

[C2]Are there differences in female and male forms of folklore, narrative, representation, cognition, culture, and language that are important to the book?

[D1]. Do you agree with Ragussis's insistence that silence "obfuscates the difference between husband and lover" (317)?

[D2] What of his assertion that in the principal actions "a series of mock engenderments occupy the foreground of the narrative" (328)?

[E1]. Do you agree that Berkovitch's "angel and apostle" quotation (344-345) from the conclusion of the text "reconciles the novel's various antinomies" (344) ?

[E2] To what extent do you accept his overall reading of the text as Hawthorne's taming of Hester's potential radicalism in light of the "red scare" of 1848?

--- 3. Other issues: ---

1. What are some of other significant observations or questions about the book?

2. How do the major editions vary: , eg. SL & Tales of the Puritans, Norton Critical Edition (1962, later revised), and Bedford Case Studies edition (1991). Which questions and issues might the other critical editions raise?

--- 4. Glossary of some significant names in Beford criticism--- Ann Hutchinson --- John Wilson --- Margaret Fuller --- Henry James --- Freud --- Lacan --- Nan Baym --- Frederick Crews --- Stanley Fish --- Wolfgang Iser --- Wayne Booth --- David Leverenz --- Anthony Trollope --- D. H. Lawrence --- Derrida --- Foucault --- Steven Greenblatt --- Larry Reynolds --- Walter Benjamin --- Bahktin --- Harriet Beecher Stowe -- Abraham Lincoln -- Franklin Pierce

March 10/12:

The Blithedale Romance (Bedford);

---

The Blithedale Romance: 20 questions

1. What use did Hawthorne make of his stay at Brook Farm and his record of that stay in his notebooks and letters? Why did he go to Brook Farm? Why did he leave? What was Brook Farm like? What happened to Brook Farm and its participants after Hawthorne left? How was Brook Farm and its participants treated in contemporary literature? How did contemporary events affect the reputation of Brook Farm?

2. To what extent is The Blithedale Romance a continuation of The Scarlet Letter (and The House of the Seven Gables)? What were Hawthorne's apparent motives, interests, or purposes in writing each of these novels? How do they differ in form, content, effect, and context? Can the leading characters be compared (Hester and Zenobia, Dimmesdale and Hollingsworth, etc.)

3. How does The Blithedale Romance continue some of the topical interests Hawthorne displayed in such tales and sketches as "Ethan Brand," "The Celestial Railway," "Earth's Holocaust," "The Artist of the Beautiful," and related materials in his letters and notebooks?

4. What is the double sense of "romance" in the title? Hawthorne seems to suggest that the Brook Farm experiment itself was already a "romance," according to his preface "the most romantic episode of his own life -- essentially a day-dream and yet a fact -- and thus affording an available foothold between fiction and reality."

5. Despite Hawthorne's disclaimer it is tempting to "identify" the characters in Blithdale with actual persons. What is the effect on the reader when, in his preface, he calls upon Ripley, Dana, Dwight, Channing, Burton, and Parker and others to give their accounts of Brook Farm -- along with others he dare not name "because they veil themselves from the public eye."

6. Why does he conclude his preface by likening his residence at Brook Farm to the oriental travel narratives of G. W. Curtis written for the New York Tribune under the pen name Howadji?

7. What is the apparent "moral" of Blithdale? How does it compare with similar statements in his other writings?

8. What is the critical and theoretical significance of the preface to Blithdale? Compare it to his prefaces, such as The House of the Seven Gables, "Rappaccini's Daughter," "The Old Manse," "The Custom House."

9. Why is Blithdale presented to us by a first-person narrator named Miles Coverdale? How does he represent the story, and how is he involved in it?

10. Why does Hawthorne introduce mesmerism in the story? What is its relation to the other thematic material?

11. Since the Russian and Chinese revolutions of the 20th century, it has become increasingly difficult to understand the nature of the 19th century international socialist movements as Hawthorne referred to them in Blithdale, and particularly American social experiments, especially those in New England from 1620 to 1852 with which he was familiar. One of the tasks of historicizing socialism in Hawthorne may be to separate it from political and economic Marxism and to connect it with religious and social movements of the day. In "Chardon Street and Bible Conventions," Emerson reported a series of meetings in Boston in the early 1840 attended by:

Madmen, madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-day-Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians, and Philosophers, -

At other times and places New England and nearby states had seen the Pilgrims, Puritians, Shakers, Moravians, Hutterites, Mormons, Millerians, Pefectionists, Owenites, and Fourierians -- and in passages (to follow in the course) in Melville's Pierre in New York.

The Bedford edition: Sample and discuss background documents:

`12. Editor William E. Cain's introduction and bibliography, pp. 3-36, 507-511

13. Reform, radical, and revolutionary authors in the Bedford edition: Marx, Engels, Douglass, Lincoln, Harriet Martineau. Margaret Fuller

14. Communitarian theorists, leaders, and reporters in the Bedford edition: Fourier, Owen, Wright, Noyes, Alcott, Stowe

`15. Brook Farm participants and observers in the Bedford edition: George Ripley, Emerson, Elizabeth Peabody

16. Feminists in the Bedford edition: L. M. Child, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Stanton

17. Explore the deep vein of anti-utopian, anti-Fourierian, and anti-transcendentalist literary satire and exposés, chiefly of the 1840s, in Poe ("Ligeia"); Emerson (increasingly in post-1848 writings); Melville, Mardi, Pierre; Lowell, A Fable for Critics; Charles Frederick Briggs, Pinto Letters; James Fenimore Cooper, Upside Down; Thoreau, "Etzler"; New York Knickerbocker group.

18. Two favorite subjects of literary satire were Margaret Fuller and her French role model, George Sand. Explore and discuss.

19. To what extent were the literary modes of the Gothic and the romance inherently radical and revoutionary in the mid-19th century?

20. For background, sample the two Reynoldses: Larry, on the European revolutions of 1848, and David, on American popular literature.

Works (Centenary Ed., gen. ed., W. Charvat, 20 v. 1963-1988)
American Notebooks (Claude Simpson, 1972)
English Notebooks (Randall Stewart, 1941)
French and Italian Notebooks (L. Neal Smith and Thomas Woodson, 1979)
Letters (L. Neal Smith and Thomas Woodson, 1984--)
Lost Notebooks (B. Mouffe, 1978)
Works: Centenary Edition., 18v., 1963-1987
Letters: Smith and Woodson, 1984--
Contemporary views: Poe (reviews), Lowell (Fable for Critics), Melville (Hawthorne and His Mosses)
Life: Henry James (1879), Julian Hawthorne (1884), Randall Stewart (1948), Arlin Turner (1980), James Mellow (1980)
Bibliography: Walter Blair in Eight American Authors, rev James Woodress, 1971; also American Literary Scholarship, 1963--
Recent Trends: Gender studies, including views of feminism, masculinity, domesticity; relations to popular woman writers
Anthologies: selections from prefaces, notebooks
Critical editions: Norton, Bedford, etc.
Ignored works: Campaign biography of Franklin Pierce, sketches, works for children

Secondary works:
Life: Henry James (1879), Julian Hawthorne (1884), Randall Stewart (1948)
Criticism: Roy R. Male (1957), Frederick Crews (1966), Nina Baym (1976), Gloria Erlich (1984), Michael Colarcurcio (1984), Richard Brodhead (1986), Sacvan Bercovich (1991), Edwin Haviland Miller (1991), T. Walter Herbert (1993)
Reference Guides: Walter Blair in Woodress, 1971

Nathaniel Hawthorne OnLine
From Alan Liu's Voice of the Shuttle