The Scarlet Letter is a great book—when you're 30 years old. Before then, it's an impenetrable mass of dependent clauses, irritating men, funny shoes, and words you've never heard before (prolixity? moil? lucubrations?). We'll never understand why high school kids are forced to read this wonderful, dense, and difficult book, but we don't make the rules around here; we just complain about them.
To make The Scarlet Letter season a little more tolerable, we thought we'd ask our pal Ramsey to blog about it. Sound good? Let's get started.
p.s. If you're looking for the extremely helpful lit guide, here it is.
Blogging The Scarlet Letter
Before I begin, I should warn you that there will be spoilers, so be careful if you haven't read the novel. But to be fair, it was written in 1850, so you've had 159 years to get to it.
The Custom-House
The introduction to the book is narrated by a nameless fellow who works in the Salem Custom-House. A custom-house was a place where you would go to pay taxes on foreign imports, so this poor guy was clearly stuck in one of the most boring jobs available in the mid-1800s. My knowledge of history during this time is a little shaky, but think of all the much cooler jobs he could've had: blacksmith, statesman, pirate, dinosaur rider. Instead, the job he picked was basically like being on the TV show The Office without anything fun, romantic, or interesting happening (there were no female coworkers in those days, to put it mildly).
The narrator (who doesn't have a name but seems to be an awful lot like Nathaniel Hawthorne...) basically does what he can to make work go by quickly. It seems the best way to do this is to sit in a chair and shoot hate-beams at his coworkers from his eyes. His coworkers are all ancient old men who don't know what they're doing and don't deserve their jobs, yet, thanks to their friends in the government, get to keep their jobs until they die. So, basically, working in an office hasn't changed in 160 years.
One day, Nathanial our narrator is in the second floor of the custom-house, where he comes across a batch of papers and a scrap of cloth with a scarlet letter "A" on it. Feeling a strange sensation, he presses the letter to his chest and suddenly he gains all the powers of the letter A and goes on to fight crime as A-Man! Defender of alphabetizing!
Okay, I made that up. He actually reads the batch of papers and is transfixed by the story and its subject: a woman named Hester Prynne. He decides he is going to turn this batch of papers into his masterpiece. He tries and he tries, but he just can't get inspired to write, for two reasons. First, he keeps worrying about how his Puritan ancestors would think what he's doing was a waste of time (but to be fair, they hated everything that was fun). Second, our narrator just can't be creative while his senile coworkers surround him. (And if they're anything like the people in my office, they probably yell at him for checking his email, too. He was just checking for a second, it's not a big deal. Jeez.)
As luck would have it, his problems are solved when a new president is elected. This commander in chief doesn't agree with our narrator's political views, and our hero gets a pink slip. His job goes to some dude from the Whig party. I don't have a joke for that; I just like saying Whig party.
With his newfound free time (and what must be a hefty savings to live off of) our narrator gets to work and starts writing "The Scarlet Letter."
Confused? Don't be! I made you a chart!
Chapter One - The Prison Door
We now go back in time 200 years. We're still in Salem Massachusetts. Hawthorne sets the scene. He talks about the founders of the colony, who built the prison. He talks about the massive door of the prison and how ominous it looks. He briefly mentions the rosebush and how out of place it seems. He talks about...nothing else. That's the first chapter: a description of the prison door. Granted, it's probably the most action-packed description of a door in literary history, but still, that's all that happens.
Chapter Two - The Market Place
All right, here we go. We begin this chapter with...two pages of Puritan settlement history. Then...then we get to the good stuff: a few women are gossiping and talking about the punishment to be given to Hester Prynne. (Yes, after multiple pages of scenery description, I'm calling gossiping townsfolk "good stuff.") The women feel that Hester's punishment wasn't harsh enough and that she should've been branded with an iron. Any kind of sin was a big deal to the early Puritans. If they were in charge today, each episode of Gossip Girl would be cut down to a minute and a half, and the cast would be sentenced to death by drowning.
Suddenly, that prison door we've heard so much about opens up, and out steps Hester Prynne, holding her three-month-old baby. Attached to the front of her clothing is a scarlet letter A, very delicately embroidered. Hawthorne doesn't directly tell us what the A stands for, but if you read between the lines (or if you've seen an episode of Jeopardy!) you can figure out that it stands for adulterer. (Because she's all embarrassed...holding a baby...you know what? Ask your mom.)
The chapter ends with Hester thinking about her past and the decisions she's made, in disbelief that she's ended up in this situation. She suddenly snaps back to reality when she is forced to stand at the front of a platform in the middle of town, surrounded by gawkers who are murmuring and judging her for bringing shame into their town. Just keep that level of embarrassment in mind the next time your parents tell your friends about the plastic sheets you had on your bed until the age of eight.
Keep checking SparkLife for the next installment of Blogging The Scarlet Letter or you'll be forced to wear a Scarlet "F" on all your clothes. It stands for "failure to keep checking a blog for the next installment of an humorous summary of a classic literary work." (I'm going to work on streamlining that.)
What do you think, Sparklers: Is this a better way to read The Scarlet Letter?
Post a comment!