The “Red Letter” Plays
Suzan-Lori Parks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist (2002) for her play TopdoglUnderdog, has written two works, which she terms her “Red Letter” plays, inspired by Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. The first, In the Blood, centers around the figure of Hester La Negrita, who sums up her situation tersely: “My life’s my own fault. I know that. But the world don’t help, Maam.” Park’s Hester, like Hawthorne’s, lives outside society—literally; she is a homeless black woman living in an urban jungle. In Park’s play, the letter “A” is not sewn onto a dress but scrawled onto the concrete streets of the unnamed city. Illiterate and prone to a violent temper, Hester struggles desperately to care for her five children, all born out of wedlock. Grasping for a semblance of order amid brutal poverty that a dysfunctional welfare system does little to relieve, Hester hides her children under a bridge for shelter. The actors who portray Hester’s children double as her adult nemeses, who cast her out with an acid and thorough vilification. In the Blood was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1999.
The second “Red Letter” play bears a title that most newspapers have refused to print: Fucking A. The title reflects Park’s sense of dialogue, which makes use of street idiom and expletive-laced, yet mellifluous, language. Hester Smith lives in a small, tropical (and fictional) country where she earns gold coins as an abortionist—hence the “A” and the letter tattoo with which she has been branded. Hester believes her son, Boy, has been wrongly imprisoned—she has, in fact, not seen him since he was a young child—and devotes her life to freeing him. Ten original songs, written and composed by Parks, serve as interstitial sparks to the narrative. In its 2003 New York production the play, directed by Michael Greif, featured S. Epatha Merkerson as Hester, supported by Mos Def, Daphne Rubin-Vega, and Bobby Cannavale.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the history of the book. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
Speaking of Thackeray, I cannot but wonder at his coolness in respect to his own pathos, and compare it to my own emotions when I read the last scene of The Scarlet Letter to my wife, just after writing it—tried to read it, rather, for my voice swelled and heaved as if I were tossed up and down on an ocean as it subsides after a storm. But I was in a very nervous state then, having gone through a great diversity of emotion while writing it, for many months.
—from English Note-Books
(September 14, 1855)
HENRY JAMES
Like almost all people who possess in a strong degree the story-telling faculty, Hawthorne had a democratic strain in his composition, and a relish for the commoner stuff of human nature. Thoroughly American in all ways, he was in none more so than in the vagueness of his sense of social distinctions, and his readiness to forget them if a moral or intellectual sensation were to be gained by it. He liked to fraternise with plain people, to take them on their own terms, and put himself, if possible, into their shoes....
Nothing is more curious and interesting than this almost exclusively imported character of the sense of sin in Hawthorne’s mind; it seems to exist there merely for an artistic or literary purpose. He had ample cognizance of the Puritan conscience; it was his natural heritage; it was reproduced in him; looking into his soul, he found it there. But his relation to it was only, as one may say, intellectual; it was not moral and theological. He played with it, and used it as a pigment; he treated it, as the metaphysicians say, objectively....
He is no more a pessimist than an optimist, though he is certainly not much of either. He does not pretend to conclude, or to have a philosophy of human nature; indeed, I should even say that at bottom he does not take human nature as hard as he may seem to do.
—from Hawthorne (1879)
JULIAN HAWTHORNE (THE AUTHOR’S SON)
The punishment of the scarlet letter is a historical fact; and, apart from the symbol thus ready provided to the author’s hand, such a book as The Scarlet Letter would doubtless never have existed. But the symbol gave the touch whereby Hawthorne’s disconnected thoughts on the subject were united and crystallized in organic form. Evidently, likewise, it was a source of inspiration, suggesting new aspects and features of the truth, a sort of witch-hazel to detect spiritual gold. Some such figurative emblem, introduced in a matter-of-fact way, but gradually invested with supernatural attributes, was one of Hawthorne’s favorite devices in his stories. We may realize its value, in the present case, by imagining the book with the scarlet letter omitted. It is not practically essential to the plot. But the scarlet letter uplifts the theme from the material to the spiritual level. It is the concentration and type of the whole argument. It transmutes the prose into poetry. It serves as a formula for the conveyance of ideas otherwise too subtle for words, as well as to enhance the gloomy picturesqueness of the moral scenery. It burns upon its wearer’s breast, it casts a lurid glow along her pathway, it isolates her among mankind, and is at the same time the mystic talisman to reveal to her the guilt hidden in other hearts. It is the Black Man’s mark, and the first plaything of the infant Pearl. As the story develops, the scarlet letter becomes the dominant figure—everything is tinged with its sinister glare. By a ghastly miracle its semblance is reproduced upon the breast of the minister, where “God’s eye beheld it! the angels were forever pointing at it! the devil knew it well, and fretted it continually with the touch of his burning finger!”—and at last, to Dimmesdale’s crazed imagination, its spectre appears even in the midnight sky as if heaven itself had caught the contagion of his so zealously hidden sin. So strongly is the scarlet letter rooted in every chapter and almost every sentence of the book that bears its name. And yet it would probably have incommoded the average novelist....
Dimmesdale is, artistically, a corollary of Hester; and yet the average writer would not be apt to hit upon him as a probable seducer. The community in which he abides certainly shows a commendable lack of suspicion towards him: even old Mistress Hibbins whose scent for moral carrion was as keen as that of a modern society journal, can scarcely credit her own conviction. “What mortal imagination could conceive it!” whispers the old lady to Hester, as the minister passes in the procession. “Many a church member saw I, walking behind the music, who has danced in the same measure with me, when Somebody was the fiddler! That is but a trifle, when a woman knows the world. But this minister!” It is, of course, this very refinement that makes him the more available for the ends of the story. A gross, sensual man would render the whole drama gross and obvious. But Dimmesdale’s social position, as well as his personal character, seems to raise him above the possibility of such a lapse. This is essential to the scope of the treatment, which, dealing with the spiritual aspects of the crime, requires characters of spiritual proclivities. Hester’s lover, then, shall be a minister, for the priest of that day “stood at the head of the social system;” and, moreover,—a main object of the story being to show that no sacred vows nor sublime aspirations can relieve mortal man from the common human liability to guilt,—Dimmesdale himself must commit the most fatal of the sins against which the priest is supposed to provide protection; nay, he is the actual spiritual adviser of her whom he ruins. Young and comely he must be, for the sake of the artistic harmony; but his physical organization is delicate, he is morbidly conscientious and “the Creator never made another being so sensitive as this.” Highly intellectual he is, too, though, as the author finely discriminates, not too broadly so. “In no state of society would he have been what is
called a man of liberal views; it would always be essential to his peace to feel the pressure of a faith about him.” Nor has he ever “gone through an experience calculated to lead him beyond the scope of generally received laws, although, in a single instance, he had so fearfully transgressed one of the most sacred of them.” It is by such subtle but important reservations that the author’s mastery of the character is revealed: they would have escaped the average mind, which would thereby have been perplexed to show why Dimmesdale did not follow Hester’s example, and seek relief by speculatively questioning the validity of all social institutions. Nor would this average mind have been likely to perceive the weak point in such a character,—“that violence of passion, which, intermixed with more shapes than one, with his higher, purer, softer qualities, was, in fact, the portion of him which the devil claimed, and through which he sought to win the rest.” It is upon this flaw that Chillingworth puts his finger. “See now how passion takes hold upon this man, and hurrieth him out of himself! As with one passion, so with another! He hath done a wild thing ere now, this pious Master Dimmesdale, in the hot passion of his heart!” For the rest, save in one conspicuous instance, the minister plays Prometheus to the vulture Chillingworth. As Hester suffers public exposure and frank ignominy, so he is wrapped in secret torments; and either mode of punishment is shown to be powerless for good. “Nervous sensibility and a vast power of self-restraint” are leading features in the young man’s character, and these, combined with his refined selfishness, are what render him defenseless against Chillingworth. Dimmesdale cares more for his social reputation than for anything else. His self-respect, his peace, his love, his soul,-all may go: only let his reputation remain! And yet it is that selfsame false reputation that daily causes him the keenest anguish of all.
Pearl, however, is the true creation of the book: every touch upon her portrait is a touch of genius, and her very conception is an inspiration. Yet the average mind would have found her an encumbrance. Every pretext would have been improved to send her out of the room, as it were, and to restrict her utterances, when she must appear, to monosyllables or sentimental commonplaces. Not only is she free from repression of this kind, but she avouches herself the most vivid and active figure in the story. Instead of keeping pathetically in the background, as a guiltless unfortunate whose life was blighted before it began, this strange little being, with laughing defiance of precedent and propriety, takes the reins in her own childish hands, and dominates every one with whom she comes in contact. This is an idea which it was left to Hawthorne to originate: ancient nor modern fiction supplies a parallel to Pearl. “In giving her existence, a great law had been broken.... The mother’s impassioned state had been the medium through which were transmitted to the unborn infant the rays of its moral life.... Above all, the warfare of Hester’s spirit, at that epoch, was perpetuated in Pearl.” The mother “felt like one who has evoked a spirit, but, by some irregularity in the process of conjuration, has failed to win the master-word that should control this new and incomprehensible intelligence.” Pearl instinctively comprehends her position as a born outcast from the world of christened infants, and requites their scorn and contumely with the bitterest hatred,—a passion of enmity which she had “inherited by inalienable right, out of Hester’s heart.” In her childish plays, her ever-creative spirit communicated itself, with a wild energy and fertility of invention, to a thousand unlikeliest objects; but—and here again the mother felt in her own heart the cause -Pearl “never created a friend; she seemed always to be sowing broadcast the dragon’s teeth, whence sprang a harvest of armed enemies, against whom she rushed to battle.” And this strange genesis of hers, placing her in a sphere of her own, gave also a phantom-like quality to the impression she produced on Hester: just as a unique event, especially an unpremeditated crime, seems unreal and dream-like in the retrospect. Yet Pearl was, all the while, the most unrelentingly real fact of her mother’s ruined life.
Standing as the incarnation, instead of the victim, of a sin, Pearl affords a unique opportunity for throwing light upon the inner nature of the sin itself. In availing himself of it, Hawthorne touches ground which, perhaps, he would not have ventured on, had he not first safeguarded himself against exaggeration and impiety by making his analysis accord (so to speak) with the definition of a child’s personality. Pearl, as we are frequently reminded, is the scarlet letter made alive, capable of being loved, and so endowed with a manifold power of retribution for sin. The principle of her being is the freedom of a broken law; she is developed, “a lovely and immortal flower, out of the rank luxuriance of a guilty passion,” yet, herself, as irresponsible and independent as if distinctions of right and wrong did not exist to her. Like nature and animals, she is anterior to moral law; but, unlike them, she is human, too. She exhibits an unfailing vigor and vivacity of spirits joined to a precocious and almost preternatural intelligence, especially with reference to her mother’s shameful badge. To this her interest constantly reverts, and always with a “peculiar smile and odd expression of the eyes,” they almost suggesting acquaintance on her part with “the secret spell of her existence.” The wayward, mirthful mockery with which the small creature always approaches this hateful theme, as if she deemed it a species of ghastly jest, is a terribly significant touch, and would almost warrant a confirmation of the mother’s fear that she had brought a fiend into the world. Yet, physically, Pearl is “worthy to have been left in Eden, to be the plaything of the angels,” and her aspect—as must needs be the case with a child who symbolized a sin that finds its way into all regions of human society—“was imbued with the spell of infinite variety: in this one child there were many children, comprehending the full scope between the wild-flower prettiness of a peasant baby and the pomp, in little, of an infant princess.” The plan of her nature, though possibly possessing an order of its own, was incompatible with the scheme of the rest of the universe; in other words, the child could never, apparently, come into harmony with her surroundings, unless the ruling destiny of the world should, from divine, become diabolic. “I have no Heavenly Father!” she exclaims, touching the scarlet letter on her mother’s bosom with her small forefinger: and how, indeed, could the result of an evil deed be good? There is “fire in her and throughout her,” as befits “the unpremeditated offshoot of a passionate moment,” and it is a fire that seems to have in it at least as much of an infernal as of a heavenly ardor; and in her grim little philosophy, the scarlet emblem is the heritage of the maturity of all her sex. “Will it not come of its own accord, when I am a woman grown?” And yet she is a guiltless child, with all a child’s freshness and spontaneity....
For the controlling purpose of the story, underlying all other purposes, is to exhibit the various ways in which guilt is punished in this world,—whether by society, by the guilty persons themselves, or by interested individuals who take the law into their own hands. The method of society has been exemplified by the affixing of the scarlet letter on Hester’s bosom. This is her punishment, the heaviest that man can afflict upon her. But, like all legal punishment, it aims much more at the protection of society than at the reformation of the culprit. Hester is to stand as a warning to others tempted as she was: if she recovers her own salvation in the process, so much the better for her; but, for better or worse, society has ceased to have any concern with her. “We trample you down,” society says in effect to those who break its laws, “not by any means in order to save your sou!,—for the welfare of that problematical adjunct to your civic personality is a matter of complete indifference to us,—but because, by some act, you have forfeited your claim to our protection, because you are a clog to our prosperity, and because the spectacle of your agony may discourage others of similar unlawful inclinations.” ...
Such being the result of society’s management of the matter, let us see what success attended the efforts of an individual to take the law into his own hands. It is to exemplify this phase of the subject that Roger Chillingworth exists;
and his operations are of course directed not against Hester (“I have left thee to the scarlet letter,” he says to her. “If that have not avenged me, I can do no more!”), but against her accomplice. This accomplice is unknown; that is, society has not found him out. But he is known to himself, and consequently to Roger Chillingworth, who is a symbol of a morbid and remorseless conscience. Chillingworth has been robbed of his wife. But between that and other kinds of robbery there is this difference,—that he who is robbed wishes not to recover what is lost, but to punish the robber.... Chillingworth is an image in little of society; and the external difference between his action and that of society is due to unlikeness not of inward motive, but of outward conditions. The revenge of society consists in publishing the sinner’s ignominy. But this method would baffle Chillingworth’s revenge just where he designed it to be most effective; for, by leaving the sinner with no load of secret guilt in his heart, it is inadvertently merciful in its very unmercifulness. The real agony of sin, as Chillingworth clearly perceived, lies not in its commission, which is always delightful, nor in its open punishment, which is a kind of relief, but in the dread of its discovery. The revenge which he plans, therefore, depends above all things upon keeping his victim’s secret. By rejecting all brutal and obvious methods he gains entrance into a much more sensitive region of torture. He will not poison Hester’s babe, because he knows that it will live to cause its mother the most poignant pangs she is capable of feeling. He will not sacrifice Hester, because “what could I do better for my object than to let thee live, than to give thee medicines against all harm and peril of life, so that this burning shame may still blaze upon thy bosom?” And, finally, he will not reveal the minister’s guilt. “Think not,” he says, “that I shall, to my own loss, betray him to the gripe of the law.... Let him live! Let him hide himself in outward honor, if he may! Not the less he shall be mine!” And afterwards, when years had vindicated the diabolical accuracy of his judgment, “Better he had died at once!” he exclaims, in horrible triumph. “He fancied himself given over to a fiend, to be tortured with frightful dreams and desperate thoughts, the sting of remorse and despair of pardon, as a foretaste of what awaits him beyond the grave. But it was the constant shadow of my presence, the closest propinquity of the man whom he had most vilely wronged, and who had grown to exist only by this perpetual poison of the direst revenge!” But this carnival of refined cruelty, as is abundantly evident, can be productive of nothing but evil to all concerned; evil to the victim, and still more evil, if possible, to the executioner, who, finding himself transformed by his own practices from a peaceful scholar to a fiend, makes Dimmesdale answerable for the calamity, and proposes to wreak fresh vengeance upon him on that account. And it demonstrates the truth that the only punishment which man is justified in inflicting upon his fellow is the punishment which is incidental to his being restrained from further indulgence in crime. The Puritan system was selfish and brutal, merely; Chillingworth’s was satanically malignant; but both alike are impotent to do anything but inflame the evils they pretend to assuage.
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