On March 16, 1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter,
widely regarded as the first
great American novel was issued by Ticknor,
Reed & Fields, the publisher of choice for the New England
transcendentalist literary elite.
Nathanial
Hathorne was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, a member of an old family that, much to his chagrin and embracement, included one
of the judges of the Salem
Witch Trials. He later added a w to the spelling of
the family name in a vain attempt to disguise the connection.
After his sea
captain father died when he was two, his family sent him to be fostered with wealthy local relatives who saw that the boy
was educated Bowden College in Maine, which
aspired to be the Harvard of the North and which was considerably cheaper than the Harvard of Massachusetts. Among his classmates were lifelong friends Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow and Franklin Pierce. A shy and brooding young man, but strikingly handsome, he wished only to
write.
A Democrat in ultra–Whig Massachusetts
he was able to secure political
appointments at the Boston Custom House to support himself as he wrote. He published an undistinguished first novel anonymously and sold short stories to various literary magazines. His first collection of short stories Twice-Told Tales drew local interest in Boston. He began to move in the intellectual orbit of the emerging Transcendentalists.
Hawthorne courted Elizabeth, the eldest of the brilliant Peabody
Sisters, but
to everyone’s surprise, especially
the heart broken Elizabeth, proposed to her frail sister Sophia, an artist.
The Peabodys were always in a condition of dire genteel poverty.
Hawthorne decided to raise money
for his marriage by investing $1000 and joining the Brook Farm community. He was put in charge of the manure pile. It was not a happy experience and he soon departed. He later satirized
the community in his Blithedale Romance.
Sofia and Hawthorne married in 1842
anyway and moved to the epicenter of
Transcendentalist life, Concord where they lived for three
years in The Old Manse, later the home of Longfellow. While
there he completed a second story collection Mosses from an Old Manse
The couple were madly in
love and devoted to each
other.
In 1846 with the return to power of the
Democrats in Washington, Hawthorne got the lucrative
appointment as Inspector of Revenue
at the Port of Salem. The move back to his—and Sophia’s—hometown was a mixed blessing. On one hand
his growing family was secure. On the other hand, the dreary duties of the custom house sapped his energy for writing. But he
did have time to explore the legacy of Puritan morality. When the
Whig’s return ousted him from his position, he turned those musings into The Scarlet Letter.
The shocking tale of the noble but
fallen Hester Prynne
and the tormented Rev. Dimmsdale, a sexually predatory preacher who was the cause of Hester’s shame,
was a literary sensation and one of
the first American best sellers. More
than 2,500 copies flew off bookstore
shelves in the first ten days.
Hawthorne moved his family to a farmhouse
near Lenox in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts to dedicate
himself to writing. While there he met and became fast friends with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., the physician, wit, and poet, and Herman
Melville, to whom he became a mentor. During these years he completed The
House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and his collection of classic mythology for children,
The Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys.
Summers
in the mountains were pleasant but winters brutal and lonely. The family moved once again, this time back to Concord into
the old home of Bronson Alcott where Ralph Waldo
Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were neighbors and close friends. He named
the house The Wayside. He also found time to complete a campaign biography for old pal Franklin
Pierce.
When Pierce won the Presidency,
Hawthorne was rewarded with appointment as United States Consul in Liverpool. After his appointment lapsed when the Pierce administration ended, Hawthorne and Sophie
made the grand tour of Europe
before returning to Concord and the Wayside.
He completed and published the Marble Faun in 1860 and
was working sporadically on several
other romances.
But Hawthorne’s health was failing. In 1864 Pierce took him back to the
Berkshires to restore his health.
Hawthorne died there with his old friend at his bedside at Plymouth, New Hampshire on May 18,
1864.
At his funeral in Concord Longfellow,
Emerson, Alcott, and Holmes were among his pallbearers. Sophia died in London seven
years later. In 2006 her remains and
those of their daughter Una were relocated to the Sleepy
Hollow Cemetery in Concord and laid
next to Hawthorn’s.
The
Scarlet Letter became a staple of
20th Century high school English classes,
although it has increasingly been protested
by fundamentalist parents who
think that Hester got just what was coming to her, the little slut, and
sometimes banned by timid or rightwing dominated school boards.
Meanwhile being branded by a scarlet letter became a widely used cultural metaphor for public
shaming and mob mentality bullying.
The semi-salacious nature of the plot
made it a natural for several stage and film adaptations. The first movie version was a 1911 one
reel film with King Baggot, Lucille Young, and William Robert Daly shifted the focus to Baggot, then a major star as the tortured
Dimmsdale. Hester fared better in the
third version released in 1926 as a prestige
MGM feature with their biggest melodrama
star, Lillian Gish. Colleen
Moore, Hardie Albright, and Henry B. Walthall, the star of
Birth
of a Nation, were featured in the first sound version, a 1934 release shot on location at Salem’s Pioneer Village. German
director Wim Wenders made a European
film starring Senta Berger in 1973 which
has seldom been shown in the United
States.
In 1995 Demi Moore, Gary Oldman, and Robert Duval headlined a star
studded cast. But
the film took great liberties with the novel and was roundly mocked—the film review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes gave the
film a 14% approval rating, based on
35 reviews. It won the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Remake or Sequel and Moore was
nominated for Worst Actress.
There was also a Public Broadcasting System miniseries made
by WBGH in Boston in 1979 as an answer to
the tony BBC costume/literary dramas
that dominated the public airways. The production featured Meg Foster, John Heard, and Kevin Conway.
And inevitably there were porn
versions and take offs. Yes, you can see up-close and personal just how Hester earned the A.
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