Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-788cddb947-m6qld Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-09T19:33:20.026Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - Romancing the letter: screening a Hawthorne classic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2009

Michael Dunne
Affiliation:
Professor of English, Middle Tennessee State University
R. Barton Palmer
Affiliation:
Clemson University, South Carolina
Get access

Summary

In The Office of The Scarlet Letter (1991), Sacvan Bercovitch calls Nathaniel Hawthorne's famous novel, written nearly a century and a half earlier (1850), “our most enduring classic.” This glowing compliment echoes dozens of others, including Henry James's judgment of 1887: “It is beautiful, admirable, extraordinary; it has in the highest degree that merit which I have spoken of as the mark of Hawthorne's best things – an indefinite purity and lightness of conception.” As these critical valentines attest, Hawthorne (1804–64) is one of America's indisputably canonical authors, and The Scarlet Letter is generally conceded to be his ultimate achievement. It is only to be expected, then, that there would be one or more attempts to present The Scarlet Letter on film. Mark Axelrod explains that “particular texts are preferable for standardization and exploitation within the Hollywood film industry because of the way they are written,” so it comes as no surprise that Hawthorne's artful, stimulating, highly symbolic narrative should have been frequently chosen for cinematic adaptation. For most of the twentieth century, from “artistic” silents, through studio entertainments obviously aimed at a mass audience, and high-minded European art films, all the way down to a starring vehicle for Demi Moore, The Scarlet Letter has been repeatedly adapted from the page to the screen. Curiously enough, these film versions simultaneously recognized the excellence of Hawthorne's classic text and sought to “improve” that text by adjusting it to the values of the contemporary cultures into which the films were released.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×