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The Scarlet Letter: A Political Reading

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Ellen Moers
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Extract

It was something of an accident that Hawthorne's masterpiece appeared in bifurcated form: an adultery novel — that ancient female form — preceded by a long political introduction, as masculine in tone as anything Hawthorne ever wrote, called “The Custom-House.” This introduction deals with Hawthorne's three-year tenure as surveyor of the Salem Custom House, a post he was given as a Democratic Party stalwart, and which he took on solely for its salary. He describes his fellow officials (mostly Whigs) as stupid, sluggish, lazy, animal-like, senile, and gluttonous, and himself as little better than the rest:

a row of venerable figures, sitting in old-fashioned chairs, which were tipped on their hind legs back against the wall. Oftentimes they were asleep, but occasionally might be heard talking together, in voices between speech and a snore, and with that lack of energy that distinguishes the occupants of alms-houses, and all other human beings who depend for subsistence on charity, on monopolized labor, or any thing else but their own independent exertions … And here, some six months ago, - pacing from corner to corner, or lounging on the long-legged stool, with his elbow on the desk, and his eye wandering up and down the columns of the morning newspaper, —you might have recognized … the same individual who welcomed you into his cheery little study … on the western side of the Old Manse. But now, should you go hither to seek him, you would inquire in vain for the Locofoco Surveyor. The bosom of reform has swept him out of office; and a worthier successor wears his dignity and pockets his emoluments.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 9 , October 1984 , pp. 49 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

NOTES

1. Particularly in The Minister's Wooing. Mrs. Stowe took theology seriously, and was a superb chronicler of American church history, as Edmund Wilson pointed out. Like Hawthorne, however, she principally records the mid-nineteenth-century movement away from Calvinism. She herself became an Episcopalian in later life (as did most upwardly mobile Americans). In Pogenuc People she records the establishment of the first Episcopal church in a small New England town and the disestablishment of New England Congregationalism, among the principal events of her childhood as daughter of a minister. (Her account of a little girl's first wondering celebration of Christmas as a festival of purely heathen provenance, that was absolutely forbidden by the Puritans, whose children went to school on December 25, should claim equal time with Dickens, 's Christmas CarolGoogle Scholar as holiday reading in America.) Like Hawthorne, but slightly later, Stowe displays the mid-Victorian American's craving for festivity, gayety, art, taste, and sensual gratification; but she never lost her admiration for the intellectual rigors and spiritual seriousness of Puritan religion. None of this last can be found in The Scarlet Letter.

2. And a tyranny of course largely female. Behind it echoes catechism, what Hawthorne himself once called “a world of meaning” in the “simple comment” — “That old woman taught me my catechism” — made by Young Goodman Brown when he discovers that one of the severer matrons who dominated his childhood is a votary of the dead.

3. Flight into the wilderness, a changed name, an open future, “yet full of trial and success. There is happiness to be enjoyed! There is good to be done.” So Hawthorne has Hester sound a distinctively American but hardly Christian theme. “Begin all anew!”