Good Afternoon, Jonathan. I understand that you missed my lecture about the Puritans and their relationship to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Is that right?
Yes, that is why I am here Mrs. Sabraw.
Great. Do you have your notebook and materials to take notes?
Yes, I do.
OK. To begin, the Puritans were a religious group whose beliefs originated from the teachings of a Swiss minister, John Calvin.
I know.
In England, members of the Church of England who believed that the Puritans’s views were too extreme abused them.
Yeah, I know.
Wow. You know quite a bit for someone in the 11th grade whose main focus is girls. Well, in 1642 a group of Puritans left England after its friends were tortured for their religious zeal. They had been branded with B’s for Blasphemy, had their noses slit and parts of their ears cut off. The Puritans, such as John Winthrop, were willing to risk scurvy and beriberi in the long and arduous trip to avoid such torture.
I know.
We are going to be reading Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter which tells the story of a puritan community in which the minister has an affair with a married woman and they produce Pearl, their impish odd daughter who dresses in scarlet clothing and asks pertinent questions and thinks critically.
Yeah, I know this.
Hmmm..I imagine that if Pearl were going to school here in California, she would be GATE identified; that is, she would be a mentally gifted minor, an avid reader, and terrific critical thinker who would perform at the top of her class.
I know.
But Alas, Pearl will be insecure and worried about her place in the world, not just because she is the product of her parents’ sin, but because she is so smart. Often times really smart people live with a profound sense of insecurity because (Now, Jonathan, I want you to listen really hard here) they know what they don’t know, as Socrates expressed, and that fact creates an awe about the entire life experience, a respect for all who have been and all who will come after us.
Yeah, I knew that too.
The children who teased Pearl were average human beings who felt A-OK about life because they thought they knew it all.
I know.
So, to wind up my lecture, Jonathan, the point of it all is that sometimes torture over beliefs causes people to leave their comfort zone and venture into new territory. Often, great authors decide to personalize those harrowing journeys in fiction. One such author was Hawthorne who wrote The Scarlet Letter in 1850 and created one of the strongest female characters in American literature. I just wanted you to know that I know that you know all of this material before you start the book.
I know.
oh, how I long for my days in college…
What a wonderful way of framing the book and our relationship to it.
I am going far back in my memory to recall the details.
You are setting up Pearl, born out of a transgression and singularly (+ scandalously) discriminating and sharp, as a Puritan Socrates, “born” out of a Delphic Oracle that told him there was none wiser and singularly (+scandalously) discriminating and sharp.
Pearl/Socrates as the truth-loving individualistic misfits; Puritan Massachusetts/Athens as oppressive “know-it-all” conformism.
Above all the irony that most people reading the book, by statistical necessity, will be Puritans/Athenians (“I know”) rather than Pearls/Socrates (“But why?”)
Most people I teach are the Puritan/Athenian model, as you call it.
Wish I could go back and teach the novel using Socrates, but my public school days are over.
This post makes me want to read The Scarlett Letter again. It has been decades!
I like what you said in the last paragraph of your entry, “Often, great authors decide to personalize those harrowing journeys in fiction.”
I have so much inner angst, pain and pent up emotion that stems from my childhood and someday I will be brave enough to write about it all – fictitiously, of course. Even if no one ever reads it, writing it will help me move on.
I’ll be visiting the library today.
Writing is a painful way to release pain without the cost of a therapist (who are usually dealing with their own pain…_
You can be brave, Glorybelle!
That “……..really smart people …….know what they don’t know…….” was obviously known also by Donald Rumsfeld, who famously said “……there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know…….”
When I went to (high) school, a girl like Pearl who was “……an avid reader, and terrific critical thinker who would perform at the top of her class………” was shunned by boys because they only liked “dumb” girls.
Thus smart girls, wishing to have boyfriends (didn’t they all?) acted “dumb” when with boys. I’m not sure that this dynamic has entirely gone away. But you’ll know better than I (me).
Yours is a terrific introduction to “The Scarlet Letter”, which I’ve never read, but now will.
The dynamic is alive and sick and makes for a lovely reason for a smart woman to attend an all girls’ school.
Looking forward to your thoughts as you read The Scarlet Letter.
If I were better
I’d read the-”Scarlet Letter”
Come the Revolution.
Victorian C of E
Made no-one flee.
Come the Revolution!
Some even let in
Old Charlie Darwin.
Come the Revolution!
No thought
Of this sort
Come the Revolution.
Struggling with big issues is an internal revolution, don’t you think?
Yep
I’m really sorry, Cheri, I told him not to worry you. Come on Toe. Everything’s OK over at HB. The nasty man’s going now. You forgot your tablets. That’s better. Bye for now Cheri.
I guess you know the story of Socrates and the slave? The one in which he leads the slave boy on with his questions to show that the boy already knows geometry because he, like all of us, was born with certain innate knowledge?
Sooo…maybe your student…?
I have often wondered…is it possible Hawthorne was just kidding? I think you can read “Rappaccini’s Daughter” or “The Minister’s Black Veil” as black comedy. I wouldn’t go far as to write a thesis on it or anything, but a part of me suspects Hawthorne wrote with his tongue squarely in his cheek.
This is a thought that is new to me. Honestly, in all those years of The Scarlet Letter, Young Goodman Brown, The Birthmark, Rappaccini’s Daughter and The Minister’s Black Veil, I never considered Hawthorne’s intention anything other than a stern and cynical look at the rules.
Wow.