Revising The Scarlet Letter: Race and Motherhood in In the Blood and Little Fires Everywhere

Adaptation ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan S Williams
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Single Mother ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Us ◽  
White Mothers ◽  
Fugitive Slave ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Hester Prynne

Abstract Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter has generated numerous adaptations. Its depiction of race has made it a problematic ‘master text’, however, especially since it was published in the same year as the US Fugitive Slave Act. This essay examines three recent adaptations across a variety of media that focus on the relationship between race and motherhood, revealing the ways in which Hester Prynne can be integrated into society as a single mother in ways that non-white mothers cannot. Suzan-Lori Parks’ 1998 play In the Blood stages ‘Hester, La Negrita’ as a homeless mother of five who cannot escape the ‘hand of fate’ of racial oppression. Celeste Ng’s 2017 novel Little Fires Everywhere reinvents Hester as a surrogate mother whose efforts on behalf of a birth mother in a trans-racial adoption dispute highlight how race differentially impacts maternal rights. The 2020 Hulu television adaptation of Ng’s novel casts the Hester and Pearl figures, along with an artist named Hawthorne, as black women whose activism forces the Richardson family to acknowledge their white privilege. Together, these adaptations examine how the ‘monstrous birth’ of slavery that Hawthorne only belatedly acknowledged has had a lingering afterlife in constructions of race and motherhood.

Hawthorne, Pearl, and the Primal Sin of Culture

2005 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-185
Author(s):  
EMILY MILLER BUDICK
Keyword(s):  
Henry James ◽  
Critical Essay ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Hester Prynne ◽  
Coming To Know ◽  
As If

In his long critical essay entitled simply “Hawthorne” (published in 1879), Henry James narrates the story of his own coming to know Hawthorne's most famous work of fiction, The Scarlet Letter. Speaking in an impersonal third person, James, “who was a child at the time,” explains that heremembers dimly the sensation that book produced, and the little shudder with which people alluded to it, as if a peculiar horror were mixed in its attractions. He was too young to read it himself, but its title, upon which he fixed his eyes as the book lay upon the table, had a mysterious charm. … Of course it was difficult to explain to a child the significance of poor Hester Prynne's blood-coloured A. But the mystery was at last partly dispelled by his being taken to see a collection of pictures (the annual exhibition of the National Academy), where he encountered a representation of a pale, handsome woman, in a quaint black dress and white coif, holding between her knees an elfish-looking little girl, fantastically dressed and crowned with flowers. Embroidered on the woman's breast was a great crimson A, over which the child's fingers, as she glanced strangely out of the picture, were maliciously playing. I was told that this was Hester Prynne and little Pearl, and that when I grew older I might read their interesting history.

scholarly journals Puritan’s Hegemony in the Nathaniel Hawthorn’s The Scarlet Letter

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-49
Author(s):  
Zakaria Zakaria ◽  
Akin Duli ◽  
Fathu Rahman
Keyword(s):  
Married Woman ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
Political Values ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
Library Research ◽  
State Administration ◽  
The Social ◽  
Religious Law ◽  
Hester Prynne

Misperception and inhuman behave presented by Puritan in conducting state administration, consequently character of Hester Prynne in the novel of Nathaniel Hawthorn’s The Scarlet Letter under the implementation of religious values, law assembling, and political system. The implementation of Puritan’s inhuman religious, law and political values to Prynne’s personal character is something criminal behave, and assembling of the law in the case of sin of Prynne’s adultery presented by Custom House was irresponsible decision or immoral severance in front of court. Puritan’s values over the social living is regulated not only for social norms, culture, and law affairs, but even political matters, means that everything must be obeyed and be bent over the God’s rule, and so to whom (married woman) has committed adultery, must be committed as a sinner and impose a sentence in front of general public. It is a library research and used descriptive qualitative analysis. In challenging and lift it up the universal value in against suppressive, hegemonic in the case Prynn the writer used two approachings as solution to solve the problem and they are feminism perspective and deconstruction model as a solution over the Prynne’s problem.

scholarly journals Puritanism and Its Controversies in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (02) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tifanny Peleng ◽  
Tini Mogea ◽  
Mister Gidion Maru
Keyword(s):  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
Library Research ◽  
Public Pressure ◽  
Hester Prynne ◽  
Descriptive Qualitative

Puritanism is one of the phenomena contained within the literary work. Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne the main character in The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne represents the puritanism condition. This research is focused on Puritanism. The research is aimed at finding out the Puritanism in The Scarlet Letter. The source of data of the research is a novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne entitled The Scarlet Letter. The main data were taken from the source of data that implied Puritanism. The main data were analyzed based on the supporting data which were taken from books, articles, essays, critics, and other related writings. The research was a descriptive qualitative library research. The researcher will use the genetic structuralism approach to find out the Puritanism.Keywords    :   Puritanism, Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, Perseverance of the Saints, Public Humiliation, Public Judged, Public Pressure.

The Scarlet Letter

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Cindy Weinstein
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Critical Edition ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
Hester Prynne

Thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me.' With these chilling words a husband claims his wife after a two-year absence. But the child she clutches is not his, and Hester must wear a scarlet 'A' upon her breast, the sin of adultery visible to all. Under an assumed name her husband begins his search for her lover, determined to expose what Hester is equally determined to protect. Defiant and proud, Hester witnesses the degradation of two very different men, as moral codes and legal imperatives painfully collide. Set in the Puritan community of seventeenth-century Boston, The Scarlet Letter also sheds light on the nineteenth-century in which it was written, as Hawthorne explores his ambivalent relations with his Puritan forebears. The text of this edition is taken from the Centenary Edition of Hawthorne's works, the most authoritative critical edition.

scholarly journals Maternal Age and Infant Mortality for White, Black,and Mexican Mothers in the United States

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip N. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Infant Mortality ◽  
Infant Death ◽  
Maternal Age ◽  
White Women ◽  
The United States ◽  
Delayed Childbearing ◽  
The Us ◽  
Health Experiences ◽  
The Relationship

This paper assesses the pattern of infant mortality by maternal age for White, Black, and Mexican mothers using the 2013 Period Linked Birth/Infant Death Public Use File from the Centers for Disease Control. The results are consistent with the “weathering” hypothesis, which suggests that White women benefit from delayed childbearing while for Black women early childbearing is adaptive because of deteriorating health status through the childbearing years. For White women,the risk (adjusted for covariates) of infant death is U-shaped—lowest in the early thirties—while for Black women the risk increases linearly with age. Mexican-origin women show a J-shape, with highest risk at the oldest ages. The results underscore the need for understanding the relationship between maternal age and infant mortality in the context of unequal health experiences across race/ethnic groups in the US.

scholarly journals SOCIAL MATRIX AND CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER IDENTITY IN NATHANIEL HAWTHORN’S THE SCARLET LETTER

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 182-188
Author(s):  
Liaqat Iqbal ◽  
Farooq Shah ◽  
Akbar Ali ◽  
Irfan Ullah
Keyword(s):  
Gender Identity ◽  
Gender Studies ◽  
Gender Issues ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Social ◽  
Sexual Orientations ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Hester Prynne

Purpose of the study: The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorn, already explored from different perspectives by many researchers, has relevance to the social matrix that how gender identity is constructed in the text. In order to explore this perspective, the study deals with the character of Hester Prynne as how she is deconstructing normative gender. Methodology: For this purpose, the theory of ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’ presented by Butler (1993) has been applied. Secondly, the study tries to answer the gender identity of Hester Prynne by using Freudian ‘Identification of gender.’ Lastly, the work is concerned with Hester Prynne’s avoiding the danger of being leper and castaway. The last analysis owes itself to the Freudian understanding of psychoanalysis. Main Findings: The findings show that gender is purely volatile and oscillating and is usually being constructed by feminist narratives, social appropriations, inborn congenital schema, and sexual orientations. Butler’s arguments get augmented in this study through the analysis of a few characters, particularly Hester Prynne’s, and it has indicated that through the application of Butler’s arguments on gender stance that gender is performative and hence, it has no real or inborn value/definitions. Therefore, it is inferred that gender is performative and is socially constructed. Application of this study: This study has implications in literature in general, gender studies, and related fields in particular. Novelty/Originality of this study: Though Nathaniel Hawthorn’s The Scarlet Letter had been written long before that has been explored from different perspectives, the present research is original and new in the sense that it brings social matrix and discusses gender issues in it both from the social and psychological interpretations.

scholarly journals Misogyny or Feminism? A Probe into Hawthorne and His The Scarlet Letter

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 139
Author(s):  
Yueming Wang
Keyword(s):  
Family Relationships ◽  
Family Relationship ◽  
Female Character ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
Hester Prynne

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter has been focused onby critics from different aspects due to his ambiguity used in the novel. Hawthorne himself has been doubted as to whether he is a misogynist or a feminist when describing the female character, Hester Prynne. This article supports the idea that Hawthorne holds the idea offeminism in his work The Scarlet Letter. A writer who mirrors Hester’s life as his own cannot be a misogynist; a writer who honors a woman’s rebelling against patriarchy cannot be a misogynist; a writer who has a beloved wife and mother cannot be a misogynist. Harmonic family relationships, sympathetic character descriptions, and mild demonstrations against patriarchy all prove that Hawthorne is not a misogynist, but a feminist. Hawthorne depicts through four aspects on Hester’s life, Hester’s rebel, Hawthorne’s own family relationship to advocate feminism in his novel.

scholarly journals Pearl in Hawthorne’s the Scarlet Letter: a Socio-Religious Perspective

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
AWEJ for Translation & Literary Studies ◽  
Tatit Hariyanti ◽  
Dwi Nurhayati
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
Religious Perspective ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Literature And Religion ◽  
Alternative Means ◽  
Religious Aspects ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Religious Aspect

The relationship between literature and religion is still most often confined to the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and it is used to recommend the analysis of the bible as literature and religious aspect of literary works. This paper aims at exploring the possibility that literature could be an alternative means to do comparative studies of certain religious aspects from different religion. It focuses on the name and the significance of the name of Pearl in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter which alludes to the Bible. This paper however will examine the name from different angle; that is from an Islamic point of view, for the purpose of a comparison. Pearl is also mentioned in Al-Qur’an and some Hadiths; therefore they will be the main sources to analyze the view on pearl. The result is that The Scarlet Letter shows the vivid image of Pearl in Islam. Pearls in Islam have both worldly and spiritual significance with their special characteristics such as being natural, beautiful, pure, invaluable and demanding great price and effort to gain them. Relating to the character of Pearl in The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne depicts Pearl as having such characteristics .

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