This chapter examines masculine individualism’s push–pull relationship with sympathy, beginning in The Scarlet Letter’s Custom-House. There, Hawthorne’s narrator sympathetically presses Hester Prynne’s dusty, scarlet A against his heart, feeling a burning tingle as he places himself in her position. Sections read touch and untouchability in The Scarlet Letter, exploring what encouraged male readers to overcome what Henry Thoreau referred to as masculinity’s “gulf of feeling” to experience sentimental connection. Writing through alienation and writer’s block, Hawthorne’s tingling connection with Hester in the Custom-House propelled him to complete the novel in just five weeks, after being fired from his position as surveyor. His imagined intimacy with Prynne emerges against myths of the self-made man and the untouchable citizen-subject. Readings of tactility reveal alphabetic print and textual space as sites of flux and flow, intimacy and distance, as writers and readers sympathetically lean into and recoil from page and print.
The Unsuccessful Self-treatment of a Case of 'Writer’s Block': A Replication in Science Education
