Wednesday, March 7, 2012

"The Scarlett Letter": some intersections

I started to reread "The Scarlet Letter" hoping to see the connections with Toni Morrison's "Beloved", as someone had pointed out to me there were many. I also found many intersections between "The Scarlet Letter", set in the Puritan community of seventeenth-century Boston, and Jane Campion's movie "The Piano", set in nineteenth-century New Zealand.

In Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel, Hester Prynne is a young bride who, after having been sent to the new colony of Pennsylvania where Puritans lead a sober and gloomy life, is tempted into committing adultery (a word that is never mentioned in the novel), seen that her old husband is believed to be dead. For this reason she is banned from her own community and is forced to wear a big embroidered "A" on her corset, so that she will be always reminded of her sin. She lives in a cabin by the sea with her daughter Pearl, born out of wedlock. In Morrison's "Beloved", instead, a woman escapes from the plantation where she was a slave and when her master comes back to retrieve her, she kills her infant daughter to spare her a life of slavery. After this crime, the woman is also banned from the community and has to deal with the ghost of her baby, who haunts the house where she lives at the edge of the town.

What is striking about both "The Scarlett Letter" and "Beloved" is the way they deal with horrible things, like the plantation were Sethe and Paul D used to live as slaves or the mark Hester Prynne is forced to wear. Both texts conflate beauty with horror, showing how beautiful things can grow in the most ugly places and viceversa. The play is also indicative of the way in which a literary text can be beautiful and poetic even though it deals with terrible topics such as slavery, rape and  infanticide. This passage also shows how the reader might feel when reading "Beloved", which I consider one of the most beautiful novels of the last decades. At the beginning of the novel, Morrison writes about the plantation where Sethe grew up and from which she escaped:

suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out beofre her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves. Boys hanging from from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her - remembering the wonderful soughing trees rather than the boys. Try as she might make it otherwise, the sycamores beat out the children every time and she could not forgive her memory for that. (6)
The same pattern is more than evident in "The Scarlett Letter", where similarly to what happens in "Beloved", the main character, a woman who has committed a hideous crime and is banned from the community, ends up living in a house isolated from the rest of the world, with no visitors and nothing more than a weird daughter. At the beginning of Hawthorne's novel, the prison where Hester is kept is dscribed in these terms:

The best passage to show the affinity between "The Scarlet Letter" and "Beloved" is in chapter two of the former, when Hester comes out of the prison and the embroidered letter is described:
Many more passages between the two works could be found, for instance the importance of fairs and community, the fancy dress, crime, punishment and guilt. This has been noticed by scholars, but Morrison denies that she was thinking of Hawthorne's novel when she wrote "Beloved". Another interesting parallelism is between Sethe's remembrance of wishing to have a mark like her mother (chapter 6) and Pearl's innocent belief that her mother's scarlet letter is benevolent and that she will also have one when she grows up.

In Jane Campion's "The Piano", the references to narratives of the middle of the 19th century abounds, "Wuthering Heights" and "Jane Eyre" beign the first two that come to mind. As in "The Scarlet Letter", Ada is sent to a foreign land and is estranged from her lawful husband. Both Hester and Ada have had a daughter out of wedlock. Their names - Pearl and Flora - evoke a closeness to nature: they're wild creatures. They're both described as wild, angel-like or devil-like in an ambiguous way that is characteristic of both works (how much is Hester to be blamed for cheating on such a hideous man?). They represent the unstable boundary between nature and culture, thus allowing a nuanced portrayal of sin and virtue. In order to show an evocative connection between the two works I would like to quote a scene from "The Scarlet Letter":

And now a video from "The Piano". The setting is, as in the previous passage, the beach. Both the child, her mother and her lover are present. Notice Flora's use of sea-weed and her creativity with sea-shells, both recalling the passage quoted from Hawthorne's classic work.