For each due date, you will write a commentary on some issue within the assigned reading.  Commentary addresses some passage or problem or issue in the text under discussion.  A commentary may be an explication or analysis or inquiry into a problematic passage or concept, a meditation on a narrated event or a reflection on some lines or scenes of interest.  A commentary is not a summary.  Below are some possibilities for your commentaries (not an exhaustive list):

 

  1. Apply the Biographical Lens to The Scarlet Letter (also consider applying other lenses: feminist, Marxist, etc):

 

 Information on Hawthorne from Richard Gray’s A History of American Literature

  • Nathaniel Hawthorne lived from 1804-1864.
  • Although The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850, it is set in 17th Century Salem.
  • Hawthorne’s earliest ancestor, William Hawthorne, arrived in Massachusetts in 1630.  Nathaniel said of William that “he had all the Puritanic traits, both good and evil.”
  • John Hawthorne, son of William Hawthorne, was a judge at the Salem Witch trials.
  • Nathaniel’s father was a sea captain; he died when Nathaniel was four, leaving Nathaniel’s mother to live “a long life of seclusion.”
  • Other Romantic Era writers: James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), Walt Whitman (1819-1892), and Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
  • Hawthorne was friends with the poet Longfellow, as well as the transcendentalists, Emerson, Thoreau and Fuller.
  • Hawthorne called his long pieces romances, not novels.
  • Hawthorne said of his writing: “’Moonlight is a familiar room…is a medium the most suitable for a romance writer,’ because it runs the room into ‘a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairyland where the Actual and the Imaginary meet.’”
  • Hawthorne had an ambivalent attitude towards Puritanism.
  • The Scarlet Letter rehearses the central debate in nineteenth-century American literature: between the demands of society and the needs of the individual, communal obligation and self-reliance.”
  • In his journals, Hawthorne wrote: “there is evil lurking in every human heart.”
  • Some critics consider this book modern, because it doesn’t have answers but a “shifting, disconnecting and almost endless series of questions.”

 

2. Comment on some topic/motif at work in the novel (what is said about the topic becomes theme):

  • The effects of isolation
  • What suffering wrought (maybe a comparison between characters’ suffering)
  • Lightness versus darkness
  • The efficiency of the letter as punishment: Did the scarlet letter work?
  • What constitutes sin?  What are the effects of sin?
  • The effect of biblical allusion
  • Transformations (both positive and negative)
  • Guilt versus revenge
  • The effect or burden of secrets

 

3. Look at the use of literary elements and their effect on the text’s meaning:

  • The use of symbols (forest, letter, clothing, Pearl)
  • Character Analysis (and how that reveals tone: how does Hawthorne feel about Hester, Dimmesdale and Chillingworth?)
  • Setting (reflecting mood, theme)

 

4. Look at Hawthorne’s style and how it contributes to meaning:

  • His use of hyperbole
  • His flowery language
  • His long, sprawling syntax
  • His direct address of the reader