Read more
Zusatztext "[Nathaniel Hawthorne] recaptured! for his New England! the essence of Greek tragedy." --Malcolm Cowley Informationen zum Autor Kathryn Harrison has written the novels Enchantments, Thicker Than Water, Exposure, Poison, The Binding Chair, The Seal Wife, and Envy . Her autobiographical work includes The Kiss, Seeking Rapture, The Road to Santiago, and The Mother Knot . She lives in New York with her husband, the novelist Colin Harrison, and their three children. Klappentext Introduction by Kathryn Harrison Commentary by Nathaniel Hawthorne, W. D. Howells, and Carl Van Doren A stark tale of adultery, guilt, and social repression in Puritan New England, The Scarlet Letter is a foundational work of American literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne's exploration of the dichotomy between the public and private self, internal passion and external convention, gives us the unforgettable Hester Prynne, who discovers strength in the face of ostracism and emerges as a heroine ahead of her time. As Kathryn Harrison points out in her Introduction, Hester is "the herald of the modern heroine." Includes a Modern Library Reading Group Guide Introduction by Kathryn Harrison Why should the fate of a fictional seventeenth-century adulteress named Hester Prynne concern us? After all, we live in an age when marriage is understood more as a lifestyle choice than as a sacrament and children are routinely conceived not only out of wedlock but out of body. When grandmothers can give birth to their own grandchildren and paternity can remain forever invisible, hidden behind the bar code of a sperm bank deposit, isn't the notion of a public outcry against adultery a bit quaint, even irrelevant? Isn't Hester Prynne--the invention of a writer notoriously preoccupied with guilt--merely a historical curiosity? The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance, on a large scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam, and a face which, besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. She was lady-like, too. . . . And never had Hester Prynne appeared more lady-like . . . than as she issued from the prison. . . . But the point which drew all eyes, and as it were, transfigured the wearer,--so that both men and women, who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne, were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time,--was that Scarlet Letter, so fantastically embroidered on her bosom. It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and inclosing her in a sphere by herself. Hester might be forgotten, were she not unforgettable. She might, like countless real-life unwed mothers, have simply suffered and vanished, were she no more than an unwed mother. After all, Hester's crime is irrelevant. She survives in the reader's imagination because of her punishment and what she makes of it: a spell that removes her from "the ordinary relations with humanity," from the realm where her story begins. The plot of The Scarlet Letter is that which typically proceeds from a lovers' triangle. Having escaped a confining marriage to an older man whose intellect has eclipsed his soul, Hester Prynne falls into the ready arms of a man whose soul has burned away his reason, only to discover that fate is, indeed, biology. Despite the courage of her convictions, despite an evolved understanding that what she "did had a consecration of its own," Hester's freedom, both sexual and societal, ends with pregnancy. After bearing her child within the comparatively forgiving shelter of a prison, she is released into the murderously intolerant community of Salem, Massachusetts, populated by Puritans, politicians, witches--each group defined and afflict...
