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This chapter suggests that vestiges of a Catholic imagination may be discerned in classic works of American literature authored by Protestants, and in particular, the most canonical novel of all, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. It enlists the intercession of Robert A. Orsi, perhaps the most influential figure in the field of American Catholic Studies, who in his own work has treated the interior religiosity and public devotional lives of urban Italian Americans—to provide a kind of Catholic Studies rereading of The Scarlet Letter. The playful quality of this exercise only enhances the sense that American Studies has been “Catholicized” via works of Orsi, the author himself, and others who explicitly treat issues that historically bedeviled Protestants, such as the body in its various guises and (in)capacities and the interplay of suffering, erotic desire, and spirituality.

This chapter considers some of the classics of 19th-century American literature: Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Thoreau’s Walden, and James’s The American. These canonical works toy with the edict of knowability, but unlike popular genres, they ultimately reject complete revelation as an illusion. Their protagonists gravitate to inscrutability and hide in plain sight.

Nathaniel Hawthorne explores nonnormative kinship structures in The Scarlet Letter. Hester Prynne successfully defends her right to custody of her daughter, Pearl, when the Salem magistrates threaten to place her for adoption. In this landmark novel of 1850, Hawthorne rejects the adoption plot as practiced by the domestic novelists he famously excoriated. His portrait of an adulterous mother in control of her motherhood stands in striking contrast to a body of fiction in which mothers tearfully relinquish their children to others. Through the trope of adoption—in this case averted—Hawthorne examines historical as well as contemporary configurations of family and explores the strength of bonds of blood and care necessary to form a stable society.

Transitioning towards the standard centres of US canonicity, Chapter 3 explores the Iranian reception of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, reading this iconic American novel as rendered by Sīmīn Dāneshvar - pioneering female fictionist, and best-selling author of the 1969 Sūvashūn. Signalling a unique encounter between novelists of global import, Dāneshvar’s Persian rendition of The Scarlet Letter - her 1955 Dāgh-e Nang - exemplifies not only a traversal of language, religion and gender, but also an intersection of national canons. Amplifying the signature ambiguity of Hawthorne’s Letter, Chapter 3 explores Dāneshvar’s Persian Dāgh-e Nang as shifting the historical and orthographic specificities of her Hawthornean source, but also fruitfully enhancing the ‘strangeness and remoteness’ of this American Romance.

This chapter focuses on Nathaniel Hawthorne's writings during his time in Salem and Concord in Massachusetts. It offers a reading of the 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter, with particular reference to its many symbols including the prison door. It also considers Hawthorne's attempt to preserve the balance between psychological novel and allegorical romance in The Scarlet Letter, and how the novel’s allegory sets itself against naturalism. Finally, the chapter examines Hawthorne's views on topics such as sin, morality, religion, and law through his characters in The Scarlet Letter.

This chapter offers a reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 historical fiction The Scarlet Letter: A Romance. It first considers Henry James’s opinion of The Scarlet Letter before discussing the “American” qualities attached to the novel and the darkness associated with its appeal. It then examines why The Scarlet Letter has become a great piece of American literature despite its themes of sinfulness, law, and unjust punishment. It also analyzes Hawthorne’s decision to take on the challenge of writing the historical romance before concluding with an assessment of criticisms against Hawthorne’s morality and politics.

This chapter offers a reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter. It suggests that Hawthorne seemed to assume a force of evil so pervasive that it did not need to be embodied in anyone or in any action in particular when he referred to sin and discusses the narrator's insistence that love and nature are insuperable values and that morality has nothing to say to them. It also argues that the sexual character of the relation between Hester and Dimmesdale is so vaguely rendered that only the existence of Pearl as a consequence of it makes it credible.

This chapter examines the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of the leading novelists of antebellum America. In particular, it discusses Hawthorne’s historical fiction, including The House of the Seven Gables: A Romance (1851), The Scarlet Letter: A Romance (1850), The Blithedale Romance (1852), and The Marble Faun: or, The Romance of Monte Beni (1860). It also considers Hawthorne’s turn to history and his theory of romance that privileged his own practice in writing novels.

The perception of a “peculiar” alliance between nineteenth-century Protestant clergy and their female parishioners emerges from contemporary sources such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter (1850) and the widely publicized adultery trial of Henry Ward Beecher (1875), and the influential monograph The Feminization of American Culture (1977) by Ann Douglas. By examining a wider variety of primary sources from mostly ordinary northern, white, Protestants, Gedge analyzes the similarities and differences between perceived, imagined, idealized, and experienced pastoral relationships, and identifies the cultural, spiritual, and psychological tensions they reveal. She outlines the argument that women were without benefit of clergy in the pastoral relationship. Though viewed as natural allies in their mission as moral guardians of the new republic, women and clergy were estranged by the same ideology that prescribed their alliance.

Hawthorne was an inactivist who fetishized deferral. His campaign biography of Franklin Pierce is said to provide a retroactive template for his fiction. The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance—Hawthorne's three “American” novels gave fictional form to the age's ethical and legislative impasse, the Compromise of 1850. This chapter carries this consensus by foregrounding Hawthorne's connection to the dissenting ferment that he, like his friend Pierce, saw as a menace to sectional peace. The novelist was out of the country during much of the 1850s, first as Pierce's consul in Liverpool and then as a resident in Italy; but during his creative heyday, from 1850 to 1852, he was acutely conscious of the mounting pressures on free speech. Indeed, his book on Pierce placed him at the center of those pressures. He hoped the prohibitions would prevail and stifle the seditious ferment of anti-slavery oratory.

The Coda extends a key argument of the book—that older natural and natural-magical traditions of sympathy continued to overlap and interact with moral traditions—into the nineteenth century. It shows that Mary Shelley and Nathaniel Hawthorne engaged energetically with earlier representations of sympathy and in particular with those of John Milton and Sir Kenelm Digby. In Frankenstein, Shelley recalls and refers to Milton’s account of sympathy in Paradise Lost as a creaturely phenomenon. She suggests that an occult sympathy exists between Victor Frankenstein and his creature, even as both characters struggle to find true compassion and companionship in society. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne casts Roger Chillingworth as a Digbeian man of science and develops an analogous occult sympathy between his other two principal characters, Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale. The scarlet letter localizes the power of sympathy, and the novel as a whole turns on a magical idea of action at a distance. The Coda’s two readings demonstrate that novelistic sympathy is not merely a moral matter between characters or between authors and readers but also a complex negotiation between the natural and the moral and between past and present; the magic of sympathy endured.

This chapter describes a sampler embroidered with the letters T, E, A, R by artist Maria Damon. Terra Divisa/Terra Divina: (T/E/A/R), referring to the Scottish/English “Debatable Lands,” is bisected by conflict on the diagonal: brown and green for the earth and its cycles of rest and renewal or, more violently, death and rebirth. The large, ornate T and A are from a Scottish sampler from the 1750s, described in the pattern booklet as “a step toward the majestic illuminations to follow.” The A takes pride of place and space: it is the largest letter, spilling over its borders. It resonates with the American literary classic, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, about a woman who is forced to embroider an A (for Adultery) on her clothing. The smaller E and R are from an English sampler made in an orphanage in the 1840s.

This chapter examines the debate over film adaptations of the American novel, including Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. More precisely, it analyzes the question of fidelity of adaptation to the original and whether the film can do justice to novels, citing the arguments of critics and theorists such as James Metcalfe, Seymour Chatman, Sergei Eisenstein, and D. W. Griffith. It discusses how adaptations of novels to film have provoked criticism, polemics, and theories. The chapter also considers the relationship between film translations and artistic vision and whether there is a fundamental incompatibility between novelistic and cinematic forms of narration. Finally, it explores the issue of whether differences in the media assure that film adaptations of novels will always be inferior to their originals.

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume which is about the books that are considered American classics. This volume analyzes Nathanial Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Henry David Thoreau's Walden, and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. It investigates what it meant for these books to be accepted by American culture as the cardinal books and how American readers use them for different causes.

This chapter examines the link between the development of American religion and the emergence of the American novel in the period 1820–1870. More specifically, it considers the use of literary figures of speech to deliver sermons and how ministers and their congregations turned to the novel to advance a simple code of morality and pious feeling. It also discusses the reasons why congregations turned to the novel for spiritual and religious guidance in antebellum America, along with the importance of evangelicalism for American literature. The chapter concludes with examples of novels that negotiate the trappings of religion, including Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s A New England Tale (1822) and Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in Massachusetts (1827), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1852), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter: A Romance (1850), and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861).