Discussion questions: The Scarlet Letter, like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, has become a fixed staple of classic fiction for courses in American literature for college-prep and AP/pre-AP high school curricula. Why? What purposes does it serve or teaching models fulfill?

For all the purposes The Scarlet Letter and Hawthorne generally serve in curricula, I'm not aware of his work being taught much as gothic. However, Hawthorne's use of gothic motifs or paraphernalia in the passage below and throughout his corpus seems obvious, raising these questions:

Is gothic paraphernalia just enduring pop-culture clutter that is renewed by every generation of youth who find death sexy? Or does it serve some higher purpose? Or more than one?

from The Scarlet Letter
Chapter I. THE PRISON DOOR

[1] A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and grey steeple-crowned hats, inter-mixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes. [cf. House of Usher 24]

[2] The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognised it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the Vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel.

[2a] Certain it is that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilised society, a prison.

[2b] But on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.

[3] [historical fiction>] This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it, or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson [1591-1643, Puritan dissident] as she entered the prison-door, we shall not take upon us to determine.

[3a] Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers, and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolise some sweet moral blossom that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.

from chapter XXIV. CONCLUSION

(final paragraph)

And, after many, many years, a new grave was delved, near an old and sunken one, in that burial-ground beside which King's Chapel has since been built. It was near that old and sunken grave, yet with a space between, as if the dust of the two sleepers had no right to mingle. Yet one tomb-stone served for both. All around, there were monuments carved with armorial bearings; and on this simple slab of slate—as the curious investigator may still discern, and perplex himself with the purport—there appeared the semblance of an engraved escutcheon [heraldric shield]. It bore a device, a herald's wording of which may serve for a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend; so sombre is it, and relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow:—

"ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES"

["against a background of black, the letter A, red"]

[gothic color code of white / black or light / dark background with foreground of lurid color like red or yellow; also note Romantic rhetoric of archaic diction with "gules"]

Discussion questions: The Scarlet Letter, like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, has been for generations a fixed staple of classic fiction for courses in American literature for college-prep and AP/pre-AP high school curricula. Why? What purposes does it serve or teaching models fulfill?

1. knowledge of canonical author (e.g., Hawthorne, Twain, Shakespeare, Dickens, Homer) as cultural literacy > continued currency of "Scarlet Letter" as allusive sign for badge of shame / honor.

2. Scarlet Letter is what child's parents, grandparents, and teachers read, therefore what child should read: canon as cultural conservation but also maintenance of educational privilege.

3. Historical fiction--teaches all most students will ever know (aside from Salem Witch Trials & The Crucible) of Puritanism; reinforces dislike of New England and official community authority.

4. Use of symbols as essential element of communication and aesthetics; e.g. the scarlet letter itself, Faith's pink ribbons, the minister's black veil.

5. Historical importance of Scarlet Letter to American literature and fiction.

Henry James, Hawthorne (1879), ch. 5 (http://www2.newpaltz.edu/~hathawar/nhhj5.html):

. . .The Scarlet Letter contains little enough of gaiety or of hopefulness. It is densely dark, with a single spot of vivid colour in it; and it will probably long remain the most consistently gloomy of English novels of the first order. But I just now called it the author's masterpiece, and I imagine it will continue to be, for other generations than ours, his most substantial title to fame. . . . It is simpler and more complete than his other novels; it achieves more perfectly what it attempts, and it has about it that charm, very hard to express, which we find in an artist's work the first time he has touched his highest mark--a sort of straightness and naturalness of execution, an unconsciousness of his public, and freshness of interest in his theme. It was a great success, and he immediately found himself famous.

The writer of these lines, who was a child at the time, remembers dimly the sensation the book produced, and the little shudder with which people alluded to it, as if a peculiar horror were mixed with its attractions. He was too young to read it himself, but its title, upon which he fixed his eyes as the book lay upon the table, had a mysterious charm. He had a vague belief indeed that the "letter" in question was one of the documents that come by the post, and it was a source of perpetual wonderment to him that it should be of such an unaccustomed hue.

Of course it was difficult to explain to a child the significance of poor Hester Prynne's blood-coloured A. But the mystery was at last partly dispelled by his being taken to see a collection of pictures (the annual exhibition of the National Academy), where he encountered a representation of a pale, handsome woman, in a quaint black dress and a white coif, between her knees an an little girl, fantastically dressed and crowned with flowers. Embroidered on the woman's breast was a great crimson A, over which the child's fingers, as she glanced strangely out of the picture, were maliciously playing. I was told that this was Hester Prynne and little Pearl, and that when I grew older I might read their interesting history.

But the picture remained vividly imprinted on my mind; I had been vaguely frightened and made uneasy by it; and when, years afterwards, I first read the novel, I seemed to myself to have read it before, and to be familiar with its two strange heroines. I mention this incident simply as an indication of the degree to which the success of The Scarlet Letter had made the book what is called an actuality. . . . In fact, the publication of The Scarlet Letter was in the United States a literary event of the first importance. The book was the finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth in the country. There was a consciousness of this in the welcome was given it--a satisfaction in the idea of America having produced a novel that belonged to literature, and to the forefront of it. Something might at last be sent to Europe as exquisite in quality as anything that had been received, and the best of it was that the thing was absolutely American; it belonged to the soil, to the air; it came out of the very heart of New England.

For all the purposes The Scarlet Letter and Hawthorne generally serve in curricula, I'm not aware of his work being taught much as gothic. However, Hawthorne's use of gothic motifs or paraphernalia in the passage below and throughout his corpus seems obvious, raising these questions:

Is gothic paraphernalia just enduring pop-culture clutter that is renewed by every generation of youth who find death sexy? Or does it serve some higher purpose? Or more than one?

Symbols by definition can mean more than one thing at a time.

Is the gothic sexy?

Is the gothic psychological?

Historical? (That is, past sins haunt us; the dead don't stay buried.)

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