[This past weekend we celebrated Ernest Hemingway’s 125th birthday. While I’ve been very glad to do my part to diversify our curricula way beyond the canon, I also believe there are still lots of valuable AmericanStudies reasons to read canonical authors. So this week I’ll make that case for Hemingway and four other canonized folks!]
On how two
over-taught texts can still be under-appreciated.
Unlike
yesterday’s subject James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne is an author
about whom I’ve written
a great deal in this space, including an entire week-long
series inspired by The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and this
post on The Blithedale Romance (1852) among others. Yet
interestingly enough, I don’t think I’ve written much about the two Hawthorne
texts with which American high school students are consistently confronted (and
based on what I’ve heard from those students when they arrive in college
literature courses, the encounter does feel very much like a confrontation to
most of them): his short story “Young
Goodman Brown” (1835) and his novel The Scarlet
Letter (1850). I’m not sure Hawthorne’s very 19th-century style
can really speak to most 21st century teenagers, so I’m not here to
disagree with their frustrations with his ubiquitous classroom presence. But at
the same time, I would argue that the frustrations can lead not only our high
school students but also and more importantly for this point all of the rest of
us (who might well carry such classroom challenges with us into later life) to
miss just how much both those texts have to offer.
Part of
what makes “Young Goodman Brown” well worth our time is connected with House
of the Seven Gables, as both the story and the novel offer unique
and thoughtful perspectives on one of our most frustrating and telling American
histories: the Salem
Witch Trials. As a descendent
of a Witch Trials judge, Hawthorne was particularly horrified by what had happened
in late 17th century Salem, and in “Young Goodman Brown” that personal
interest leads him to a nuanced engagement with how both individuals and
communities can get to such extreme and destructive moments. But Hawthorne’s
multi-layered story is just as interested in a profoundly universal theme, one
also explored in Bruce Springsteen’s deeply personal Tunnel
of Love (1987) album: whether and how we can ever really know another
person, even (if not especially) the one to whom we’re married. The
relationship and arc of Young Goodman Brown and his new wife Faith represents
one of the most tragic yet also one of the most human depictions of marriage in
all of American literature, making this a story with meanings far beyond its
historical setting and subject.
The Scarlet
Letter likewise features a pair of central romantic relationships, and I’d
argue that both Hester
Prynne’s marriage to Roger Chillingsworth and her affair with Arthur
Dimmesdale are similarly thoughtful and illuminating about the dynamics,
limits, and possibilities of such relationships in all of our lives. But while
those two male characters take up a great deal of space in Hawthorne’s novel
(and while their evolving relationship with each other is complex and crucial
in its own right), at the end of the day this book is all about its
female protagonist, and to my mind she’s one of the best in American
literary history (both on her own terms and as a mother to the somewhat less
well-developed but still fascinating character of her
daughter Pearl). I don’t broadly disagree with the overarching argument of Judith
Fetterley’s The Resisting Reader (1978), her thesis that much
of canonical American literature reflects at best a limited male perspective on
female identity. But I think Hawthorne’s most-canonized and best novel comprises
a compelling alternative to that trend.
Next
CanonStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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