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The Great American (Historical) Novel: The Scarlet Letter

06 Monday Jun 2022

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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adultery, book review, Boston, Charles Darwin, desire as human, good vs evil, H. L. Mencken, historical fiction, literary fiction, Massachusetts Bay Colony, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Puritanism, seventeenth century, sin and redemption, truth through observation, verbose style

Review: The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Penguin, 2003. 228 pp. $8

Maybe you know the story, even if you’ve never read the novel. Hester Prynne, a woman of seventeenth-century Boston, must be punished for having borne a child out of wedlock. In this most Puritan community, she’s lucky to escape with her life; instead, she spends several months in prison, after which she must forever wear a scarlet letter A, announcing that she’s an adulteress.

The simplest of premises, you’d think, yet there’s nothing simple about this quintessential American moral tale, written in 1850. Hawthorne, descended from a judge at the Salem witch trials, an ancestry that shamed him and influenced his work and life, cuts surgically into the withered, envious soul of Puritanism and holds the stinking mess up to the light. (For those interested in a fictional account of the author’s life and struggle with his unwanted legacy, see Erika Robuck’s House of Hawthorne.)

It’s not just that the reader is meant to understand and sympathize with Hester, who’s actually a bit of a stubborn drip, at times. It’s that Hawthorne wants you to see the society that condemns her, a group of caviling hypocrites who may or may not lust for her but certainly do for the wealth and power they possess. Nobody escapes, Hawthorne says; there’s evil in all of us, and desires aplenty.

Mary Hallock Foote’s illustration of Hester and Pearl, from an 1878 edition of The Scarlet Letter (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

H.L. Mencken, writing more than a half-century after Hawthorne, quipped that Puritanism was “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.” The Scarlet Letter bears witness, as even children’s play involves games of persecuting Quakers or attending church. Some leading elders assume that Hester’s daughter, Pearl, unable to answer a single question from the catechism at age three, may therefore be Satan’s handmaid. She is ungovernable, it’s true, and has a mean streak that pains her long-suffering mother. But she’s also a happy child, and nobody knows what to make of this.

Crucial too is how Hester wears her A, skillfully embroidered, perhaps pushing the bounds of everyday Puritan taste (though not of formal wear, curiously enough, especially among the rich and powerful). Consequently, the adulteress hides nothing, though she largely keeps to herself, because her every public appearance challenges her judges as to their righteousness and pretended sobriety of custom.

But, in Hawthorne’s world, sin must be spoken of, or else it eats away at everyone. The Scarlet Letter pays heed to the spiritual and emotional as though they were the same. To feel whole, the sinner must confess, so as to breathe freely; conversely, so as not to overstep the bounds of humility, the hearer must listen and withhold judgment. Desires are human, not particular to individuals. To Hawthorne’s seventeenth-century Boston, this idea was revolutionary — and in some ways, it still is, not in what American society says, but what it does.

Hawthorne’s style can take getting used to, even for readers accustomed to nineteenth-century literature. Not only does he tell, tell, tell, explaining damn near everything, he imbues the smallest moments with hard-working metaphorical swoop:

The mother’s impassioned state had been the medium through which were transmitted to the unborn infant the rays of its moral life; and, however white and clear originally, they had taken the deep stains of crimson and gold, the fiery lustre, the black shadow, and the untempered light, of the intervening substance. Above all, the warfare of Hester’s spirit, at that epoch, was perpetuated in Pearl. She could recognize her wild, desperate, defiant mood, the flightiness of her temper, and even some of the very cloud-shapes of gloom and despondency that had brooded in her heart. They were now illuminated by the morning radiance of a young child’s disposition, but, later in the day of earthly existence, might be prolific of the storm and whirlwind.

That style deserves consideration in its context, however. Hawthorne was countering the point of view that all wisdom and truth comes from God; he argues that humans can find truth anywhere if they look hard enough, particularly within themselves. The Scarlet Letter, published nine years before The Origin of Species, feels like kin to Darwin, though it has nothing to do with biology: Both works deal with the power of observation and its overriding importance. Hawthorne wants you to see his abstractions, as though the spiritual world inhabits the physical. Often, he succeeds.

Strange, but I had avoided reading The Scarlet Letter, and I’m not the type to shun the classics. As a high school sophomore, I transferred out of an English class, no mean trick, led by a teacher with whom I knew I’d quarrel, and who’d just begun discussing this novel. The teacher whose class I transferred into turned out to be a mentor, so I got the better deal–and swapped Hawthorne for Dostoyevsky, Huxley, Orwell, and Zamiatin besides. But I still didn’t let Hawthorne off the hook—there’s a Puritan in me too—and more than fifty years passed before I found out what Hester’s story has to offer.

Don’t make the mistake I made. At least take a look at The Scarlet Letter.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

To Have Her Own Story: That Churchill Woman

04 Monday Nov 2019

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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adultery, backstory, book review, feminism, Great Britain, historical fiction, Jennie Jerome, Lady Randolph Churchill, Lord Randolph Churchill, nineteenth century, Parliament, political power, Prince of Wales, scandal, sexual double standard, Stephanie Barron, Winston Churchill, women's fiction

Review: That Churchill Woman, by Stephanie Barron
Ballantine, 2019. 384 pp. $28

Nineteen-year-old Jennie Jerome, heiress to a sizable New York fortune, knows what she wants: to be taken seriously for her intellect and abilities, to have the power she believes she deserves, and to matter as a person. Why shouldn’t she, when she’s a brilliant conversationalist, has all the confidence her buccaneer merchant father taught her, plays the piano with verve and virtuosity, fears nothing and no one, and turns heads whenever she enters a room? But Miss Jerome is a woman, it’s 1873, and as an American, even a rich one, she faces obstacles to finding a husband among the British nobility, for which purpose her mother has brought her to England.

When daughter falls for Lord Randolph Churchill, son of the Duke of Marlborough, a rising star in Parliament, and a noted rake, Mrs. Jerome objects, as do the Churchills—the girl has no family to speak of, sniff sniff. However, Jennie has spent her life taking risks to get what she wants, and her mother doesn’t scare her, especially when she has Papa on her side.

Lady Randolph, as she appeared around 1880, age twenty-six, artist unknown (courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

History records that Lady Randolph’s first child, Winston, would be the most famous Briton of the twentieth century. But Barron is much more interested in Jennie and what else her marriage to this particular dissolute, scandalous husband brings. Randolph grants her the freedom to do what she pleases, so long as she’s discreet, and even lets her rewrite some of his speeches, removing the intemperate parts that would hurt him politically. Randy means to be prime minister, if ever that dour, Bible-thumping twit, Gladstone, ever falls — and Jennie will help secure her husband’s victory, if she can.

Consequently, Barron intends to rehabilitate Lady Randolph from the status of historical footnote, as mere mother of a great man, and, more importantly, her reputation as a scheming adulteress who drove her poor husband crazy. The author makes her case, for Jennie’s a far more appealing, nuanced character than the scandal mongers would have it, though at times her selfishness and sense of entitlement put me off. She does have love affairs, and she loves passionately, always struggling against the double standard applied to women, in that, and in her political pursuits, the latter activities furnishing some of my favorite scenes. Apparently, she was a fabulous stump speaker.

The narrative lives on splendid descriptions. Barron has a knack for portraying the lives of the rich and famous (which she also displayed in Jack 1939, a thriller written under a pseudonym), and she renders the leading figures of the realm with ease and panache. (I particularly like her portrait of Bertie, Prince of Wales, licentious wretch, court arbiter, and trendsetter.) It takes a sure hand to convey every conceivable setting with accuracy and authority, from royal residences to the House of Commons to opium dens to a fashionable woman’s boudoir. Not only does Barron never miss a step, she connects her descriptions to the characters (and, therefore, the reader), as with this passage from Jennie’s girlhood, about her father’s library:

Jennie never set foot in Papa’s library when he was there, because then it was his place and not the secret one she kept to herself while he was at his offices on Wall Street. The mahogany paneling glowed warmly even on the dreariest days, and the draperies were crimson velvet, so heavy that not a whisper of the carriage traffic from Madison Square filtered through the glazed windows. The only sounds were the settlings of logs burning behind the brass fender and the rustle of thick paper as Jennie turned the pages. A Turkey carpet splashed carmine and indigo at her feet. The library smelled of cigars and brandy and old leather bindings, the dryness of paper in the wetness of ink. It smelled, Jennie thought, of Papa.

It’s the storytelling, I think, that fails to measure up. The novel begins not at any of the first three chapters, where it could, but at Jennie’s funeral. Though by definition unnecessary, this particular prologue is at least very well written and, typical of Barron, shows her command of history. But reading yet another prologue makes me ask whether authors today — or their editors — have mistakenly set the bar too low, fearing that if the context for an almost-famous character doesn’t appear right up front, readers will be lost. Are we that unsophisticated or impatient or have such a short attention span that we can’t appreciate a woman’s life except by looking at it backwards? Are we that star-struck and name-conscious that if we don’t know a character’s bloodlines by the first paragraph, the novel won’t sell?

Speaking of looking backward, the forward narrative often breaks off to tell a story from Jennie’s past. Few of these scenes belong, most feeling as though they’ve been plopped in to give background to the adult Jennie, tacitly—or literally—asking, Why does the protagonist behave in such a way at this particular moment? Answer: Well, it all stems from this incident from her childhood; 2 + 2 = 4.

But people aren’t formulas, psychology doesn’t work that way, and since I believe Barron’s a fine writer, with a gift for characterization, I’m guessing she fell too much in love with Jennie’s backstory. I could also do with less rib-nudging dramatic irony, as when Jennie tells young Winston to go off and be prime minister someday.

That Churchill Woman makes entertaining reading, for the most part. But I wonder whether the author tried to cram too much into it, paradoxically winding up with less than she could have had.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Harsh Necessity: The Secret Chord

12 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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Tags

adultery, Bible, bloodshed, civilization, David, dramatic tension, Geraldine Brooks, historical fiction, Israel, Nathan, prophecy, Pulitzer Prize, Solomon, Tanakh

Review: The Secret Chord, by Geraldine Brooks
Viking, 2015. 302 pp. $28

The stories are so well known they’re common metaphors. When one person, athletic team, or military force faces a much larger, stronger opponent, we talk of David confronting Goliath. If we hear of adultery that leads to murder, the case evokes David and Bathsheba. Everyone knows, too, how the first king of Israel was a celebrated warrior, political leader, poet, musician, and judge, yet how a prophet’s rebuke made him repent while at the height of his power.

The Tel Dan stele, one piece of archeological evidence for David's kingdom (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

The Tel Dan stele, one piece of archeological evidence for David’s kingdom (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Or maybe not, if you read this magnificent, powerful, intensely gripping novel, which reimagines the biblical hero in his glory and fatal flaws. Brooks shows David’s daring, passion, devotion, ability to listen, grasp of military and political strategy, his occasional efforts to restrain the blood lust of the age, and his unmatched singing voice, beautiful verse, and cries of rage or grief. In other words, she explores why people followed, loved, and believed in him, and how he forged a kingdom out of warring tribes, but also why his vanity, arrogance, sexual appetites, and blindness to misdeeds (his own and his favorites’) caused so much misery and jeopardized his entire enterprise. Perhaps most important, the bloodshed and cruelty that David calls necessary to create a strong central government and, thereby, curtail unnecessary bloodshed and cruelty, keeps circling through the narrative, just as it has circled throughout human history.

How does Brooks manage to convey all this while sustaining the tension of a story written thousands of years ago? On first reading, I see several ways. First, though David is the object of everyone’s attention, he’s not the protagonist; Natan, his conscience, is. (Throughout, Brooks uses Hebrew names for people and places.) Like all prophets, Natan often wishes he didn’t have his gift, which keeps him from living like other men and evokes a mixture of fear, awe, disbelief, and misunderstanding.

However, it also saves his life. When David, then a rebel outlaw, puts a village to the sword for having refused to share food with his soldiers, the ten-year-old Natan watches his father die. Then it’s Natan’s turn, whereupon he falls into a fit and pronounces the fateful prophecy of great things. Naturally, the soldiers think it’s a performance, if brilliantly done; they don’t believe what they can’t see or touch. But David brings the fledgling seer into his household, where he eventually becomes a trusted adviser, and you get the idea that it’s not just David’s ego that has guided him but his talent for seeing beyond surfaces.

Even so, for Natan, his calling cuts more than one way. First, intense physical and emotional anguish always presage and accompany his prophetic utterances, so that he’s completely outside himself and can’t hear his own words. If it happens among other people, he can only find out what he’s said after he recovers, though meanwhile, he sees how his listeners react. That separation puts him at a disadvantage. Secondly, though his status protects him, when Natan speaks to the king and the generals in his own guise, he’s risking his neck, especially if they think he’s criticizing them. It’s a delicate balance for Natan, who must resist the temptation to pretend that certain words come from God when they don’t, and he can be sure that these powerful men will ask. Further, contrary to what they assume, he doesn’t see how things will come to be, only what will be. Consequently, his presence at their councils creates tension, as do his divided feelings, and much rides on what he chooses to say or keep to himself.

The narrative of course grows much flesh on the bones of an oft-told story, but Brooks never lets her inventiveness betray her characters. For instance, how she shows David winning his epic combat with a slingshot, or how she explains why Batsheva was bathing on her roof, make perfect sense for the people involved. You know that these things will happen, but you don’t know how, or how people will view them, and that adds drama as well.

Then there’s the prose, though which Brooks re-creates an ancient landscape and ways of thought until you can practically touch them. Take this example, when Natan leaves his burning, corpse-ridden village forever, his father yet unburied, and his mother refuses to say goodbye:

I felt, in her shunning, the first of many turnings-away. It was hard for a child to feel that ebbing love, to sense an estrangement that I could do nothing to gainsay. For my part, I still loved her as much as I had the moment before my mouth opened and the words poured out of me. But like the leper when the first lesion darkens and pits his skin, I was marked in her eyes, blemished, unlovable.

As for quibbles, I do wish Brooks had scrapped the prologue; I dislike them, and they feel gimmicky. The narrative switches time perspectives, leaving me in the dust on occasion, though I caught up soon enough. Finally, when the five-year-old Shlomo (Solomon) speaks words that he’d later set down in Ecclesiastes, that feels a bit precious, much as I love their wisdom. He’s a prodigy, sure, but it’s actually more meaningful that Brooks stresses David’s vanity, a subtle contrast with the philosophy that his son would later express.

This is the fourth novel of Brooks’s I’ve read (see my review of Year of Wonders, January 5). But I like this one the best of any, and I wouldn’t be surprised if The Secret Chord, like March, earned her a Pulitzer Prize.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Texas Three-Step: The Promise

25 Monday May 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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Tags

1900, adultery, Ann Weisgarber, characterization, Galveston, historical fiction, inner lives, literary fiction, love triangle, marriage, romance, twentieth century

Review: The Promise, by Ann Weisgarber
Skyhorse, 2014. $25

The Promise is one of the best novels I’ve read in years, a brave, exacting, often painful work, the type that takes a premise elegant in its simplicity and explores its depths.

Catherine Wainwright was brought up to appreciate and expect the finer things, including the music by which she makes her meager living. However, in this year of 1900, an independent woman’s place is precarious, to say the least, and Catherine has made a costly blunder. An affair with her cousin’s husband has made her hometown of Dayton, Ohio, too hot for her to live in. Polite society cuts her dead, parents cancel their children’s piano lessons with her, and her nascent concert career vanishes. Owing back rent she can’t pay and cut off from the man she loves, she realizes marriage is the only answer.

Map of Galveston, Texas, 1885, Augustus Koch (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain in the US).

Map of Galveston, Texas, 1885, Augustus Koch (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain in the US).

Accordingly, she resumes her correspondence with a Dayton man who has moved to Galveston, Texas, and become a dairy farmer. When they were at school together, Oscar Williams always liked her, and he intrigued her too, in his way. And as it happens, when Catherine writes Oscar again, he’s recently widowed and has a five-year-old boy to think of. After a few more letters pass back and forth, Oscar proposes marriage, and Catherine accepts–without telling him about her disastrous affair.

In Galveston, she finds a different level of heat from Dayton, and not just from the stifling, insect-ridden climate. She shares a bed with a man she doesn’t love, worries that his Dayton relatives will have told him about her, feels deeply hurt by her former lover’s treatment of her, and doesn’t know how to approach her stepson, Andre. Then there’s Nan Ogden, a young woman who keeps house for Oscar and looks after Andre. Nan resents the new Mrs. Williams and fancies Oscar for herself, but she doesn’t let herself think about it, which makes her character all the more fascinating. The two women narrate the novel in their very different voices. What they see (or don’t) in themselves or their adversary turns their already fraught triangle into high drama, even when the action concerns sweeping the floor or making coffee.

The Promise therefore delivers what I’ve come to believe is the key to good literary fiction. Like the musical Catherine communing with Beethoven, Weisgarber plays every note. She lingers over emotional transitions, finding many that lesser writers would miss or skim over, unpacking the compressed moments into their intriguing parts rather than summing them up in shorthand. Yet the narrative moves at a crackling pace, because the author knows storytelling and her characters’ inner lives.

This all begins with Catherine’s flaws. At the start, she’s self-absorbed, entitled, and superior, disbelieving that her comedown should happen to her. She’s terrified of her new surroundings and the scrutiny she’s under:


 

I felt Nan Ogden watching from the house as I fumbled with the latch on the barnyard gate. The soft soil in the yard was churned with hoof prints, and flies buzzed around a pile of dung. Water streamed from the chin of the cow that stood at the trough, her unblinking eyes taking note of my every move . . . . I’d never been so close to a cow, and her size was alarming. So, too, was her udder. It resembled a balloon but one that was lined with swollen blood vessels. I hurried past her.


 

Prompted by necessity and Oscar’s patient insistence, Catherine unbends enough to discover hidden sides to him, Andre, and herself. She also reflects on how she must appear to others. Consequently, she grows within a short time, as does Oscar in her view, which further deepens the novel.

My only quarrel is the manner in which, fairly early, she admits her mistakes to herself and realizes her illicit lover wasn’t the man she thought he was. Her shame feels completely real–I connected with her right away over that–but don’t see what prompted these revelations at that moment.

Otherwise, The Promise is absolutely splendid.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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