A" for Atlantic: The Colonizing Force of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (original) (raw)

2007, American Literature

In The Scarlet Letter, colonization just happens or, more accurately, has just happened. We might recall, by contrast, how Catharine Maria Sedgwick's novel Hope Leslie elaborately narrates the sociopolitical process of making an Indian village into a native English spot. Hawthorne eclipses this drama of settlement. Although Hawthorne, like Sedgwick, sets his plot of sexual crisis in the early colonial period of Stuart political crisis and English Civil War, he places these events in the distant backdrop, as remote from his seventeenthcentury characters as his nineteenth-century readers. Meanwhile, he recasts Sedgwick's whimsical heroine, Hope Leslie, as a sober, already arrived, and already fallen woman. In beginning from this already fallen moment, Hawthorne keeps offstage both the "fall" of colonization and its sexual accompaniment. He thereby obscures his relationship to a long Atlantic literary and political history. But if we attend to the colonizing processes submerged in The Scarlet Letter, we discover the novel's place in transatlantic history-a history catalyzed by the English Civil War and imbued with that conflict's rhetoric of native liberty. We see that Hawthorne's text partakes of an implictly racialized, Atlantic ur-narrative, in which a people's quest for freedom entails an ocean crossing and a crisis of bodily ruin. That is, The Scarlet Letter fits a formation reaching from Oroonoko, Moll Flanders, Charlotte Temple, and Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative to The Monk and Wieland and continuing through such divergent yet fundamentally Atlantic texts as Billy Budd, Of One Blood, The Voyage Out, and Quicksand.1 Critics have long noted the offstage locale of Hester Prynne and