The Scarlet Letter
A stark and allegorical tale of adultery, guilt, and social repression in Puritan New England, The Scarlet Letter is a foundational work of American literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne's exploration of the dichotomy between the public and private self, internal passion and external convention, gives us the unforgettable Hester Prynne, who discovers strength in the face of ostracism and emerges as a heroine ahead of her time.
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1recommend
8mentions
7people
2015–2026years
13% recommend63% neutral25% critical
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What Hacker News says
- I thought everyone was supposed to read Nathanial Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter” in high school.
Maybe it should return to being required reading.
- Some of them are also just badly written, like The Scarlet Letter - the impression that stuck with me was it took way too long to get to the point, so much so that the second half of the book contained needed context for the first half to have any meaning at all.
And I was one of the few who got it when we read it. I don't think anyone I knew realized the movie Easy A shared any themes with that book, but it was just so much better done they understood the relevant themes from it.
- It's not actually naive to disagree with you, and at the time of this writing, several other people have disagreed with you as well, including two people giving alternative and less extreme interpretations which also fit the casual usage of the phrase. Several other people have pushed back on what they suggest is you inserting nazis into the conversation.
It's pretty aggressive to tell someone they're being naive because they don't agree with you and are trying to defend someone, in my opinion. Nominally, saying someone is being naive suggests that you can show that something is not just wrong but shouldn't have been believed by anyone sensible. Since you appear to be interpreting the words of a stranger, I doubt that this is the case.
Usually, in my experience, going to the most extreme possible interpretation without direct support isn't actually justified.
If several different people have disagreed with you, perhaps that's a point at which you might reconsider, instead of criticizing everyone as being unable to see what you see. One possibility is that you might be overreacting.
But to be clear, to me, the wording that they used seems to specifically indicate the novel The Scarlet Letter, by Nathanial Hawthorne. This is a culturally significant phrasing with frequent repetition, which is non-offensive, and unlike a mention of the Nazis, actually makes sense in context. In the rest of the text, they are talking about shaming, not wholesale slaughter of human life.
If I wanted to discuss someone wearing a mark of social shame as a pariah, it's quite likely that I would phrase it the same way, and I'm quite startled to realize that anyone might interpret such a comment in this radically other way. It's pretty common to talk about wearing a mark of shame, and you are the first person I've ever seen in my life suggest that that should be associated with the genocidal extermination of people by their religion.
I think that you might be well advised to look at what other people are saying here. Two people have told you that they feel that other interpretations are appropriate besides me, and another two have expressed concern for what they suggest is the inappropriate addition of a genocide to what was being discussed. I'm inclined to agree with them.
It's hard, because earlier in the discussion when you were saying "zero tolerance policy," I was super on your side. I thought that you were one of the few people here discussing solid common sense.
But also, ... I dunno, man, this just seems like an unjustified public shaming, to me.
In my private experience - and this has no attached data, and I could be wrong - but in my private experience, when someone is actually making a comparison like that, they're doing it for one of three reasons:
1. Shock value
2. Demonization
3. It's actually legitimately relevant in context
In all three of those cases, I would expect the person to come out and directly say what they meant, instead of making a vague metaphoric reference. Metaphor defeats shock value; metaphor does not make people look evil; metaphor doesn't have impact when you're trying to make someone face history.
Call me naive if you want, but I just don't think that person said what you claim, and I'm not alone in that.
If someone didn't say "nazi," and there's a reasonable common way to interpret what they said which makes sense in context, when "nazi" doesn't, probably ... probably they didn't mean nazi, friend. Horses and zebra, and all that stuff.
- The message was very easily missed because the story doesn't actually start until halfway through the book. Most of our class had already given up on the book by that point.
There's a movie based on it called Easy A [0], set in highschool, that gets across a similar message except it actually works because it's a comedy that keeps you interested.
(And I only say "similar" instead of "the same" because although I can remember what the A was, I can't remember anything about the narrative in The Scarlet Letter)
- > Everybody tends to white wash [the Puritan regime] because they had high literacy rates and treated women better than most at the time.
I don't think this squares with The Scarlet Letter being read in just about every high school in the US.
- Fiction:
Inherent Vice --- Thomas Pynchon
The Great and Secret Show --- Clive Barker
Jurassic Park --- Michael Crichton
The Mothman Prophecies --- John A. Keel (1)
The Wind in the Willows --- Kenneth Grahame
Ender's Game --- Orson Scott Card
All Quiet on the Western Front --- Erich Maria Remarque
The Drought --- J. G. Ballard
The Dead Father's Club --- Matt Harris
Children of Men --- P. D. James
The Islanders --- Pascal Garnier
Silence of the Lambs --- Thomas Harris
Inherit the Wind --- Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee
The Butt --- Will Self
Inside Outside --- Philip Jose Farmer
The Panda Theory --- Pascal Garnier
Fanshaw --- Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter --- Nathaniel Hawthorne
This Census-Taker --- China Mieville
The House of the Seven Gables --- Nathaniel Hawthorne
The A26 --- Pascal Garnier
The Blithedale Romance --- Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Weird --- Edited by Jeff VanderMeer & Ann VanderMeer (2)
Front Seat Passenger --- Pascal Garnier
Non-Fiction:
The Wealth of Networks --- Yochai Benkler
Field Notes from A Catastrophe --- Elizabeth Kolbert
What Ever Happened to Modernism? --- Gabriel Josipovici
Escape Velocity --- Mark Dery
What We See When We Read --- Peter Mendelsund
(1) Author described as non-fiction, publisher hedged bets and labelled in as such, supposedly.
(2) If only this book could be picked by Subterranean or Centipede press so it'd be a better printed and bound book than Tor ever seems to want to do.
I always recommend Ballard, even when not wanted. Relevant quote:
I'd recommend Pascal Garnier for anyone who likes sickly dark humor + surrealism + noir + a kind of Ballardian-air. Also Pynchon. Hawthorne might be the stand-out this year, in the sense of his works' subtle, implicit ability to question the authorial mode, the nature of the text itself, and the instability of it.A story by J. G. Ballard, as you know, calls for people who don't think. One begins with characters who regard the physical universe as a mysterious and arbitrary place, and who would not dream of trying to understand its actual laws. Furthermore, in order to be the protagonist of a J.G. Ballard novel, or anything more than a very minor character therein, you must have cut yourself off from the entire body of scientific education. In this way, when the world disaster — be it wind or water — comes upon you, you are under absolutely no obligation to do anything about it but sit and worship it. Even more further, some force has acted to remove from the face of the world all people who might impose good sense or rational behavior on you, so that the disaster proceeds unchecked and unopposed except by the almost inevitable thumb-rule engineer type who for his individual comfort builds a huge pyramid (without huge footings) to resist high winds, or trains a herd of alligators and renegade divers to help him out in dealing with deep water. Algis Budrys, Galaxy magazine (December 1966)In non-fiction I'd recommend Dery's Escape Velocity; It's from the 90s but still deals too presciently with many of the issues around the near-religification of modern electronic technology. And Josipovici if you lean toward depressive jolts of existential anxiety (it deals mostly with the arts, but I think there's a broader life applicability).
