I have no understanding of who Nancy Mace is or what she's up to, but I just hate seeing this sort of snide parading of low-level knowledge. Read the whole book and get back to me. Meanwhile:Why books should be read, not banned. “The Scarlet Letter.” I give you Nancy Mace. “A” actually stands for adultery, but you do you, @NancyMace pic.twitter.com/7BhcC9rsjB
— We HearVoicesOutThere #voteBlue2024 (@WeHearPodcast) October 11, 2023
It was perceived, too, that while Hester never put forward even the humblest title to share in the world’s privileges—further than to breathe the common air and earn daily bread for little Pearl and herself by the faithful labour of her hands—she was quick to acknowledge her sisterhood with the race of man whenever benefits were to be conferred. None so ready as she to give of her little substance to every demand of poverty, even though the bitter–hearted pauper threw back a gibe in requital of the food brought regularly to his door, or the garments wrought for him by the fingers that could have embroidered a monarch’s robe. None so self–devoted as Hester when pestilence stalked through the town. In all seasons of calamity, indeed, whether general or of individuals, the outcast of society at once found her place. She came, not as a guest, but as a rightful inmate, into the household that was darkened by trouble, as if its gloomy twilight were a medium in which she was entitled to hold intercourse with her fellow–creature. There glimmered the embroidered letter, with comfort in its unearthly ray. Elsewhere the token of sin, it was the taper of the sick chamber. It had even thrown its gleam, in the sufferer’s bard extremity, across the verge of time. It had shown him where to set his foot, while the light of earth was fast becoming dim, and ere the light of futurity could reach him. In such emergencies Hester’s nature showed itself warm and rich—a well–spring of human tenderness, unfailing to every real demand, and inexhaustible by the largest. Her breast, with its badge of shame, was but the softer pillow for the head that needed one. She was self–ordained a Sister of Mercy, or, we may rather say, the world’s heavy hand had so ordained her, when neither the world nor she looked forward to this result. The letter was the symbol of her calling. Such helpfulness was found in her—so much power to do, and power to sympathize—that many people refused to interpret the scarlet A by its original signification. They said that it meant Able, so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman’s strength.
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A modern discussion of Hester Prynne and her embroidered "A" must, I believe, include the high school movieEasy A, starring Emma Stone. Which is a lot more interesting than whatever drivel that person in the linked video was trying to express.
No books are banned. At least not here in the US. For those promulgating this lie, please provide one book title banned in the US. Just one. That's all I asked.
The twitterer has never met the concept of a literary allusion.
I don't know that Mace knows what the letter means in the novel, but I think it likely that she does. What the twitterer is doing would be the exact equivalent of someone pointing out that the year is ackchyually 2023 and not 1984 if someone else alludes to our Orwellian thought police.
All I saw was a pair of T's.
It's always fun watching someone be both snotty and ignorant while thinking they're being clever. Not sure I understand the point of Mace's stunt either, except it seems that she's trying to show her intellectual independence without having to lay it out for us. She's taking bad advice.
I also have no idea what Nancy is up to and, uncharacteristically, I even clicked through to that horrible Xitter feed from which Althouse drew this Xeet. I watched BOTH the videos of Ms. Mace, a congresscritter I already hold in low esteem by virtue of what she says and does anyway, and still do not know what she is doing with that A or why the rabid leftist Xaccount posted them. Other than the obvious mockery endemic to the Left. Perhaps by crowdsourcing the Althousians collective wisdom we can sort it out.
But I doubt it. Like old Will Shatner I believe a lot of things are simply meant to be Unexplained.
pretty sure, she's saying she's Proud of being demonized
Agreed. Stop using gimmicks to make your point. False literary or otherwise.
So... is she dumb or not? Political theatre can be so tiresome.
I know that Mace voted to oust McCarthy, and I've seen her name mentioned as a possible VP pick for Trump. I have only the vaguest notion of her.
I did see her "A" shirt and thought it silly. "The Scarlet Letter" is something I read once and never thought to revisit. Woman as whore-penitent is not my favorite trope.
I.
Love.
This.
Book.
Had to read it in high school and tried not to. After college I developed a love for old literature and have read this probably 3-4 times. The wordiness can be off-putting (side note: I also love Hemingway's sparseness), but reading it to me is like letting the words wrap around you like a warm blanket. And the overall theme is so very human.
What the letter stands for is rather trivial. The fact that it's there is the significance.
I'm gonna guess "A" was not the scarlet letter at the top of her book report when the teacher handed it back to her in school.
YouTube: F for P and P for F
What's Trump's scarlet letter?
#TrumpChallenge
Reading that passage, I was reminded of what Oscar Wilde said about Little Nell. Hawthorne laid it on pretty thick. Like, with a brace of trowels.
"No books are banned. At least not here in the US. For those promulgating this lie, please provide one book title banned in the US. Just one. That's all I asked."
Indeed. Name one.
Parents want gay porn out of the grade and middle school libraries. Then the left created their big lie. Because the groomer left WANT gay porn in school libraries. The left are very good at lying.
Gosh people are dumb sometimes. Mace for the dumb stunt and the poster who thinks he's smart.
Now seeing the rumor of a possible VP pick, now the stunt makes sense.
On a field sable, the letter A gules
Hester Prynne was a stand up person before anyone knew what that was. She never gave up the name of her partner, allowing him to thrive.
Yah I dunno Nancy Mace either. Someone here referenced her- I figured she was the punch bag du jour…
…and I loathe the assumed correlation between classics and intelligence, as if a well read morons don’t exist. Lately it seems the correlation is negative…
…for the record we did about a month on it in sophomore english. When you flipped over our dog-eared paperbacks Billy Budd was in back. I got bored with Hester and read that instead…
"pretty sure, she's saying she's Proud of being demonized"
Seems pretty straightforward to me. Whether you like the gimmick or not.
May be some cattery involved as that is a very attractive woman.
It's easy, I think, to see the story of The Scarlet Letter as one of redemptive suffering, but it also one of redemption, in spite of ourselves, by God's Grace, and the symbol for that grace is the daughter, Pearl.
For a Biblically literate audience (and in Hawthorne's time, that meant about EVERYONE who could read), the name Pearl would be evocative of Matthew 13:45:
Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking beautiful pearls, who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it.
And this is from The Scarlet Letter, Chapter 23 which has the climactic moment of Rev. Dimmesdale's revelation of his adultery with Hester Prynne and that Pearl is his child, followed by his death.
He withdrew his dying eyes from the old man, and fixed them on the woman and the child.
“My little Pearl,” said he [Rev Dimmesdale] feebly,—and there was a sweet and gentle smile over his face, as of a spirit sinking into deep repose; nay, now that the burden was removed, it seemed almost as if he would be sportive with the child,—“dear little Pearl, wilt thou kiss me now? Thou wouldst not, yonder, in the forest! But now thou wilt?”
Pearl kissed his lips. A spell was broken. The great scene of grief, in which the wild infant bore a part, had developed all her sympathies; and as her tears fell upon her father’s cheek, they were the pledge that she would grow up amid human joy and sorrow, nor forever do battle with the world, but be a woman in it. Towards her mother, too, Pearl’s errand as a messenger of anguish was all fulfilled.
At death's door, Rev. Dimmesdale finds his Pearl of Great price.
Probably the only A she has gotten in her life. I wish she'd just drop the fake "I'm standing up for women" con.
She is not.
Anthony,
I haven't reread it (yet), but did take part in the premiere of an opera based on it, by Martin Herman. I think the stumbling-block for me was those first fifty pages or so of "The Customs-House." I must go back and reread that, at least. It seemed interminable to my 14-year-old self.
No account of "The Scarlet Letter"'s later reflections can be complete without Peter de Vries' Slouching Towards Kalamazoo, in which an affair between a tutor and a ridiculously precocious eighth-grader who nonetheless is flunking out leads to the former (I think; it's been a long time) wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a scarlet A+.
I dunno, it seems to me she understands the usage of the scarlet letter. Like others here, I'm not sure in what way she was being "demonized" (or shamed), but if she intended the letter to signify society's shaming of her, then... makes sense to me.
It's kind of ironic, I think, that the Xer is trying to shame her. On brand (if I'm inferring this person's politics correctly from the reference to book "banning"), but ironic.
The Scarlet Letter was about the imagined consequences throughout a whole lifetime of having a sin, adultery, which was legally a crime, either exposed exposed or successfully concealed. Hester, the woman, got pregnant so she was exposed while the man, a minister was able to hide his part. This is not my kind of book; it's a "problem" book where a human situation is a sort of puzzle - was it worse to be exposed or to be able to hide? But Hawthorne was able to have puzzle within puzzle. Hester becomes a real Christian woman as described in the quote - a Sister of Mercy - BUT the minister becomes a great minister able to call hardened sinners to repentance because he's always trying to call himself to tell the truth. BUT he is never able to call himself to tell the truth and Hester is never exactly sorry that she loved him or that she shields him and won't tell the community who the father of her child is. And on it goes, in what I regard as a long-drawn misery inflicted by an author on his unfortunate characters paralleled by the long drawn misery of high school classes in the old days, reading the book. I prefer a story like Macbeth where you see the woman start sleepwalking and constantly washing her hands while the man becomes more and more a killer while seeing ghosts at a banquet. It's the same idea.
In relation to Nancy Mace - and I don't know who she is and I'm not going search - but in relation to her, she's just as defiant in her way as Hester was. But the point of The Scarlet Letter was consequences dragging out through a lifetime and reported by conversations and, as it were, by A Messenger's Reports like some Greek drama (yawn). And we don't know what the consequences will be to Nancy Mace. We're on page 1-10 and we only know that she regards some entity as being like the Puritans in trying to censor, or more likely, cancel her for some offense. You young folks can follow her through life and see if she becomes a secular Sister of Mercy. She doesn't look the type but then Hester didn't either.
What does she think the A stands for? Or what do we think she thinks it stands for?
I suppose it's too much to ask for her to explain how her votes reflect the values represented by A, but...I can't even guess what message she is trying to send other than some kind of general defiance that may or may not be related to her status as a woman.
Maybe she thinks The Scarlet Letter was part of the Handmaid's Tale series?
Good one. I have no idea who Nancy Mace is either, but obviously she intended the letter to carry a meaning of defiance of those who would impose a stultifying conformity on the country, that would be the "vote blue no matter who" people, BTW, if you weren't clear on it.
I don't give a lot of weight to anyone who would write a paragraph like that. No idea of how to format for comprehension.
So Hawthorne is wordy. Try Trollope. I've read The Scarlet Letter probably four times now. First in high school--then in my adult life I read it every 15 years or so. I enjoy these novels written in the mid or late 19th Century. The authors were trying to include and teach moral lessons in what they wrote. All contained in a spoonful of literary sugar as it were.
As for Ms. Mace--a 46 year old Republican Congresswoman from South Carolina. Forget the cheap red ink A on your tee shirt. If you are going to pull this stunt, get an embroidered A that would have made Hester Prynne proud. Cheap stunts are just that--cheap. And as for cheap stunts, you've got lots of competition in Congress. AOC, Rashida Talib, Ilhan Omar from the Squad, and Kentucky Fried Chicken Steve Cohen out of Tennessee are masters at that. In the cheap stunt arms race, you can't keep up with the Democrats.
The modern usage of “the scarlet letter” isn’t about adultery.
Excellent post, YoungHegelian. A reminder one cannot really understand literature without knowing the Bible too. Because the great writers were raised on it, steeped in it, and it is universally cited in so many titles, works, novels, films. The accelerating ignorance of young Americans can be traced to the removal of such common texts as the Bible and Shakespeare from our education industrial complex.
Nancy Mace is the first woman to graduate from The Citadel in Charleston, SC.
That godawful novel was inflicted on me in junior(?) high. Why anyone thought young people should read it--especially boys FFS--is and remains beyond me.
Congcritter Mace has been on FOX and other outlets--she was prominent in the UAP hearings and caused some faux scandal by humblebragging at some ConCon that she was cohabiting with her phee-on-say IIRC.
That said, I don't know the context of this particular tiff and won't click to find out.
I also don't know who Nancy Mace is, and I only know what party she is in by inference from the comments here. But everyone is interpreting her actions--and The Scarlet Letter which is indeed a great novel--incorrectly, and I think Nancy Mace actually had a good English professor somewhere along the line, because she is interpreting it properly.
Because Hester Prynne gets pregnant out of wedlock and refuses to name the father, her community forces her to wear the scarlet"A" of "adultress." Hester doesn't try to avoid wearing the letter or hiding it under a cloak. No. She embroiders a particularly beautiful and decorated letter on her clothing as a way of defying the community's power over her--to the extent that she can. She is in a way making them live up to their own book of rules: they said she has to wear a letter, and she doesn't have enough power to resist that fully, but by wearing the beautiful, embroidered letter, she takes away some of their power to dominate her--and makes other members of the community start to question their group action.
The beauty of the daughter she bears, Pearl (named for obvious symbolic reasons) is likewise a rebuke of the community's assertion of its dominance: You all may brand me with the A, but God has given me a beautiful, good child.
Dimmesdale's NOT being punished by community, but eventually being punished by himself (and/or God) is intended--as is the whole novel--to get readers to think about how exactly a community should go about enforcing its own (and theoretically God's) laws: what the cost of that is, the hypocrisy and dishonesty that such laws might engender, and the heroism of those who refuse to abase themselves.
OK, I checked, and Nancy Mace was one of the people who voted to remove McCarthy as Speaker. So she's wearing the A to indicate that she knows that the other Republicans are calling her names behind her back, etc., and she's trying to own that. Maybe? I don't think it works 100%, but I think it's intended to be "I wear their scorn as a badge of honor," and since she's talking about congressional Republicans, their scorn (of her) is a badge of honor.
Too bad that the stunt doesn't quite work, because we could all use more Scarlet Letter reading and discussion in our lives.
Pair the Scarlet Letter with Elizabeth Gaskell's novel Ruth, and you provoke excellent discussions about how society can or should enforce standards that are intended to be for the good of the whole but cause harm--and unjust and disproportionate harm at that--to individuals. We KNOW from bitter experience--as did the Puritans and the Victorians--that out-of-wedlock births harm the community, so it would be good to have fewer of them. But in order to bring about that "policy" goal, you ended up harshly punishing the innocent children produced by such affairs and the women whom you are also counting upon to raise those children properly so that they do not grow up to harm the community.
Also: a lot of readers misunderstand why Hester refuses to reveal the name of the father. If she had named Dimmesdale as the father, he would either have been executed or exiled from the community, and Hester very well may love him (remember, she was basically abandoned for years by Roger Chillingsworth). Another one of Hawthorne's genius moves is to make Dimmesdale suffer so horrifically from his guilt over Hester's punishment; the irony is that if Dimmesdale had just been a common rake, who cared nothing for Hester, he would not cared and therefore not ended up with the scarlet A on his flesh.
The overall theme of The Scarlet Letter is NOT what every dimwitted Twitter-commenter and shallow high-school teacher thinks--Puritans were uptight about sex! (Really? Who knew!)--but the much more important notion that laws and customs have larger, more complicated, and less just effects than might have been intended when they were adopted, and that the complexity of human social relationships is often not a good fit for laws based on abstractions.
(I'm a medievalist, not a American Lit specialist, but it was the "A+ (See me)" that I got on my Scarlet Letter paper in Mr. Ryner's 8th grade English class that put me on the path to becoming a professor, scholar, and writer, so I'll always have a special fondness for Hawthorne's masterpiece).
She just wanted to wear a tight tee shirt.
In evangelical circles, Nancy Mace stirred a bit of controversy a few weeks back.
At a (national? congressional?) prayer breakfast she talked about being late to the event because her boyfriend pulled her back into bed to have sex when she had to get ready to go to the prayer meeting. Reference to (a) sex and (b) extramarital sex at that at a (c) prayer meeting was not well-received by many.
Althouse - white suburban snob womyn with degrees, looking down her nose at "low level knowledge". Business as usual.
I loathe The Scarlet Letter. I hated it when I first read it in high school and hated it even more when I had to read it in college when I was 45. What a stupid, awful book! I strongly object to stories/movies/books, etc. that make evil good and good evil. Yes, yes...I'm well aware of what the author was trying to say with his book, but I don't like it and I never will.
I thought it was funny. Nancy Mace gets a A from me. Did her actions also prompt a discussion about Nathaniel Hawthorne? That makes it an A+. Was she responsible for sending $6,000,000,000 to Iran? No. Then she gets an A++ .
Rich - your leftist pals Ilhan Omar(D) & Rashida Tlaib(D) - are fine with be-headed Jewish babies.
So what is your point?
If it's Nancy Mace, the A stands for Attention.
keeping pornography from children = book banning
abortion at any time = Women's reproductive health care
anti-White racism = antiracism
free speech = disinformation
and so on.
The Left is much better at marketing slogans than they are at simple logic.
I never glommed on to any of the great themes and ideas in Scarletter--it was simply too wordy and abstract to interest me.
In fact, I can't recall any of my junior high or high school novel assignments clearly, much less fondly. I read a ton, including adult fiction, but I wasn't having any of that old lady stuff.
OTOH, I always managed decent or better grades in English (I read a lot, did I mention that?) and in 11th grade Mrs. Taras (a tomato) read my analysis of Conrad's "The Secret Sharer" aloud to the whole class to show them how it's done and embarrass me.
"But everyone is interpreting her actions--and The Scarlet Letter which is indeed a great novel--incorrectly.."
Professor, you obviously did not complete your homework which required a fuller reading of the comments before offering your opinion here in the Althouse classroom. Many commenters above are in essential, if less wordy, agreement with you.
C+
rrsafety said...
The modern usage of “the scarlet letter” isn’t about adultery.
Then what is it about? The plot of that bad movie with Demi Moore?
Seriously. Never heard of a big 'ol red "A" on your chest as anything other than for adultery. Antifa?
Unknown said...
Nancy Mace is the first woman to graduate from The Citadel in Charleston, SC.
10/11/23, 2:54 PM
Love this comment! Thank you, Unknown! And Nancy Mace is unknown, despite being a First Woman in a male-dominated societal class. You can bet your last buck that if she was a democrat party member she'd be very well-known as the outspoken congresswoman from South Carolina who was the first ever female to graduate from The Citadel. Buuuut, she's not a democrat party member, so, like Kelly Anne Conway, and Kayleigh McEnany, Melania Trump, Sarah Palin, Sarah Sanders, Sandra Day O'Connor, and all the other groundbreaking republican women, her accomplishments will never be acknowledged and she will be relentlessly ridiculed and belittled by the pussy-hatters and abortion zealots of the democrat party.
I have no idea who this person is or why I should care who she is, but based on the video clip is her misuse of the Scarlet A and worse that the universally misused Uncle Tom? Both reveal a Wikipedia-only level of familiarity with the book in question.
That Mace is from South Carolina obviously makes her more susceptible to the sin based on Lord Byron's insight:
"What men call gallantry and Gods adultery
is much more common where the climate's sultry"
My grandmother, an English Lit professor, did her master's thesis on The Scarlet Letter. I've tried to get a copy of it, but the institution that granted the MA didn't keep copies for more than a few years.
Mace is one of the new breed of attention whores in Congress, so maybe the A isn't out of line. They pull stunts and use them for fundraising, gigs on Fox News/MSNBC, etc. A pox on them.
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