Karenina. The comparison is illuminating.
The European adultery novels feel sophisticated and contemporary and
immediately relevant. They feature recognizably “modern” women
rebelling against the dull misery of unhappy marriages, seeking their
salvation in romance and illicit sex. Tolstoy and Flaubert address the
topic of infidelity head-on; we see Emma and Anna make the choices
that doom them, then watch in horror as they get betrayed by their
lovers. Both women are martyrs to passion; once they cross the fateful
line, there’s no way forward, and no turning back.
Compared with Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, The Scarlet
Letter is disappointingly chaste and old-fashioned. Hawthorne refuses
to provide even a fleeting glance of the original sin, the love affair that
turned Hester into a disgraced single mother and Reverend Dimmesdale
into a pious fraud. Even their happy reunion scene, late in the novel,
sparks little in the way of physical fireworks. There’s only breathless
conversation—erotic in its own way—and a single act of abandon,
when Hester “undid the clasp that fastened the scarlet letter, and, taking
it from her bosom, threw it to a distance among the withered leaves.”
But Hawthorne offers us something that neither Tolstoy nor Flaubert
can provide—a glimmer of hope, and a paragon of courage. Instead of
a sexual martyr, we get a hero, a strong woman at peace with her own
conscience, willing to accept the punishment for her rebellion, but
refusing to admit that it was a sin. “‘What we did,’” she informs
Dimmesdale, “‘had a consecration of its own.’” She tells her cowardly
lover that he needs to answer only to himself, and to find a way to live
honestly, even if it means losing his social position and striking out for
the wilderness. “‘There is happiness to be enjoyed!’” she declares.
“‘There is good to be done. Exchange this false life of thine for a true
one.’”
Dimmesdale can’t do it, of course. In an astonishing climactic scene, he
stands before the community and confesses his guilt, exposing himself
as a hypocrite, poisoned from the inside out, literally !consumed by his
shame. In the European novels, it’s the woman who !dies, but in The
Scarlet Letter, not only does Hester survive, she !thrives, growing