Hester: A Novel

In February, 1829, a young Scottish needlewoman named Isobel Gamble crosses the Atlantic with her older husband and arrives in Salem, Massachusetts, just when the young and brooding Nathaniel Hathorne is finding his feet as a writer. Isobel and Nathaniel meet, they fall in love, and soon, with the husband serendipitously away at sea, they go to bed together. Isobel despises her absent husband and dreams of a future with Nathaniel. But family pride, egotism, and chicken-heartedness all prevent him from committing himself to her. Happy to claim her as a muse, he can’t imagine her as a wife. Eventually, even though she’s pregnant, he abandons her. Decades later, the love affair becomes the basis of The Scarlet Letter. Sophia immediately recognizes Dimmesdale as her husband’s Kunstfigur. “But who,” she asks, through her headache, “is the woman, Nat? For she is not me” (Lico Albanese 304). Said woman has long since left town. Unlike Hester, she never returns to the precincts of her sorrow, opening a dressmaker’s shop in Halifax instead.The back cover of Laurie Lico Albanese’s Hester: A Novel seconds Sophia in asking: “Who is the real Hester Prynne?” The novel’s Notes and Acknowledgments state that “Hester began with the question: What if Hester Prynne told her own story?” Rather than simply retell The Scarlet Letter from Hester’s perspective, however, Lico Albanese has invented an original of Hester whom she introduces into Hawthorne’s young adulthood. “[We] can only speculate upon Hester’s true origins,” she remarks, “as there’s no source evidenced in the author’s life or writing, no original manuscript or notes to study” (318). Freed from these burdens, Lico Albanese speculates liberally.The assumption that Hester had “true origins” outside of Hawthorne’s imagination begs the question, of course. But granted the premise, any competent novelist is bound to determine that these origins must lie with someone Hawthorne slept with. The historical record’s silence on the matter won’t be any obstacle to invention. And it needn’t be, of course: Lico Albanese has full liberty to construct any Hawthorne she likes. Hers could have the webbed feet of a duck if that suited her purposes. Not even the supposed “truth of the human heart” famously invoked in the Preface to The House of the Seven Gables need constrain her (CE 2:1). And in any case, she’s in good company: speculating about Hawthorne’s secret sexual life has been the stock-in-trade of biographically-oriented critics for decades.But granted this artistic license, part of the interest and pleasure of the exercise presumably lies, for both author and reader, in a fictionalized Hawthorne that negotiates with the traces he left in the archive. Hester enters these negotiations, but with equivocal success. It’s good at capturing the beauty his contemporaries so often remarked on. Isobel is smitten with his “thick, wavy hair” (Lico Albanese 42), his “high forehead and deep-set eyes” (65), his “eyes . . . the color of honey in a glass jar” (74). It captures subtler aspects of his physical presence, too. Brenda Wineapple records of Hawthorne that, owing to a childhood ailment, “[when] he walked . . . he swung his right arm and tilted his head a little to the left, as if balancing himself aboard a rolling ship—a kind of seaman’s gait” (Wineapple 63). Hester’s Isobel duly notes that “his gait tips slightly to one side” (Lico Albanese 42), a nicely idiosyncratic detail. Lico Albanese likewise makes an effort to reckon with the known events in Hawthorne’s life, strategically departing from it in some instances, conforming to it in others. She briskly dispenses, for instance, with Hawthorne’s famously long post-Bowdoin seclusion. Taking a hint, perhaps, from James R. Mellow’s account of Hawthorne’s daily walks during this period (37), she makes her Hawthorne a flâneur, Salem-style. Isobel first sees him on the docks, “reading a book while he walks slowly down the pier” (Lico Albanese 42), and subsequently encounters him at the East India Marine Society Hall, and at Derby Square, and in dry goods shops, and out in the sunshine, and out in the dark. Plainly, the plot demands some such circulation: if he were to spend all his time studiously winning fame in his “dismal and squalid” Herbert Street chamber, there’d be no opportunity for adultery (Lost Notebook 25). Otherwise, Lico Albanese organizes her plot around the major events, such as they were, of Hawthorne’s year in 1829. That summer, for instance, the real Hawthorne decamped to Maine, so Hester’s decamps, too, leaving Isobel to pine for him alone in Salem.Still, whereas in these respects Lico Albanese’s sketch of a young Hawthorne is compelling enough, by contrast its delineation of his character is disappointing—not because his seduction and abandonment of Isobel is so craven but because his personality is so thinly drawn. In addition to his ingratiating mien when he’s out a-wooing, there are three notes, roughly speaking, that the novel’s Hawthorne hits. He’s the kind of intelligent young man who hides his earnestness behind a mask of irony, which expresses itself as a “smothered” half-smile (Lico Albanese 62). When reflecting Holgrave-like on the burden of the past, he’s as gloomy as Young Goodman Brown on the far side of the woods. And when he and Isobel eventually part ways, he throws a tantrum. Even based on the limited surviving evidence, it’s clear that the real person was more complex. Consider the letters Hawthorne sent to his sisters during his years at Bowdoin, now witty, now plaintive, now gossipy, now cajoling, now anecdotal, now tartly aphoristic. Or consider the charmingly oddball Hawthorne who on one occasion, as he wrote in 1835, “strolled slowly through the pastures, watching [his] long shadow, making grave, fantastic gestures in the sun” (Lost Notebook 6). Hester’s Nathaniel is far too conventional for flourishes of that stripe.The normal challenges of delineating character are compounded by the challenge of writing dialogue. In Hester, dialogue never seems to emanate from actual human beings. I was reminded of the idiosyncrasy that Arthur Miller detected in George Bernard Shaw’s plays: “One of the signs of an abrogation of regular psychology,” Miller remarked, “is that people stay on the theme. . . . You read Shaw’s plays and see how rarely people get off the subject” (Miller and Gelb 194). Hester’s Salem is not the dwelling-place of the chance remark, the swerve in conversation, the sudden second thought: the characters always express fully formed thoughts that always serve the themes and plot. No doubt this is true of Hawthorne’s fiction, too—but he was writing pre-Shaw and we read post-Miller. Hester also struggles with the challenge of writing dialogue spoken by characters in a historical setting. One response to this challenge is suggested by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s quip in the stage directions of An Octoroon, his rewriting of the Dion Boucicault melodrama. “I’m just going to say this right now so we can get it over with,” he writes; “I don’t know what a real slave sounded like. And neither do you” (Jacobs-Jenkins 43): his solution is to make the play’s enslaved characters speak in a comically anachronistic modern Black vernacular. A more conventional approach is to use what David Mitchell calls “Bygonese”—a contemporary impression of historical speech that is knowingly “inaccurate but plausible” (Mitchell 489). This is Hester’s approach, too, and the novel’s version of Bygonese is generally what Mitchell calls for—generally plausible, more or less. These two challenges—writing psychologically convincing dialogue and writing convincing Bygonese—converge in Hester’s depiction of Hawthorne in particular. Hester’s Nathaniel signals his interest in Isobel by saying, in one instance, “You always intrigue me, Mrs. Gamble” (Lico Albanese 98), and, in another, “There you go again, Mrs. Gamble . . . Intriguing me as you do” (117). These romantic overtures beguile Mrs. Gamble, but “intrigue” is not a verb that Hawthorne would use, since, according to the OED, the particular meaning of “to intrigue” used here—“to excite curiosity”—originated in the 1890s. Putting it in any early nineteenth-century mouth is a straightforward howler, then. As to whether the historical Hawthorne would have wooed as maladroitly as this: I don’t know; and neither do you. But I sure hope not.To paint a compelling literary portrait of Hawthorne is difficult, of course: one needs an intimate familiarity with Hawthorne’s writing and a talent for pastiche. Far less forgivable is Lico Albanese’s tenuous grip on American literary history. In the Notes and Acknowledgments, she writes:Whether or not Hester Prynne qualifies as the “first feminist historical hero,” it’s a simple error of fact to call The Scarlet Letter the beginning of American historical fiction. To say so is, in the first instance, to disregard most of Hawthorne’s own short fiction. But even if Lico Albanese has novels and not short stories in mind, she’s still flat-out wrong. She ignores not only the historical fiction of James Fenimore Cooper but also novels like Hobomok and Hope Leslie, thereby also ignoring a half-century of feminist literary scholarship that gives Lydia Maria Child, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and other historical-fiction-writing women their due. Poor Carolyn Karcher. This construction of The Scarlet Letter’s significance in American literary history entails a masculinist literary revanchism starkly at odds with Hester’s ostensible feminist politics.In a way, however, the error is illuminating. As a twice-told tale that reframes and retells a literary “classic,” Hester is part of that familiar phenomenon in contemporary publishing wherein readers are induced to spend money on an unfamiliar new novel because of its association with a familiar older one. To be sure, such novels are not reducible to the economic logic that makes them appealing to publishers; they can aim for more elevated purposes, too, negotiating for instance with literary tradition and thereby aiming to modify, in an Eliotic way, the tradition as a whole. One might call such works “paraclassics,” with “paraphrase” and “parody” in mind and with due ironic distance from the term “classic.” As with parody, works in this genre presume familiarity with a precursor and invite the reader to place the new work in dialogue with the old. Typically, paraclassics offer to correct some political defect discerned—often judiciously—in the so-called classic. But the negotiation is as much artistic as political, the paraclassic’s artistic strategies necessarily in conversation with the classic’s—with the art of its sentences, say, or its theory of symbol. In this conversation, similarity and difference alike are equally significant.Of the various moments of resonance or disharmony between Hester and The Scarlet Letter, two seem fundamental. Isobel’s adulterous sex with Nathaniel figures directly in Hester, a marked departure from The Scarlet Letter, where Hester and Arthur’s adultery is confined to the anterior action, partly for matters of literary decorum, nineteenth-century style, and partly because adultery is a figure for something somewhat like Original Sin, a preexisting condition, so to speak, in life after the Fall. In Hester, adultery doesn’t carry anything like this theological weight, even though Isobel experiences sex as apostasy, “sin, God, and the Devil [not] nearly as real as the throttle of his breath in my ear, his taste of salt, and the white-hot coil that goes through me like thread in the eye of a needle” (Lico Albanese 188). What’s at stake instead is her right to pursue sexual happiness. For all that, Hester does take up The Scarlet Letter’s interest in reproductive matters, and it does so with greater frankness. It pointedly supplements the sex scenes by showing Isobel’s attempts to use contraception and, once she discovers her pregnancy, to abort the fetus. Meanwhile, what Hester emphatically does not suggest is that Isobel’s daughter Margaret needs a father’s acknowledgment to “grow up amid human joy and sorrow, nor for ever do battle with the world, but be a woman in it” (CE 1:256). Contrary to the patriarchal logic of The Scarlet Letter, Hester shows that Margaret will do just fine without her father, thank you very much.Hester’s central claim to originality, meanwhile, lies in how Isobel perceives the world: she’s a synesthete, which is to say that, for Isobel, “stimulation of one sensory modality automatically triggers a perception in a second modality, in the absence of any direct stimulation to this second modality” (Harrison and Baron-Cohen 3). As Lico Albanese elaborates in a prefatory note,Hester’s depiction of synesthesia coincides with an extraordinary surge of scientific interest in the subject over the past twenty years. This interest notwithstanding, contemporary fiction in which a protagonist perceives the world synesthetically is still rare. Predictably, it’s Isobel who supplies her lover with the central figure of his romance. “The A is a scarlet letter,” she says, when confiding to him about her multimodal perception (Lico Albanese 199).But whereas actual synesthesia is a deeply idiosyncratic experience of the world, fictional synesthesia becomes part of the fiction’s overall signifying system. As Isobel learns to accept her synesthesia as a gift and not a curse, she undertakes that well-traveled secular pilgrimage from self-doubt to self-celebration—the Celestial Railroad of liberal individualism. More compellingly, Hester suggests that those historically accused of being witches were endowed with synesthesia and other similarly “mystifying and inexplicable” neurological dispositions. Most interesting are the unique insights that Isobel’s synesthesia permits. Because of her color-grapheme synesthesia, she is able to detect letters embroidered in a larger pattern even when all the threads themselves are the same color:The novel likely owes a debt here to V. S. Ramachandran and E. M. Hubbard’s in the early which the of the novel’s on these of a dialogue between the and the because Hester’s A is only from Isobel’s idiosyncratic perspective, it the political, and with which Hawthorne his Hester that the of in The Scarlet Letter are all supplements and to Isobel’s original in the of Hester’s around the Isobel’s of the various the is and she it’s also a of is is when it’s part of is is and (Lico Albanese for Isobel these are also to her As are are and so theory of less that of The Scarlet Letter than that of The A is for In a scarlet to the Scarlet Letter, Lico Albanese the of its not only in this instance that Lico Albanese has a to Hawthorne’s In a Isobel expresses at her with do on the she asks, woman I have ever known is to the while she hope for what is to (Lico Albanese and the between historical and are both As a historical of and as a to Hester is just as with the past as are the Isobel the a of from the history of in and It out that Isobel is directly from the accused Scottish Isobel and of Nathaniel is from the in the Salem The Nathaniel and Isobel in a history of and The here is presumably by Hawthorne’s depiction of the in The House of the Seven But The House of the Seven Gables the through the of and The and thereby and the characters the of history. Hester: A Novel its own in the love affair of Isobel and but that because of of Nathaniel Isobel of showing in a he how the of have with (CE What to make of all Isobel the women who to the world, the novel’s that this is in have famously the of The House of the Seven Gables and to a will not But by a Hawthorne’s seems more than however, Hester an from this through Isobel’s daughter not in a as is in The Scarlet Letter, but in a outside of in from not This to be a on the for on their from to this Hester be the that famously The Scarlet “The of a new of human and they might have it their to a of the as a and as the of a (CE The suggests the of from Hawthorne’s Isobel’s daughter Margaret is those on the Hester, with its of is the central in on and is no doubt the that it challenges The Scarlet Letter. Black people figure in Hawthorne’s historical fiction, a at odds with their historical in early Hawthorne’s of them from his fiction me of that will have the gift of the of hope in the past who is that even the will not be from the if he In a to Hawthorne for these of Lico Albanese Black characters who them is Isobel’s on the of Salem and an from Isobel and up a and Isobel thereby learns something about the Black of its Hester is in its with American in part because the novel’s on Isobel’s with Nathaniel. The a the Black characters all seems to be to to the of Isobel, as evidenced by their and is on the right side of history. the novel’s is to say, Isobel’s husband Gamble and both on the in Nathaniel so by of the that he eventually Isobel’s her in with but it also makes her about as a character as a character into in a slave to its on and even though the novel is in an of Isobel not to have much to she for she was in not far up the from For the most even after she the Salem she about American always more with own (Lico Albanese In one instance, she learns about women on the use of in their This neither her to on the she might have used in the past nor her to use only in the and be but and the novel’s where she the she discovers in her new Isobel doesn’t to these from the of she in her at the head of the (Lico Albanese She seems instead at with in it be but after all what is one to She that while a place of . . . by the same and that American in the in over the The fact of this seems in itself to her to the in this of the novel for me in the between the and his Black first them on her Isobel on their saying, “The love and for was just as was for (Lico Albanese this love and when the to a while with a could to be reminded of of But in Hester, the mask never in fact no mask but the never has to The novel is about the of their of and The Scarlet Letter have been to critics for a In remarked that book by a woman a figure familiar by the and in The Scarlet Letter’s S. that the . . . Hester seems to her sisters in through a to patriarchal insights have been into Hawthorne have likewise been long since to the in Hester’s and hair” and her eyes” (CE In the of the and Black Lico Albanese is right to on the so-called of American But have been more if her Hester needlewoman not the needlewoman American as Hester it to the is deeply It in her plays A and In the The Scarlet Letter in and