The Scarlet Fetter

In the heady days of Amos Bronson Alcott’s progressive schooling experiment, Margaret Fuller’s proto-feminist Memoirs, and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s call to self-reliance, Hawthorne wrote short stories and “romances” peopled with characters plagued by original sin. The independent, sexual women of The Scarlet Letter and The Blithedale Romance end life either alone or dead, and characters who show Emersonian self-reliance, such as Aylmer in “The Birth-Mark” or Robin in “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” become monsters. In a three-part lecture on “The Times,” Emerson argued that while the conservative defends “the actual state of things, good and bad .  .  . the project of innovation is the best possible state of things.” But for Hawthorne, those who pursue such a project ruin both themselves and society.