Scarlet Letter Treatment in Modern America

Modern Scarlet Letter Treatment - Click the link to listen, or read the text below!

March 7, 2010

Newspapers are full of apologies these days, from Toyota to Tiger Woods. But papers in the Boston area are also running a growing number of "mea culpas" that are ordered by the courts.

Increasingly, companies that plead guilty to crimes that harm the community — polluting, for example — are being required to publish an apology as part of their punishment.

"Our company has discharged human waste directly into coastal Massachusetts waters," reads an ad in the Boston Herald placed by The Rockmore Co., a local ferry operator.

"That's pretty ... that's bad," says Cindy Cisco, from her spot at a coffee shop in Marblehead, Mass. "That's terrible."

The ad says the company has paid a "steep fine," but people in the area seem more moved by the price the company is paying in reputation.

"I think it's great, because they're going to learn their lesson," says hairdresser Danielle Yocum. "They're probably not going to put human waste in the ocean again."

Retribution Versus Deterrence

Former federal prosecutor Michael Sullivan has helped increase the use of these kinds of sanctions in Massachusetts, especially with companies that run afoul of environmental laws.

The goal is deterrence, and Sullivan says the high-profile mea culpas also tend to be more satisfying to a public increasingly frustrated by corporate wrongdoing.

"I think that's what might frustrate the public — when it doesn't appear that the company has been punished sufficiently enough, by simply writing a check," he says. "It's simply the cost of doing business when you're caught."

There are times when we do want to put the hurt on a corporation especially if it’s a corporation who hurt the community.

- Doug Berman, Ohio State University law professor

The "scarlet letter" treatment has long been used to sanction individuals, from shoplifters or drunken drivers confessing their crimes on sandwich boards to the public shaming used back in Puritan times.

"You would like to think that sentencing is evolving to move away from these types of public shaming. We got out of doing that for a reason," says Stellio Sinnis, a federal public defender.

Sinnis represented a Massachusetts fisherman who purposely sunk an old boat. When he was caught, the fisherman had to run an ad saying that cutting corners was "not worth it." He offered to go on a speaking tour to make that point directly to other fishermen, but prosecutors insisted on the newspaper ad.

Sinnis questions whether the goal was really more about a kind of retribution than deterrence.

"When you impose a sentence that embarrasses family members and creates hardship — public humiliation and public ridicule — and kind of ostracizes someone from the community, I think it's gratuitous, and that's just counterproductive to what you want to achieve," he says.

But Does It Work?

Some offenders have appealed their sentences as cruel or unusual, but the courts have ruled that humiliation is within the bounds of fair punishment.

Still, shaming sanctions continue to raise age-old questions about making a punishment fit a crime.

"Whether we call it vengeance, whether we call it psychic satisfaction, whether we call it restitution, we are getting at the core of what we as victims can rightfully claim to be entitled to," says Ohio State University law professor Doug Berman.

Berman says judges must be careful when shaming individuals, but they don't have to worry the same way about scarring a company.

"Corporations don't feel," he says. "There are times when we do want to put the hurt on a corporation, especially if it's a corporation who hurt the community."

When it comes to shaming corporations, Berman says, the real question is: Does it work? Judges ought to be encouraged to try to find out, he says.

Taken From: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124357844

A review of a Nathaniel Hawthorne Biography from The Atlantic

Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Atlantic Monthly



December 3, 2003


This fall a new biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne entitled Hawthorne: A Life has been published by Alfred A. Knopf. The book renews interest in an author whom Edgar Allan Poe described in the mid-nineteenth century as "one of the few men of indisputable genius to whom our country has yet given birth."

Hawthorne lived most of his life in Massachusetts and was, for a time, a neighbor of Ralph Waldo Emerson's in Concord. He was also a college classmate of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's at Bowdoin. By the time Emerson, Longfellow, and others founded The Atlantic, in 1857, Hawthorne had become a prominent literary figure as a result of publishing his collection of short stories, Twice-told Tales(1837), and The Scarlet Letter (1850). His work appeared regularly in the magazine during its early years.

One of his most famous pieces—an essay entitled "Chiefly About War Matters," on his encounter with the Civil War—appeared in the July 1862 issue. Here Hawthorne described his trip south from Massachusetts to visit the nation's capital and interview many of the country's civil and military leaders. Because, contrary to the convictions of most members of the New England literary milieu of the age, Hawthorne wasn't entirely convinced of the necessity of abolition, he considered the Civil War to be at best an ambiguous exercise, and took a dim view of many of the war's Northern principals. The Atlantic, however, was founded and edited by passionate abolitionists. As a result, many passages in the draft Hawthorne turned in ended up being altered by editors, whose views on these matters differed from his own. In response, Hawthorne is said to have grumbled, "What a terrible thing it is to try to let off a little bit of truth into this miserable humbug of a world!" In protest he added a series of humorous editorial "footnotes," written in the voice of a somewhat dimwitted editor. In place of a not entirely flattering description of President Lincoln that the editors had deleted, for example, he wrote:

We are compelled to omit two or three pages, in which the author describes the interview, and gives his idea of the personal appearance and deportment of the President. The sketch appears to have been written in a benign spirit, and perhaps conveys a not inaccurate impression of its august subject; but it lacks reverence.

And in place of another deleted section he wrote:

We do not thoroughly comprehend the author's drift in the foregoing paragraph, but are inclined to think its tone reprehensible, and its tendency impolitic in the present stage of our national difficulties.

Convinced that The Atlantic was overly biased toward a radical point of view, he warned one editor,

The political complexion of the Magazine has been getting too deep a black Republican tinge, and ... there is a time pretty near at hand when you will be sorry for it. The politics of the Magazine suit Massachusetts tolerably well (and only tolerably) but it does not fairly represent the feeling of the country at large.

Throughout his life, and especially before publication of The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne had found it a constant challenge to support himself and his family while attempting to write on the side. For several years Hawthorne had worked as a surveyor in Boston's Custom-House, measuring shipments of coal and other goods along the waterfront. He recorded these experiences, keeping extensive notebooks describing his daily thoughts and emotions. In January 1868, four years after his death, extracts from notebook entries he had written while working at the Custom-House appeared in The Atlantic. One can see in these writings not only how boring and unpleasant Hawthorne found the work to be, but also how much he struggled to keep his mind on loftier matters. In one such entry he wrote,

It appears to me to have been the most uncomfortable day that ever was inflicted on poor mortals.... Besides the bleak, unkindly air, I have been plagued by two sets of coal-shovelers at the same time, and have been obliged to keep two separate tallies simultaneously. But I was conscious that all this was merely a vision and a fantasy, and that, in reality, I was not half frozen by the bitter blast, nor tormented by the those grimy coal-heavers, but that I was basking quietly in the sunshine of eternity.... But the wind has blown my brains into such confusion that I cannot philosophize now.

Elsewhere one sees him trying to find ways to make his menial job useful to him as a writer:

On board my salt vessels and colliers there are many things happening, many pictures which in future years, when I am again busy at the loom of fiction, I could weave in.... I am forced to trust them to my memory, with the hope of recalling them at some more favorable period.

Perhaps because of his own struggles early on as a novelist, Hawthorne was later able to identify with another struggling young writer named Herman Melville. As Nancy Caldwell describes in "First Encounters," (January 1995), the two became acquainted while taking a hike through the Berkshires with Oliver Wendell Holmes and the publisher James T. Fields. Hawthorne became interested in Melville and the difficulties the young writer was having with a whaling novel he was working on. Hawthorne invited Melville to come and stay with him for a few days and helped Melville think through how to rework the novel. That work was later published as Moby Dick and dedicated to "the genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne."

When Hawthorne died at the age of sixty, he was still having difficulty making ends meet. He was also depressed, and was having trouble completing new projects. At the time he died he was in the midst of working on a novel called The Dolliver Romance, which The Atlantic had planned to publish in installments. Two years after his death The Atlantic did decide to publish the first installment, with a forward by Hawthorne's friend Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes reminisced about his departed colleague, and recounted his final visit with him:

It was my fortune to be among the last of the friends who looked upon Hawthorne's living face.... How changed from his former port and figure! There was no mistaking the long iron-gray locks, the carriage of the head, and the general look of natural outlines and movement; but he seemed to have shrunken in all his dimension, and falter along with an uncertain, feeble step, as if every movement were an effort.

After describing Hawthorne's funeral he went on to describe the bucolic spot at Concord's Sleepy Hollow Cemetery where Hawthorne's body had been buried:

... in a patch of sunlight, flecked by the shade of tall, murmuring pines, at the summit of a gently swelling mound where the wild-flowers had climbed to find the light and the stirring of fresh breezes.

Hawthorne would not be forgotten, Holmes emphasized, because "he has left enough [important writing] to keep his name in remembrance as long as the language in which he shaped his deep imagination is spoken by human lips."

Six years later The Atlantic published more excerpts from literary notebooks that Hawthorne had kept. These notebooks recorded his time in England as the United States Consul at Liverpool—a position to which he had been appointed by another friend from Bowdoin, President Franklin Pierce. These excerpts were accompanied by a long introduction by G. S. Hillard, who discussed both Hawthorne's character and the effect that his time in England may have had on him personally and as a writer. He described Hawthorne's surprising combination of imposing stature and painful shyness:

He was tall and strongly built, with broad shoulders, deep chest, a massive head, black hair, and large dark eyes. Wherever he was he attracted attention by his imposing presence. He looked like a man who might have held the stroke-oar in a university boat.... But, on the other hand, no man had more of the feminine element than he. He was feminine in his quick perceptions, his fine insight, his sensibility to beauty, his delicate reserve, his purity of feeling.... So, too, he was the shyest of men. The claims and courtesies of social life were terrible to him.

Hillard speculated that for someone as socially awkward as Hawthorne was, the social obligations of a U.S. consul must have been rather trying. But he also suggested that jobs like this one were in some ways helpful to Hawthorne, because "they took him out of the world of dreams into the world of life."

In several excerpted entries from the English notebooks, Hawthorne expressed in his own words just how unpleasant he found some of his social obligations as consul. In one entry he recounted how nervous he was delivering a simple dinner speech. "I hardly thought it was me, but, being once started, I felt no embarrassment, and went through it as coolly as if I were going to be hanged."

Hawthorne's social isolation and shyness were the subject of another article, published thirty years later. In "The Solitude of Nathaniel Hawthorne" (November 1901), Paul Elmer More considered Hawthorne's reclusive temperament and discussed how it manifested itself in nearly all of his literary works.

It needs but a slight acquaintance with his own letters and Note-Books, and with the anecdotes current about him, to be assured that never lived a man to whom ordinary contact with his fellows was more impossible, and that the mysterious solitude in which his fictitious characters move is a mere shadow of his own imperial loneliness of soul.

More argued that this essential solitariness, and the "penalty" of it on the human soul is a theme that runs through all of Hawthorne's work. "I believe no single tale [of Hawthorne's], however short or insignificant," More wrote, "can be named in which, under one guise or another, this recurrent idea does not appear." In The Scarlet Letter, for example,

From the opening scene at the prison door, which, "like all that pertains to crime, seemed never to have known a youthful era," to the final scene on the scaffold, where the tragic imagination of the author speaks with a power barely surpassed in the books of the world, the whole plot of the romance moves about this one conception of our human isolation as the penalty of transgression.

More tried to discern what might have made Hawthorne so drawn to his own inner, solitary world. He ventured a few theories including everything from an inherited disturbance of temperament—Hawthorne's ancestors, after all, had been among the judges to condemn alleged witches to death at Salem—to his isolation as a boy. But ultimately More settled on a less dark explanation, attributing his inwardness to "the everlasting mystery of genius inhabiting his brains."

Half a century later the literary critic Alfred Kazin took a look back at Hawthorne and sought to put his work into context. In "Hawthorne: The Artist of New England" (December 1966) Kazin wrote that despite the fact that Hawthorne "had ceased to be an example to writers of fiction—if indeed he had ever been ... [he] was still the most interesting artist in fiction whom New England has produced."

Because Hawthorne's preoccupations went deeper than mere surface matters, Kazin argued, he was able to convey the "inner life" of New England better than any other writer.

All that the local colorists and satirists of the New England scene were to paint as provincial stiffness, inarticulate hardness, Hawthorne had presented as the self-questioning, the debate of so many claims within the human heart, that goes on all the time....

Hawthorne's great subject was, indeed, the sense of guilt, that is perhaps the most enduring theme in the moral history of the West—guilt that is the secret tie that binds us to others and to our own past, guilt that all the characters in these stories accept and live in, because guilt, theologically conceived, is human identity. In guilt is the great rationale of human history, as Hawthorne knew it; in guilt alone is there a task for man to accomplish, a redemption of the past and promise of a future.

The central character in all [his] stories is the inward man, the human soul trying to represent itself.

Unfortunately, Kazin argued, most modern readers and writers tended to perceive such themes as anachronistic, and therefore failed to feel a sense of personal connection to Hawthorne and his works.

To those who value past writers because they influence our living and thinking now, Hawthorne is unreal. Those who create literature in our own day have never been touched by Hawthorne as they have been by Melville, Thoreau, and even Emerson.

Thus, although he was, according to Kazin, "the only New England artist in fiction whose works form a profound imaginative world of their own—and the only one who represents more than some phase of New England history," to most of us, Kazin explained, by the mid-twentieth century he had become "safely established in the past."

"It was almost as if he had aimed at that," Kazin wrote: "He had become 'New England'.... [He] was writing myths for New England to remember itself by."

—Sean Weiner

Hawthorne

Criticism of Nathaniel Hawthorne from John Erskine

The Facts of His Life

A writer who pictures life chiefly in order to project abstract ideas is not likely to reveal in his art more of himself than his general disposition. Hawthorne’s biography makes rich and human reading, for he was an admirable man in all ways and his private life was in the best sense fortunate; if at first he endured poverty, he earned success later, and even in the obscure years he had the admiration of loyal friends. But only in a few instances does his biography aid directly in the understanding of his works, and then for the most part by explaining his contact with Transcendental ideas. Of the nonliterary events in his life it is enough to say that he was born in Salem, Massachusetts, 4 July, 1804, of an old New England family; that after his father’s death he was educated by his mother’s brothers, and in 1825 he was graduated from Bowdoin College; that among his classmates he made three lifelong friends—Longfellow, the poet, Franklin Pierce, later President of the United States, and Horatio Bridge, who first appreciated his genius; that chiefly through Bridge’s thoughtfulness he was made weigher and gauger at the Boston Custom House, 1839–1841, and surveyor at the Salem Custom House, 1846–1850; that President Pierce appointed him to the consulship of Liverpool, 1853–1857; that he lived in Italy for two years, 1857–1859, and that while travelling for his health, attended by Pierce, he died at Plymouth, New Hampshire, 18 May, 1864. His Close Observation of Life Most philosophers can be classed roughly among those who conceive of the ideal ends of life as already existing in heaven, in some order or pattern which may be imitated on earth, or among those who think of the ideal as of something which does not yet exist, but which is implicit in the universe, and toward which the universe evolves. A philosopher of the first or Platonic type, if he notices facts at all, is likely to be disconcerted by them, since they rarely conform to his ideal or serve to authorize it; his comfort is in rising superior to actual life—that is, in ignoring it. Alcott was an almost pure example of this type. The other kind of philosopher is likely to entertain a respect amounting almost to reverence for any concrete existing condition, because as two points determine a straight line, so a recent moment observed against the past gives indication of the order to come. Emerson was partly, like Alcott, a Platonist, but he had also a profound and inconsistent disposition toward this other way of thought; having two points of view at once, therefore, he is not only perplexing at times, but really contradictory, and it is not strange that he should have proved in one aspect of his genius inspiring to Maeterlinck and in the other aspect acceptable to Nietzsche. Hawthorne belonged altogether to the second type of thinker. Concerned primarily with the actual world before him, he found a natural use for the past in the explanation it might give of the present, but the present was to him just as naturally the more important moment, and most interesting of all was the occasional hint or prophecy of that to which time through its past and present changes might be tending. He was a radical, therefore, but he saw clearly that this particular present will soon be no more sacred than any other moment of the past, and that to devote oneself to any cause as though it were a final remedy of circumstances, promising rest thereafter, is merely to postpone stagnation for a while. With this insight he could not readily give his faith to any reform or reformer; even the crusade for abolition and the war for the Union left him cold, for he wisely doubted whether measures conceived in the root-and-branch spirit might not raise more evils in the state than they were intended to cure. True reform, the only kind that could enlist his sympathy, must work hand in hand with nature’s slowly evolving but inevitable order, and so long as that order can be but partially or infrequently discerned, it is best to do nothing violent, nothing headlong. Even when we discern the order, from time to time, we should become humble, observing how little it resembles our own morality, our own dreams of perfection.   8   It needs no fine perception to discover these principles or attitudes in Hawthorne, for they are displayed quite simply on the surface of his early stories. The significance he attached to the present world, whatever it might be, can be seen in the important group of essay sketches such as A Rill from the Town Pump, David Swan, Sights from a Steeple, and Main Street. Some resemblance has been found between this department of his work and the essays of Addison and of Irving, and certainly Addison’s cheerfulness is here, and often something more than Irving’s fancy. But neither The Spectator nor The Sketch Book would suggest that Addison or Irving was in the habit of keeping a diary; whereas Hawthorne’s simple studies, of the group just referred to, are in form nothing more than episodes in a journal. The fact is of some consequence in understanding his genius. When the American and European notebooks were finally included in the complete editions of his writings, they took their place, not as an appendix or illustration of more perfect things, but on equal terms with his other works; for the journal manner was suited to his realistic, unprejudiced search into the world about him, and his lifelong preoccupation with his diary was not, as with most novelists, for the sake of books to be written later, but was itself the satisfaction of a primary literary interest. Like the journals, the essay sketches take the scene as they find it, extract from it all that observation can, and then discard it, having proved no point and exhibited no characters in continuous interplay, but having uncovered possibilities, hints, causes, coincidences. In the simpler essays Hawthorne observed these possibilities and coincidences in a kind of stationary cross-section, and left them undeveloped; but in more elaborate stories he played with the ironic contrasts between the order which we foresee in life and the order which time brings to pass. Emerson often came out of his mysticism and contemplated the “beautiful necessity,” the inevitable consequence of things, to which man must submit himself before he has either happiness or power. Hawthorne was inclined to stress rather man’s inability to submit himself to this necessity, since he seldom guesses correctly what it would be. Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe is a lighter treatment of this theme of consequences; Edward Fane’s Rosebud and The Wives of the Dead are in a darker tone. Or sometimes Hawthorne would turn the irony in another direction, by emphasizing the incredible swiftness with which the present becomes the past, and the insidiousness with which antiquity begins to show its symptoms even in what seems youthful and emancipated. The May-pole of Merry Mount brings this idea home, less in the overthrow of the maskers at Merry Mount than in the expressed faith of the stern Puritan leader that the troubles of life come soon and unexpectedly—a confession which somehow brings a chill over his own righteous success. A still better illustration is Endicott and the Red Cross, which shows the Puritans, who crossed the ocean for freedom of conscience and who in the moment of the story proclaim themselves champions of religious liberty, as having nevertheless instituted already the pillory and the stocks for those who disagree with them. Hawthorne and PuritanismTHE romances of Hawthorne can hardly be understood apart from the current of Transcendentalism in which his genius was formed. Most foreigners and many of his countrymen have thought of him as an affectionate student of the New England past, in a small way comparable to Scott with his love of Border history, and especially they have thought of him as a kind of portrait painter, who magically resharpened for us the already fading lineaments of Puritanism. Reflection might suggest, however, that the portrait he restored bears an unlucky resemblance in its sombreness and its unloveliness to the portrait of Edward Randolph in the Twice Told Tales, and a little further thought would perhaps convince us that Hawthorne usually treats Puritanism, not as the central theme in his canvas, but as a dark background for the ideas and for the experiences which more deeply concern him. Those ideas and experiences have little to do with Puritanism except by contrast; they were partly furnished to his imagination by the enthusiastic but uncritical thinkers among his acquaintance who kindled rapturously at Alcott’s conversations or basked in the indefiniteness of Emerson’s lectures, and partly they were furnished by his own contact with Alcott and Emerson and with their writings. Like them, he was less a Puritan than a lover of the present, and if he seemed often to deal with things long past, it was only because he had the faculty, more than other men, of recognizing in the present whatever had served its purpose or was worn out or dead. Taken from: http://www.bartleby.com/226/0201.html