Just Be Yourself

As a former high school English teacher who taught The Scarlet Letter numerous times (I was skeptical the first time I brought the novel into the classroom, but kept using the text because students had such engaged responses), I am most interested in Berlant's reading of the end of the novel. She posits:

"The moral [Hawthorne] puts forth, that to be 'true' is to '[s]how freely to the world ... some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!' exhorts the citizen/reader to donate her/his body to public intelligibility. From the point of view of this maxim, the narrative aims to install a memory of the consequences that persons, citizens, and states suffer when the subject insists on her/his physical and psychic opacity or autonomy from the community" (157).

My former students were drawn to the same passages regarding truth, freedom and expression of self, but their reading was very different from Berlant's. (Are we surprised?! Not once did a high school student refer to Hester Prynne as a "prosthetic phallus" ...) For my students, "the office of the scarlet letter" was to remind us to be ourselves, who we really are, flaws and all. The end of the novel was for them an invitation to let their hair out of its bonnet to glisten in the sun, and to unpin from their chests the repressive labels placed on them by their parents or teachers or peers. They read Dimmesdale's death as a reminder of the consequences of waiting too long to be honest about one's true self, and the ambiguous community responses to his confession and death as proof that his fears about speaking his truth were unwarranted. For my students, the counter-memory of personal truth prevailed in the novel, as further confirmed by the altered meaning of the A--the repressive label was transfigured through honesty and good works.

But Berlant shows that while Hester's responsibility toward the end of the novel is "to reempower the minister, to return to him control over language, the law, and his own body, so ruthlessly taken away from him by their engagement in a 'link of mutual crime' and negative law"--a goal which privileges the self over the community symbolic--the narrator has a different objective (134). According to Berlant, "the narrator's mission, following Dimmesdale's self-exposure, is to rescue the law from its humiliation, to eradicate the amnesiac technology of the state, and to make Puritan culture 'safe' for the future identity of the postrevolutionary nation" (134). In other words, we are invited to make counter-memory the material of the state, in exchange for "a fantasy of boundless identity" (216).

Berlant suggests that we engage with the paradoxes, not the dichotomies, of self/nation and personal/political. Ben Highmore, in one of our early readings, proposed that we engage in the everyday as "an architectural practice" whereby we uncover "a house of material memory opposed to the constructed memory of nation" ("Dwelling on the Daily" 43). If I'm reading Berlant correctly, she seems to suggest that without the construction of nation we might not find a comfortable place to dwell at all.