Is the World Then So Narrow? Feminist Cinematic Adaptations of Hawthorne and James

At the end of The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne returns to Massachusetts after many years' absence and resumes, "of her own free will," her old badge of shame (263). Sacvan Bercovitch has read this ending as a moral "of socialization in which the point of socialization is not to conform, but to consent. Anyone can submit," he writes, "the socialized believe" (Office xiii).

The distinction is important, for it enables us to see Hester's intellectual independence not as a heroic act of defiance but as an obstacle to her socialization. She must abandon her commitment to Emersonian self-reliance before she can become a fully engaged member of her community. One of our more abiding cultural legacies, Emersonian individualism is hard to dismiss, and Hester's articulate endorsement of it has been even more compelling for twentieth-century readers than for the conventional and law-abiding Arthur Dimmesdale, who is briefly tempted. In the forest Hester exhorts him to escape his seven-years' bondage, echoing Emerson's contempt for social and historical obligations: ¹ "[W]hat hast thou to do with all these iron men, and their opinions?" she asks. Imagining a freer time and place, she challenges the weak minister: "Is the world then so narrow?" (197); "The past is gone!" (202). ² Modern readers generally have no difficulty agreeing, as a review of recent film adaptations will reveal.

Both Hester and Arthur learn, however, that they cannot escape either the community or their history within it. Dimmesdale's brief flirtation with intellectual and social independence reveals itself to be a hallucination; this "revolution in the sphere of [his] thought and feeling" (217) is as unreal as Hester's "dark labyrinth of mind" (166). Arthur's unruly private vision, "stupif[ying] all blessed impulses" (222), proves to be destructive and ethically unsound, and its authority is undermined by the dissonance between his new subjectivity and the public reality that he has endorsed all his life.

Henry James rewrote Hawthorne's novel some thirty-two years later in The Portrait of a Lady. At the risk of effacing many important differences between these two novels, I want to focus briefly on James's conclusion, where Isabel Osmond decides, like Hester Prynne, between fleeing from an intolerable, punitive life with her husband and returning and enduring it as she can. Like Hester, she is briefly tempted by the Emersonian solution, this time offered by the self-reliant Caspar Goodwood. "The world's all before us--and the world's very big," he tells her, echoing Paradise Lost but also recalling Hester's words to her lover (4: 435). "It would be an insult to you to assume that you care for the look of the thing, for what people will say, for the bottomless idiocy of the world. We've nothing to do with all that. . . . We can do absolutely as we please" (4: 434-35).

James's conclusion is more ambiguous than Hawthorne's; all we know is that Isabel escapes Caspar's grasp and "start[s] for Rome" (4: 437). "She had not known where to turn; but she knew now. There was a very straight path" (4: 436). That her path is "straight" suggests both its clarity and its ethical rightness. She has made a promise to her stepdaughter, Pansy, not to abandon her, and Isabel is a woman of her word. Whatever she makes of the suffocating halls of Palazzo Roccanera and of her marriage, one can easily imagine that her future will look something like Hester's, as she offers herself as a counselor for Pansy, in the younger woman's "trials of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful passion" (the phrase, of course, is Hawthorne's, 263).

In these two nineteenth-century novels, the heroines discover--in Hester's words--that the world is narrow, and that the laws governing...