English

Events

Faculty Colloquium with Professor Rachel Cole

Date: November 4 2010, 3:30pm Location: Miller Center for the Humanities, Room 105

“Pearl Prynne: Witch-Baby or a New Model of American Personhood?”

In the first half of The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne’s narrator—and her own mother—describe little Pearl as a demon child, warped by the dark passion in which she was conceived. Critics, too, find her difficult to deal with: a generic oddity, a peculiarly flat character in a novel otherwise remarkable for its psychological depth. Later in the novel, however, in scenes set apart from her mother (and which many readers have ignored) Pearl is depicted as a remarkably normal, happy little girl. What’s Hawthorne’s interest in Pearl? Is she really so alien? One of Hawthorne’s rare failures? Or does she represent a new way of being human, one that avoids the sort of troubles that plague her parents and promises a solution to some of America’s most pressing social problems?