The name Hawthorne in many classrooms, brings up images of just that: a thorny bush that must be navigated in order to graduate. I would propose this has more to do with how the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne are taught and less with the works themselves. By utilizing a multimedia approach and using contemporary examples in “pop culture” of both Hawthorne’s works and allusions to his works, a teacher can enhance the learning experience of a student.
I realize there are purist out there who think a traditional approach to Hawthorne more appropriate, but I would argue that a student understanding the implications of Hawthorne, both in the author’s day and in ours, is vastly more important than maintaining a tradition. Gerald Graff, in his book Beyond the Culture Wars, gives us an example of how his father “was frustrated by my refusal to read [and]… once confin[ed] me to my room until I finished a book on the voyages of Magellan” (65). Here we see Graft pointing to his father’s traditionalist approach to teach his son to understand literature. Instead, Graft was much more interested in “comic books, sports magazines, and the John R. Tunis and Clair Bee sports novels” (ibid 65). In other words, the pop culture of his day. I wonder what Graft’s experience with Magellan would have been if there had been a comic book to spark an interest in the storyline?
This naturally leads to our discussion of Hawthorne. If we are to adopt a strategy that uses pop culture to excite students about Hawthorne’s works, we must first ask the question: “What contemporary examples of Hawthorne are in today’s pop culture?” For our purposes here, we can use three main categories; that of music, movies, and television shows. By analyzing these categories and tying them into Hawthorne’s works, we can show a type of perpetual importance of the ideas and themes that Hawthorne brings forth. After hooking the student with examples like the music of Taylor Swift, the movie The Help, and characters like Poison Ivy, we can show how these ideas are taken from Hawthorne. This, in turn, will point out that many of the students have pop culture heroes who have also read these stories and can talk and write fluently about them.
To begin, a note on comparing texts of various mediums, including books, movies, and song lyrics. An excellent treatment of this type of intertextual linkage is found in an essay by Zsolt K. Viragos, entitled “The Hazards of Interpretative Overkill: The Myth of Gatsby.” Although the essay itself is not about Hawthorne, Viragos makes some important observations for our discussion. For instance, when discussing how people link various texts, Viragos writes, “the network of cross-references in world literature resonates with obvious, apparent, potential and undiscovered analogs…and will have a large and ever-increasing number of counterparts” (Hungarian Studies in English 52). Viragos points out that there are any number of texts that can be cross-referenced in order to pull a theme out of any one work. In a limited sense, Viragos is talking about the link in the myth themes between literary works, but I propose, in a broader sense, that these intertextual links can come from texts like music, movies, and television shows also. Furthermore, Viragos explains “how intertextual linkage is generated: the oscillation between the poles of similarity, partial identity, anomaly, etc. is grasped [by] the reader or critic” (ibid 52). This shows us that the intertextual connection can be direct, indirect, or partial. Of course, the strongest evidence can be found in direct references, but it may be a mistake to discount partial connections.
This becomes important in our ever fragmenting social landscape, where “being connected” means never actually meeting. This leads to anything from a Hawthomian blurb in a song to a television show where a character reads The Scarlet Letter, to entire movies that are patterned after Hawthome’s themes, sometimes with a twist, and at other times quite true to the original text. By gathering these occurrences together, we can show the modern day cultural impact of Hawthorne on current issues and entertainment. Here, I will be focusing on two main modes of reference in pop culture: the explicit, where Hawthorne and/or his works are named or imitated, and the implicit, where a myth theme of Hawthorne is present, although not called out. In the latter case we will see these implied myth-themes may be older myth themes Hawthorne adapts himself.
It is said that, “Music soothes the savage beast,” and so perhaps the use of music to teach Hawthorne to a class full of undergraduates is appropriate. I am not saying that all students are savage beasts, but at times when faced with a difficult to understand Hawthorne text, some may turn into just this. Music is a vast opportunity for an instructor, if they can tap into this culturally significant medium in the classroom. Perhaps a good question to begin a class with would be, “What do Taylor Swift and Metallica have in common?” This should perk up the ears of a decent slice of the class. The answer: Hawthorne.
Taylor Swift is actually an extremely good place to start our discussion. In Swift’s song, entitled “Love Story,” she sings, “So close your eyes, escape this town for a little while/’Cause you were Romeo, I was a scarlet letter/And my daddy said `Stay away from Juliet’ (qtd. @ azlyric.com). This explicit mention of The Scarlet Letter is interesting. First, it tells us that Swift knows what The Scarlet Letter is, and another interesting detail is her age when she wrote these lyrics. Being so young implies she had contact with the text in High School, apparently alongside William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. In fact, the entire song is about a Romeo and Juliet type situation, and the verse, “I was a scarlet letter,” appears to be a mixed metaphor.
I realize there are those who may chalk this up to Swift needing a line for a song. I can understand the sentiment, but even if this is exactly true, it does not negate, both the phrase’s interesting use and its importance to pop culture, which in turn makes it appropriate for our discussion.
The reason this verse seems so out of place in a song about “Star-Crossed lovers,” is because Hester and Dimmesdale are anything but. Romeo and Juliet are willing to give up their lives for each other, and this does not happen in The Scarlet Letter. In fact, there is a vast difference between the “romantic” Romeo and his antithesis Dimmesdale, who Hawthorne writes has a “dim interior” (Scarlet Letter 87) and is a “low, dark, and misshapen figure” (SL 91). The very name of Dimmesdale, eludes to him as a dim person and is counter to the handsome and lively portrait of Romeo.
This leads us to look a little deeper into Swift’s mixing of metaphors. If we assume she intended this mix, then we wonder how she ties these ends together. In an interview for the Los Angeles Times about “Love Story,” Swift explains that “I was going through a situation like that where I could relate. I used to be in high school where you see [a boyfriend] every day. Then I was in a situation where it wasn’t so easy for me, and I wrote this song because I could relate to the whole Romeo and Juliet thing” (qtd. @ azlyrics.com). The Romeo and Juliet theme is clear and so I would propose the way Swift is tying these two together is by reading them both as tragedies. If Swift is reading The Scarlet Letter, which is considered a romance, against the grain, and instead seeing it as a tragedy, the intertextual linkage is plain. The two lovers in each story do not get happy endings. This is conspicuous because in Swift’s “Love Story” the couple does, as Swift sings, “Marry me Juliet/You’ll never have to be alone” (qtd. @ azlyrics.com). I believe this leads us to the students in the classroom reading these classic texts in entirely new ways.
Swift’s fans, known as “Swifties,” are mainly in the millennial generation and much like Swift, they may not understand why Romeo and Juliet could not have a happy ending. In a generation living with ideals about family, marriage, and sexuality that are so far removed from Puritan times, it is not hard to see why. This points to a need for, at least a cursory lesson on the Histo-critical method for students to be able to grasp these differences.
Again, I realize that some will simply dismiss Swift’s mixed metaphor as a line in a song, but I would point out that a quick dismal is what we like to do when a person’s reading of a text is different than our own. We claim, “They just don’t get it,” instead of looking into the reasons why their stance is different. The important thing here is that “Love Story” went multiplatinum, which means that, not only did millions of teenagers hear this song, they may be much more inclined to agree with Swift’s reading, than that of their English teacher.
To prove diversity we can turn to an entirely different genre of music, heavy metal, and the band Metallica. In the song “The Thorn Within,” whose very title brings to mind the name of Hawthorne, we see the explicit moving toward the implied. Lyrics like, “I do your time, I take your fall/I’m branded guilty for us all” (qtd. @ azlyrics.com), certainly bring the idea of The Scarlet Letter to the forefront of the mind, but I believe there is a deeper level here. For instance, Hawthorne and perhaps even Metallica, may have had St. Paul’s statement that, “a thorn was given me in the flesh” (RSV, 2 Cor. 12:7), in mind as they write. In fact, each of the three, St. Paul, Hawthorne, and Metallica, show us that bring imperfect gives one a “sympathic knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts” (SL 60). This sympathy that both Swift and Metallica seem to share with Hawthorne is a base line for discussion. By pointing out this wide variety of correlation between these seemingly different types of music and how they relate to Hawthorne’s works, we may be able to draw students into a discussion about the themes of Hawthorne that they can relate to their current culture.
Furthermore, Michael Broek, in his article “Hawthorne, Madonna, and Lady Gaga: The Marble Faun’s Transgressive Miriam,” we have yet another tie to the music industry. This article claims that Madonna in the 1980s and Lady Gaga today, use their art, much like Hawthorne, to point out hypocrisy. What is more, Broek believes, “arguments could be made for relating Hawthorne’s work to contemporary female pop artist other than Madonna and Lady Gaga, and such homologies would be intriguing” (Journal of American Studies 638). Especially pertinent here is the use of media in teaching these lessons. Broek explains that, “What sets these artists [Madonna and Lady Gaga] from earlier female pop “transgressors,” however, is also what sets The Marble Faun apart from other Hawthorne novels. Here Broek is showing that Madonna and Lady Gaga are using the newest forms of media in order to teach the lessons they have for the world. Even more profound is Broek’s assertion that Hawthorne does the same thing albeit with, “paintings, sketches, sculptures, Roman ruins, the coliseum, the Parthenon, and especially the Faun of Praxiteles” (ibid 638). It is not much of a stretch that music videos of today, are what sculptures were in the past.
All this being said, it would be difficult to deny the cross over between the music industry today and the works of Hawthorne. The question remains though, “How do we incorporate these into a classroom setting?” The author, Derrick Jensen, gives us an idea in his book: Walking on Water: Reading, Writing and Revolution. Although the text focuses on teaching classes in writing, it is a short leap to literature, and so the lessons transfer quite well.
Jensen proposes that teaching is less about forcing students to regurgitate what they think the teacher wants to hear, and more about showing them how to think. I could not agree more, especially in the field of liberal arts. In the chapter, “The most important writing exercise,” Jensen uses “a CD player, a pile of CDs, and a pile of books” (61), to teach about writing. Jensen asks, “What’s the attraction of rock `n’ roll?” (61), finally bringing the class to an answer, “Power. Passion. Energy” (61). By playing all types of music, from Jimi Hendricks to Beethoven, he accents this lesson, showing the students that this is true of all art. It is the power, passion, and energy that creates art. The same is true of music, painting, and writing. Much like Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga, Hawthorne uses the power of his art to point out the hypocrisy of the Puritan culture and in doing so creates an energy for change that unfolds through the years, even into the current pop culture of today. Hawthorne is not boring; he is the Ozzy Osborne of his time.
This awareness of Hawthorne within our contemporary pop culture can also be seen in the movies that are produced. Aside from the many remakes of The Scarlet Letter, there are numerous movies that either explicitly use Hawthorne or at the very least imply his themes to such a degree as to draw attention to the author. One such example is the movie Easy A starring Emma Stone as a virginal “pretender” of an adulteress. Stone’s character, Olive, is tasked with writing a paper on The Scarlet Letter, and, in a twist, begins living the ordeal of Hester Prynne. Olive goes as far as sewing the letter `A’ on her clothing and wearing it like a badge. Of course, in the movie the young Olive is innocent of all charges, except lying about her love affairs for various reasons, but in the end earns her `A’ grade by using a webcam to teach a very Hawthornian message about judgment, redemption and hypocrisy.
While I will concede that it is much different to pretend to be an adulteress and to live with actually being one, it is interesting to note that the character still learns how people would treat her if she had actually “sinned” in this way. Another point to make about this movie is that while the movie is Hawthorne themed, there is no character that mirrors Dimmesdale or Chillingsworth. Pearl is also absent and so the important lessons we learn from Hawthorne’s use of these characters is missing.
As before, I do not propose to do away with the Hawthorne texts. I propose instead that movies like Easy A many entice an otherwise skeptical student, to explore the text more fully. By assigning the movie first and then asking the students to relate it to the text itself, we may find that students understand the text better, because we have given them a baseline to start measuring from.
Moving to a more implicit Hawthorne themed movie, we have The Help, again starring Emma Stone. In this text there is no overt mention of Hawthorne, but there are a number of references that, in my reading, are obvious. For instance, there is a correlation between the mother of Stone’s character, who mirrors Hepzibah in The House of the Seven Gables. Not only does the mother embody the 1960s aristocratic old lady, who mistreats her servants, she wears a “strange horror of a turban on her head” (HS 27). In fact, the entire character seems to read as Hepzibah, and like Hawthorne’s character, the mother learns a lesson in the end and is able to change who she is.
Another interesting parallel is the character played by Sissy Spacek, who seems to minor Clifford. They are both a little senile and care little about the world’s judgment. There is even a Holgrave character, although I will admit it is a small one.
Stone’s character, nick-named Skeeter, is on the other hand, a type of Hawthorne’s Phoebe. Skeeter is not content with how things have been, she has no desire to be made into a housewife, and she makes a country to city to country transition just like Phoebe. Even so, Skeeter eventually moves to the city for good, instead of staying in the country like Phoebe. This movement theme is prevalent in Hawthorne and so it seems conspicuous in the movie when tied to the other evidence. What has changed in our current culture is that moving to the city has become the ideal instead of the country as in Hawthorne’s contemporary time which is why this is reversed in the movie.
Moving on to the medium of television shows, there are numerous mentions of Hawthorne and his works in the various popular shows. From The Glimore Girls and The Mentalist and even The Simpsons, there is mention of, or close correlation to, Hawthorne’s works and/or themes. One of the strongest characters portrayed is Beatrice from “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” The Batman character of Poison Ivy seems to be one of the most overt correlations in television to Hawthorne’s short stories. Although it is difficult to prove undeniably, the Poison Ivy Wikipedia page cites Batman: The Complete History, as claiming, “[T]he character was partly inspired by the short story “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” (qtd. Wikipedia) written by Nathaniel Hawthorne.” Naturally, this citation is for the original comic book, but any movement from the original character would extend from this genesis. The parallels are obvious.
For instance, both characters are beautiful, both are poisonous, and both have a scientific slant. After all, Beatrice is an assistant to a “scientific gardener” (RD para. 11), with a “scientific mind” (RD para. 9). Poison Ivy is often portrayed as a scientist character, especially as an environmentalist, albeit an Eco-terrorist, but a lover of the environment nonetheless. This is interesting as Hawthorne points out the character of Giovanni lives in a mansion where “perhaps an occupant…had been pictured by Dante as a partaker of the immortal agonies of his Inferno” (RD para. 3). The text note of the Norton Edition reminds us that an “unnamed Paduan nobleman [was] among those who committed crimes against Nature” (The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings 199, Note 7). While the difference between the “crimes of Nature” in Hawthorne’s time and our own are vastly different, this is still easily translated to the global environmental crisis of today. Therefore, it is not difficult to see how a modern-day reader would view both Poison Ivy and Beatrice as environmentalist.
Hawthorne is not the first author to use the concept of a poisonous female in their writing. As far as the physically poisonous female, this theme is especially prevalent in writing from the Indian continent, and by the seventeenth century we see it arrive in the western literature. This physical understanding of the poisonous female is differentiated from the female figures of Eve and Pandora, who bring both physical and spiritual death into the world. This establishment of an entire canon of literature that carries this theme shows us this is not new, but I believe the way Hawthorne uses the theme most certainly is. Beatrice commits no sin or transgression in the story and is wholly an innocent, whereas Eve and Pandora let their curiosity get the best of them (feminine curiosity seems looked down upon in ancient times). Even so, the consequence is the same has Beatrice tends the plants her father, “has killed [with] by the perfume of a flower” (RD para. 50). This is exactly how Poison Ivy kills in the comic books and the subsequent movies starring the Poison Ivy character.
Moving to more implicit evidence we have the character of Phoebe in the popular show Friends. The character of Phoebe is played by Lisa Kudrow, and she acts a lot like Hawthome’s character in The House of Seven Gables. Kudrow plays a female character who is, as Hawthorne describes, “young, blooming, and very cheerful…a face to which almost any door would have open of its own accord” (HS 46). In the show, Phoebe is an optimistic girl who has a mysteries past that unfolds slowly and is even then still obscure. What is more, the Friends character is a feminist and an environmentalist, which is precisely what a modern day Hawhtornian Phoebe would be like. Hawthorne’s Phoebe does not rush to get married and enjoys tending the flowers in the family garden. This, coupled with the examples from the movie and music industries, shows us just how much currency Hawthorne still holds in our culture today.
Finally, a note on The Blithedale Romance. First, there are not many references to this particular work of Hawthorne in contemporary media. The references that can be found are typically embedded deep into scenes and typically seem to be a nod to Hawhtorne instead of a use of his theme in the novel. For instance, in the Harry Potter movies there is a character named Moody, who has, as Hawthorne’s character Moodie, a “patch on his left eye” (BR 82). In the movie Half-Blood Prince, there is even a scene where Moody has his eye patch on the wrong eye, perhaps an ode to Hawthorne’s character’s eye “patch over his right eye” (BR 179). Which Hawthorne writes seemingly on mistake. After the Potter character realizes that the patch is on the wrong eye, he moves it back to the correct one.
Aside from this, we see a long tradition of the “drowned woman,” theme in literature. From the Chinese folk stories retold by Maxine Kong Kingston to the Mexican-American author Rudolfo Anaya, there are numerous examples in world literature of texts with a drowned woman motif. In Chinese literature this is portrayed as woman become disgraced or shamed, and in the Mexican culture in spawns the La Llorona myth. Again, although this theme is, in a wider sense, a structure of literary works from around the world, its presence in Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, tells us that there is an underlying theme. That ties Hawthorne into the wider literary community from around the world.
Again, the question is how to incorporate these texts into a class on literature. Another voice in the discussion is Lauren Gatti and her article “Seriously Popular: Rethinking 19th Century Literature through the Teaching of Popular Fiction.” Gatti also believes that we should “try hard to breathe life into Hawthorne’s work” (The English Journal 47), while she still admits that “reading Hawthorne is hard” (ibid 47). For Gatti the answer is to allow the students to, “add the poems, songs, or books that they have read…for example, if a student’s canon included Tupac, Poe, Longfellow, Lauryn Hill…the students could have these figures debating the merits of their [these authors] works” (ibid 52). Gatti is clear we should not “abandon texts that make us work hard” (ibid 53), and by using contemporary artists we can bridge the gap.
In conclusion, all of these examples of modern media of various forms, including songs, movies, and television shows, show us there is a huge opportunity to bring the classic works, especially that of Nathaniel Hawthorne, alive. Making these texts clearer and more present to the student in class will open up an entire tool chest of resources for a lively discussion of Hawthorne. I believe this is important, because Hawthorne’s writing teaches us something about what it is to be human, and by learning these works, the students will thereby learn about how they should live.
Perhaps some will see beginning the discussion of Hawthorne with contemporary movies and songs, as sneaky at best and blasphemous at worst, but I maintain that the student being actively involved in these discussions and learning something from them is vastly more important than any traditional approach. I whole heartedly agree that Hawthorne should be taught in class, but I believe by not using these techniques a teacher is missing an awesome opportunity to show the perpetual importance of one of the foundational fathers of American Literature. I admit that this will be necessarily more complex and difficult to accomplish. Even so, forcing students to sit, dead-eyed as a teacher talks, is not a better alternative. Recently there are more and more voices rising in academia with evidence to prove it is well worth the extra effort.
Works Cited
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