Anticipating the Problems of Absent Father and Single Mother: Reassessing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter

Anticipating the Problems of Absent Father and Single Mother: Reassessing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter
Pradipta Sengupta

Abstract

If R.B. Lewis’s “New Adam” hero is “bereft of ancestry”, the concept of the American hero – including Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Melville’s Captain Ahab, Hemingway’s Jake Barnes, Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, among others—is imbued with a sense of distinctness which tends to ignore and subvert paternal authority. Thus, fatherhood is either missing, consciously avoided, or even critiqued in many major American literary texts. As an offshoot of absent fatherhood, though not necessarily a corollary to it, one also encounters the trend of single mothers in American fiction. Starting with the classic Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, American fiction bristles with a host of single mothers chiselled mostly by circumstances, and seldom by choice: Augie’s mother in Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March; Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Eva Peace in Sula; Verna Ekelof in Updike’s Roger’s Version, and Sarah in Updike’s S., to cite only a few. By exploring Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, this article will illustrate that, through the creation of Hester Prynne, Hawthorne anticipates some of the problems and causes of absent fathers and single
mothers in American society and fiction.