The Scarlet Letter

Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
Year completed: 1850 (when the USA was still younger than a centenarian)
Personal enjoyment:9/10
Would I read it again: YES!

When this novel was released it became an instant hit, selling like hot potatoes. It's no wonder why with a  plot as brilliant as this, full of enough passion, wild emotion and rule-breaking to make an EastEnders episode look  as pathetic as a piece of cardboard floating in the wind.

Plot:
(Bear with me, this might be long)

When Hester becomes pregnant the only conclusion that can be reached is that she is an adulteress, as she has been separated from her husband for two full years. She gallantly refuses to reveal the name of her daughter's (Pearl) father, so that he might be saved from punishment. However she is ordered to wear a scarlet letter "A" on the bodice of her dress, so that everyone can know about her adultery (yes yes, as we know, the feminist movement was a long way off...)

But then.

DUN DUN DUUUUN.

Hester Prynne’s long lost husband arrives...and the story soon gets pretty interesting.

He visits her in prison before her release and asks her not to tell anyone that he’s in town. His plan is to disguise himself so that he can ferret out and seek revenge on her lover.  Like an undercover James Bond, Hester’s husband tells the townspeople that he’s a physician, and he adopts a fake name: Roger Chillingworth (you can tell he thought he badass by the surname he chose). Hester keeps his secret. Chillingworth is quite a successful spy, as he quickly catches on  that the minister, the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, is the likely father of Hester’s baby, and he haunts the minister’s mind and soul, day and night, for the next seven years. 
Now that is one psychopathic spy. 

The minister is too afraid to confess his sin publicly, but he's such a lovely honest guy his guilt eats away at him anyway. And Chillingworth’s constant examination makes him paranoid, and practically verging on having a nervous break down. After seven years, Hester finally catches on and realizes the evil her husband has done to the man she truly loves. She reveals Chillingworth’s true identity to Dimmesdale, and the two concoct a plan to leave Boston and go to England, where they might hide from Hester’s husband and create a new life together.
BUT 

You know how I said the minister was an honest guy? Yeah, turns out he's too honest. So much so that it becomes a bad thing. Dimmesdale confesses his sin to the townspeople on the scaffold that had, seven years earlier, been the scene of Hester’s public shaming. His dying act is to throw open his shirt so that the scarlet A that he has carved onto his chest is revealed to his parishioners.

 

Big Themes:

Sin and judgement
Hester Prynne has sinned by committing adultery. As a part of her punishment, Hester and Pearl must both stand on the scaffold every day. This punishment publically humiliates Hester and forces her to acknowledge her sin each and every day. But is Hester's initial crime a sin? She had to live without him while he was abroad (for all she knew he could have been dead) before falling in love with Dimmesdale--perhaps discovering the feeling for the first time.

Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale sin is perhaps even worse, because as well as being an adulterer he allows Hester to take the full blow of society's displeasure while he stands by in silence. He is also an authority figure, looked up to by others.

And what is Chillingworth's sin? Essentially abandoning his wife for so long upon their marriage, or failing to forgive her once he knew of the crime?

For each kind of sin, we wonder if the punishment fits the crime and what must be done, if anything, to redeem the sinner in the eyes of society as well as in the eyes of the sinner himself or herself.

Femininity

Hester Prynne is willing to take on her own shame while protecting the man she loves from his share of the public condemnation. She keeps his secret faithfully, for seven long years. Even when she might have been able to demand his help, she does not seek it. Alternatively, the two men in Hester's life, her husband and her lover, are cowards and hypocrites, unwilling to reveal their true identities. Women, although the "weaker sex" in this heavily religious society, prove to be incredibly strong in this novel.

Man and the Natural World

The way nature is often personified as listening, commenting on, and interacting with other characters makes it almost seem like an individual character. The society itself (Puritan Boston society) is like an island surrounded by nature. The town is bordered on one side by a huge expanse of woods, home to Native Americans (the Wampanoag tribes). On the other side lies the big blue Atlantic Ocean. From the beginning of this story, our narrator tells us that nature is “kind” and generous, contrasting heavily with the cold and strict ways of Puritan society.

This is seen especially in the narrator's description of the forest. The town and the surrounding forest represent opposing behavioural systems. The town represents civilization, a rule-bound space where everything one does is on display and where transgressions are quickly punished. The forest, on the other hand, is a space of natural rather than human authority. In the forest, society’s rules do not apply, and alternate identities can be assumed. While this allows for misbehavior— Mistress Hibbins’s midnight rides, for example—it also permits greater honesty and an escape from the repression of Boston. When Hester and Dimmesdale meet in the woods, for a few moments, they become happy young lovers once again. Hester’s cottage, which, significantly, is located on the outskirts of town and at the edge of the forest, embodies both orders. It is her place of exile, which ties it to the authoritarian town, but because it lies apart from the settlement, it is a place where she can create for herself a life of relative peace.

My verdict:

Dimmesdale.

What a guy.

He. Ruined.The. Entire. Story.

If he had just gone off with Hester, the story would have had a happy ending.

Words are beyond me.

Note: There's a slightly boring bit at the beginning of the book though...and it is slightly (cough, very) unneccessary to read if you're only reading it for personal enjoyment. If you're the impatient type, AVOID IT LIKE YOU WOULD A KID WITH HEADLICE.

Further reading for students:
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/scarlet/
http://www.shmoop.com/scarlet-letter/
http://www.gradesaver.com/the-scarlet-letter/

Lolita

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."

Author: Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Year published: 1955 in Paris, 1958 New York
Personal enjoyment: 10/10

Would I read it again: All. Day. Long. 

Lolita is an beautiful literary masterpiece, brimming with richly woven tapestries of metaphors and wordplays. Spawning two successful films, and influencing numerous singers, authors and artists, I know I am not the only one who has been touched by this story.

Even the name Lolita I now think of as exquisite. I love the way it plays on my tongue, as mentioned by Humbert in the quote above.

Plot:

The story is written from the perspective of  'Humbert Humbert', who is in prison for a murder  alluded to as the killing of the man who took his Lolita, Dolores Haze, away from him.

Humbert is a professor who, after losing his first pubescent love to death ,develops a longing fetish for a class of girls he terms 'nymphets'. These nymphets are not innocent young girls but demonic temptresses  between the ages of 12 and 14 (essentially before they've been fully been through puberty). After a handful of failed relationships and brothel visits he realizes that no woman can compare to the unreal pleasures of a nymphet.

By chance (or perverse divine fate) he arrives at the New England home of Charlotte Haze, a widow, who is prospectively seeking a well-to-do, and ideally a tall dark and handsome man like Humbert in which to rent the spare room of her home to for the summer months. Though cringing at the thought of spending a single consecutive moment longer in the gaudy house, fate intervened and Charlotte's daughter was sunbathing  at the exact moment the house tour reached the back yard. And Charlotte's daughter happened to be the most divine little girl our protagonist could have dreamed of ...

If you're already disgusted, grab a paper bag, the story gets more and more perverse as you go along.

Themes: 

The power of language

Like a literary shroud, language disguises shocking content and gives it a shade of beauty it does not deserve.  In this way, Humbert seduces his readers as fully and slyly as he seduces Lolita herself. 

And this, THIS, is what makes Lolita such an incredibly book. It stretches the power of language to it's limits, doing what was previously thought impossible: persuading you to sympathise with a paedophile.

 

Innocence

The idea of innocence in the novel refers first to Humbert's lack of it. He is, after all, telling his story from jail. And though he recounts the story of his affair with Lolita, he doesn't try to play off that he didn't do anything wrong,(though he tries to win the reader to his side.)
Innocence also emerges as a theme in connection to America, a country that has fully embraced consumer possibilities, shallow movie magazines, and popular culture. Humbert links Lolita's lack of innocence to all of this American-ness, but he also makes a point of explaining that Lolita was not a virgin when he got to her and that she seduced him. In other words, he did not steal her innocence.

Morality and Ethics

Humbert is torn between ethics and ego, law and lust. He offers many defenses for what he has done – psychological (trying to recover from losing Annabel), legal and literary (it may be illegal here and now, but look at East India, and what about Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laureen?), and personal (after all Lolita was experienced and seduced me). The degree of his justification is proven here: just because he wasn't the first to get to Lolita and just because she seduced him, he says it's OK that he carries on for years as he does. Plus his whole nymphet, enchantment, demoniac theme intends to imply that he just couldn't help himself!

American cultures (and perhaps it's incompatibility with European culture?)

His trips across America in Lolita detail this fascination (and repulsion). He scrutinizes every absurd tourist trap, crappy motel, consumer habit, national compulsion, and stereotype of American culture. He both rejects the fussy, musty ways of Europe and plays upon American perceptions of the sophisticated European intellectual. To him, Charlotte represents the worst of American culture: an unthinking, mediocre, upstart with pretentions to cultural sophistication. Still, he is all too ready to let her fantasize about his European background.

Though Humbert recognizes all of Lolita's bad-mannered, outspoken, brash American-ness, he gives her a pass, and in fact embraces her slang and love of lowbrow magazines and Hollywood movies. Unlike her mother, she utterly repudiates, even mocks, his pretense to cleverness and refuses to be reformed or refined by him. Humbert often covertly associates Lolita with America, praising their shared youth and vulgarity. His admission that he has defiled America bears a strong parallel to his treatment of Lolita. Nabokov himself was hurt by accusations that the book was "un-American," an assessment, in his words, that "pains me considerably more than the idiotic accusation of immorality" (source: James Kincaid, "Lolita at Middle Age"). America is the land of mass culture, a modern society of consumer goods, a nation of tourist sights and souvenirs, where everything is commodified and collectable.

My verdict:

Having already watched two of the films made from the book, I knew the story very well. But I think the wonderful power of Labokov's language brought the book alive in a way the films could not. Lolita was the closest I ever got, and ever will get, to sympathising with a paedophile. Language is powerful stuff.

There is one fault, and one fault only, that I found. After Lolita went off with Quilty, there was a very long and boring section up until Humbert was reunited with Lolita, where nothing happened of much interest. Or maybe I was just impatient...
I enjoyed how the adjectives used to describe nymphets like "frail" and "fragile" could also be used to describe butterflies. Ironically, by Humbert effectively studying, capturing and pinning down the nymphets, he destroys the very delicate quality he adores. I found it interesting that Labokov happened to be an avid butterfly-collector. 

Further help for students:
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/lolita/context.html
http://www.gradesaver.com/lolita/
http://www.shmoop.com/lolita/literary-devices.html