Shame & Storms
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Guide to Reading & Reflecting by Karen Swallow Prior
Although I’ve had a copy of Karen Swallow Prior’s edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter for more than a year, I waited to read it until I could tag along with the Close Reads podcast, where I knew she’d be a guest. The podcasters all joked that the book may be more fun to discuss than to read, and I agree. I would have preferred it as a short story. But it’s a great book to use to discuss shame — something few people outside of Brené Brown like to talk about. I know I don’t like to talk about it.
But at this year’s summer solstice — an annual occurrence I dread as a lifelong Texan who hates heat — I had a shame attack. I could not stop sobbing. I took A Forest Walk and found myself lost in an emotional Maze through The Interior of a Heart (mine).No possibility of Megan at Her Needle Pencil, writing herself out. Shame showed up and threw a tantrum Pearl would have been proud of. The Recognition of its depths undid me for that long, hot day.
* Spoiler for a 109-year-old novel you probably read in high school.
Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale share the same shame: adultery. They truly love each other. That doesn’t make their affair less shameful, but it complicates it. Both bear some form of a scarlet A. Hester’s is a fabric emblem she is forced to wear. His is, well, it’s the reason he frequently reaches with his hand to cover his heart. Whether or not an A actually brands his chest — that’s something on which good Puritan folks in the town disagree. He covers his A until the end, when he confesses in front of God and everyone. Hester embroiders hers with gold and becomes such a golden soul that people begin to whisper the A stands for Able. But at one point she tears off her symbol, and it returns to her. She can’t shake it. At the end of the story she wears it again, meekly, until her death. Hester and Arthur cannot shake loose from their shame.
What do I do with mine? Do I hide it? Flaunt it? Fling it away? Soldier on with it securely attached?
My shames are no more interesting than Hester’s. I am like the sisters in The Big Sleep, who, as General Sternwood observes, have “all the usual vices, besides those they’ve invented for themselves.” I’ve been greedy and lustful, and I have so much envy you could fill a Texas-sized swimming pool with it. There are things I have done and failed at doing, and things I have left undone that might have changed my life or the lives of my loved ones if I had done them.
So what does a person do with shame?
In the introduction to the book, Prior writes that Hawthorne was writing “a romance, a work characterized by good and evil in their stark forms, touched by the supernatural elements and relying heavily on the power of symbols.” I spent the day of the solstice threading my own version of that good-evil needle. Quick! Give me a poem that can be a symbol to show me the way out. (Nope.) Or take me to church! Surely confession will be good for my soul and stop these tears. (Yes on #1, no on #2.) What I needed that day was a literal and wholly natural storm to help me glimpse the supernatural.
At about 5 p.m. on the solstice, we had a whip of a storm. I watched it through the floor-to-ceiling windows in a yoga studio. Flooding, hail, tornado-strength wind, downed tree limbs, power outages — all in under an hour. I was safe, dry, breathing, moving, not crying. My shame had settled down into child’s pose. We shifted into down dog and took Another View of the world and ourselves. Like Hester, I have a “life-long sorrow.” When I share it, it becomes, as it was for Hester, “looked upon with awe, yet with reverence too.” I don’t need my version of a scarlet letter to disappear in order to have “joy,” “sacred love,” and to be “happy,” like Hester becomes, even with her scarlet letter. I only think I do.
So the morning after the storm — which continued through the night — I wrote a poem. I don’t know what Hester and Arthur would think about it, but I suspect Pearl would like it.
Solstice Sonnet
Let’s sing a song, a rhapsody,
about our summer storms
and how they build capacity
to transcend summer norms.
The gusts did blow, the trees, they shook.
Of limbs, we had a plague.
The power out — we read a book
beneath a sun grown vague.
The fawns and raccoons his themselves
from nature’s influence,
but we wen tout, like greedy wolves,
to watch such affluence.
Sharp spheres of hail — a legacy
against oblivion’s melody.
— Megan Willome
I loved this book. As soon as I finished, I began reading it again.”
—David Lee Garrison, author of Playing Bach in the D. C. Metro
