Explore Activities Related to Indians in The Scarlet Letter
Explore Activities Related to Indians in The Scarlet Letter
1. This activity was created by Dr. Doug Rowlett from Houston Community College
System, Southwest Campus, Stafford, TX.
In nineteenth-century Salem the frontier was a distant place only to be read
about by most inhabitants, and interactions with living Native Americans
were few and far removed. The occasional Native American visitor to Salem
had become by Hawthorne's time a quaint relic, more curiosity than threat
in most people's minds.
However, residents did read about them in the newspapers and in popular
books and articles and were certainly aware of their place in the history of
New England, and there were still a few people alive during Hawthorne's early
years who could recount old tales from previous generations about "Indian depredations."
While Hawthorne never wrote the kinds of Indian-centered tales that Fenimore
Cooper did, a close examination of his stories and novels will show he did make
more use of Native Americans than is at first apparent.
Margaret B. Moore's book The
Salem World of Nathaniel Hawthorne provides useful information about Hawthorne's treatment of Native Americans.
Read the synopsis cited above and then examine The
Scarlet Letter for examples of Hawthorne's treatment of Native
Americans in the novel . Note that the forest and its natural inhabitants
are portrayed at times as dark, mysterious, and surely allied with the forces
of darkness and iniquity and at other times as noble, enduring, natural, and
even innocent. Consider how Hawthorne's attitude toward Indians in The
Scarlet Letter may have informed his thematic treatment of the duality
presented by God's Law on the one hand (civilized, restrained, white, and
Christian) and Nature's Law on the other (savage, passionate, dark, and pagan).
Review Ellen Knight's article on the Squaw
Satchem , the excerpt
of John Winthrop's Journal for June 1630 , and review some of the original
documents from the early Colonial period . What can you glean from these
documents about the attitudes of early colonists toward the Native Americans
they encountered? Now read Johnson's
critical commentary on The Scarlet Letter and the excerpt
from Colacurcio's The Province of Piety. Does Hawthorne's attitude
toward Native Americans in The Scarlet Letter seem to agree with or
to be at odds with the early colonists' perceptions of them? Is he mainly
sympathetic or antipathetic toward them?
Illustration by Frank T. Merrill of Shem Drowne’s Indian warrior weathervane that stood on top of the Province House in Boston
(courtesy of ...)
Jarold Ramsey
in Redefining American Literary History explores ". . . why, after
four centuries of contact, America's first traditional literatures have had
so little influence on our literary heritage." While his article deals mainly
with Thoreau, explore the Hawthorne In Salem Web Site to find materials pertaining
to Hawthorne to either support or refute his thesis that ". . . literary imaging
of native life, of which there has been so much, must not be confused with
literary assimilation of native imaginative traditions, of which there has
been too little."
