Harold Bloom, in his book on Nathaniel Hawthorne, writes that “The Scarlet Letter troubles the heart and stimulates the intellect”. After watching Roland Joffe’s cinematic adaption of the novel, one is left to contemplate whether the film troubles school-teachers and stimulates the phallus. Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter is undoubtedly his most recognised work and is considered a true American classic. A true test of the book’s rigid readability is its attempted conversion to the big screen on numerous occasions. The primary reason for this lies in the novel’s acute resemblance to a Greek tragedy: forbidden love, uncontrollable jealousy, an unforgiving Puritan society, an affable offender and, of course, a tragic-heroine. All of the aforementioned plot scenarios make for a mouth-watering visit to your local film theatre, and possibly may coincide with a brief history of Puritan civilisation in the middle of seventeenth-century New England. The Scarlet Letter, like so many classics, is a timeless piece of fiction writing, whereat even today the trials and tribulations of the protagonist Hester Prynne correlate to the hardships of contemporary women. Hester embodies the feminist ideology of equal treatment and to be allowed to express individuality, self-reliance and the autonomy of body, mind and soul. She is an empowering figure who defies the patriarchal society to which she belongs.
The difficult task of adapting a classic novel to the big screen lies in its marketability, a term associated with the omitting and adding of fragments from the original text. This process is now a general feature of Hollywood and deemed an essentiality by film producers. The development of expurgating a text became a common practice among publishers before strict censorship laws were lifted in the twentieth century. However, society has now done a complete U-turn and many classic narratives are considered too innocent for contemporary viewership. This development is both scandalous and perfectly comprehensible. To portray the story of Hester Prynne while bearing in mind the demands of the market place seems plausible enough, taking for granted that the main attributes of the novel remain intact. In fact, critics claim Hawthorne himself wrote The Scarlet Letter so as catch the public’s attention; Hawthorne and his family were financially unsound during the 1840s and hoped the book would relieve them of their monetary difficulties. Whether Hawthorne’s finances were the driving force behind The Scarlet Letter remains irrelevant, for the story is aesthetically a literary masterpiece. A general rule pertaining to literature is that each and every one of us interpret the same text differently, but this does not necessarily infer that every text has a million meanings. Bercovitch formulates a similar thought when discussing The Scarlet Letter: he observes that “Hawthorne’s meanings may be endless, but they are not open-ended”. Unforgivingly, Joffe’s screen adaptation of The Scarlet Letter attempts to ‘improve’ the text by modernising it to the values of 1990s American culture. Why unforgivingly, you ask? The film adaptation, which states that the movie is based loosely on Hawthorne’s novel confines, itself to a 135 minutes of sexual dramatization. To further explicate the disparity between Hawthorne’s text and Joffe’s movie, a glimpse into a comment made by Demi Moore (who plays Hester in Joffe’s adaptation) seems appropriate. When asked about how the film version plays fast and loose with the novel, Ms Moore supposedly answered that “not many people read the book, anyway”. She could not have been more erroneous in her assumption, as the book has become required reading for students engaged in literary studies across American Universities.
A question invariably playing on the minds of movie enthusiasts is the relevancy of whether or not the adaptation stays faithful to the original text, and, if not, why this should matter. A rejoinder from a literary student may seem a little partial or subjective but hopefully will incline those who have not read the book, but have seen the movie, to read it. The movie version is a nirvana for those seeking a sexual thrill from a well-established Hollywood actress. The suspense of sexual anticipation is deafening and absorbs the plot and characters from the beginning until the end of the movie. Not to sound like a Puritan, but Hawthorne’s text conveys so much more than caveman notions of lust and sexual desire. The aesthetics of love, evil, loyalty, nature, Puritanism, and libertinism are all explored in the novel in the most articulate way. A sense of fear, intrigue, and wonder fill the minds of its readers and a true understanding of what it was like to live in such a dogmatic society becomes a reality for the reader. The film version truncates all of these experiences by sexualising the Puritan society conveyed in the novel to almost depraved sex pests. If what Joffe did was modify the novel, he did so by removing its beauty and replacing it with a seediness comparable to that found in the novel by Erika Mitchell, Fifty Shades of Grey. The movie lacks real substance, or at least, any meaningful substance, a substance found in every page of the book. Another reason why literary scholars might support the need for film adaptations to stay faithful to the original text is that the film will supplant the place of the novel in the minds of many. Instead of musing over the perspicacity of Hester Prynne, viewers will be consumed by bedraggled thoughts of Demi Moore’s exposed bosom. The problem with film adaptations of classic novels has to do with conflicting social contexts – the period in which the novel is written and for whom (70s, 80s, 90s audience) the film is produced. Nevertheless, anyone who has watched the 1995 film version of The Scarlet Letter but leaves the original book untouched are doing themselves and Hawthorne a grave injustice. Left below is a link to the trailer of the movie version starring Demi Moore, Gary Oldman, and Robert Duvall.
Works Cited
Bloom, Harold. Nathaniel Hawthorne. California: University of California, 2008. Book.
Palmer, R Barton. Nineteenth-Century American Fiction on Screen. London: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Book.
Rick, Berg. “Literature’s Faithless Other.” Pacific Coast Philology (1998): 99-102. Document.
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