Hannah Calder’s forthcoming novel, Hester in Sunlight, is less a re-telling or transposition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic and more a re-purposing of the materials to tell a different version. In “glittering language” and through Hawthorne’s Hester, Calder illuminates the life of her own protagonist, a woman of a certain age with parents, a husband, and a child also at a certain age.
Hester in Sunlight will be available on November 14, click here to find a local independent bookstore near you where you can preorder the book. Read below for a preview from the prologue:
Prologue
I carry the superstition that to start a novel, I must be elsewhere.
The Scarlet Letter is a sort of elsewhere.
So here I am. In my body. Typing on a laptop. The ticker-ticker of the letters, mic’d wings, bats in the dark. This is where I’m at.
I’m here to tell you about Hester. Yes, that Hester. After Hawthorne lifted her from a document in a barrel in the upper rooms of the Custom House in Salem, she found herself on a ride she couldn’t get off.
She’s persisted into the 21st century and will persist long past your death-day and your children’s children’s death-days, etc.
For some reason, people like her.
They root for her.
I get it. She is an impossibly decent person. Without wincing or even complaining, she carries a secret that is scalding hot.
The woman who played Hester Prynne for Hawthorne was a fragment of a whole. When Hawthorne published his book, he thought his character, a mere sliver of his psyche, would remain inside the book’s covers. Obedient. Silent. Still. But she escaped — it can be messy — out into the sunlit imaginations of readers and moviegoers. Each year, she entered a few more heads. Each year, she changed, ever so slightly, to fit the times she belonged to, to reflect the tone of each adaptation of her tale. 1920s Hester was one thing, as Lillian Gish made clear. Millennial Hester was yet another, and we have Emma Stone to thank for that. My niece read The Scarlet Letter at school, and she said that Hester was an “idiot.” Ouch. And the waves of feminism have allowed her to both crest and drown. She never got to be herself, which is the curse of all characters, you may be surprised to know.
Hawthorne polished Hester up like a silver button, but she was flawed, like me, like you, like all of us. She had plans — ones Hawthorne wouldn’t permit her to enact for fear she would break from character and destroy his novel. He was right. She would have ruined the whole thing. But that didn’t happen. Hawthorne died before Hollywood set upon Hester with its pinking shears.
Arthur Dimmesdale, her lover, had a similar problem. Trapped until death parted him from her, he writhed in the agonizing wires of stasis.
As did Pearl, their daughter. Forever skipping about maniacally or ripping up the grassy margins of the lanes and throwing the clods at bullies, she barely knew her own diagnosis.
And Roger Chillingworth, Hester’s ugly old husband, spent most of his time feeling clownish with a pillow stuffed up the back of his shirt to create a hunched back.
Hawthorne, a big believer in the slipperiness of a veneer, won’t tell me what’s on the memory card. I must be content with the spreading bruise of my own imagination. It contains the trail that we don’t stick to, the dewy morning-after cold fright, the sunlight of shame, the devil’s staff turned snake.
As hard as I try, I can barely make out Hawthorne’s characters meeting in their gloom-framed forest clearing.
This is where it gets tricky. Sorry.