Homeless Lit: The Scarlet Letter

	Title page, first edition of The Scarlet Letter, 1850.

This is the third in an ongoing series of posts looking at homelessness in literature. Prior posts in this series: Cannery Row [1/30/09] and The Tenants of Moonbloom [3/18/09]

In an NPR program last year about Hester Prynne, the heroine of The Scarlet Letter, one of the co-hosts commented, "one of the first things you learn about Hester Prynne is that she is drop-dead gorgeous."

Indeed and how! And it's far NOT a trivial factor at understanding the book and the journey Hester has in it. From the book's text:

The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance on a large scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam; and a face which, besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. She was ladylike, too...

Also of significant importance in understanding this brave woman of literature is that from the beginning of the book she suffers a double whammy of homelessness. She was sent away from her homeland, England, to the wooded outland of a new continent, America, to a newly birthed town called Boston. Her husband, who was to follow her there, is presumed lost at sea since he had not arrived in over two-years' time. And, she is in jail with no abode to return to. As if she doesn't have enough problems, a babe is in her arms and the letter "A" is embroidered in scarlet on a patch at her bosom, an indicator of sin of some sort that readers of the book are left to guess at. Adultery, you think?

We are told, in the book's fifth chapter, that upon release from jail, Boston's leaders allow Hester use of an abandoned "small thatched cottage" on the outskirts of the community. From the text:

In this little lonesome dwelling, with some slender means that she possessed, and by the licence of the magistrates, who still kept an inquisitorial watch over her, Hester established herself, with her infant child. A mystic shadow of suspicion immediately attached itself to the spot.

Thus Hester, in fiction alas, became America's first known beneficiary of transitional housing.

Though it most readily seems the scarlet sin had made her at outlier, it was the homeless "sin" that best fits the depiction of her alienation from the whole of the Puritan society where she was. Most Homeless World Sacramento folk will feel the sting of the words that follow, from the text:

In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it. Every gesture, every word, and even the silence of those with whom she came in contact, implied, and often expressed, that she was banished, and as much alone as if she inhabited another sphere, or communicated with the common nature by other organs and senses than the rest of human kind. She stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt; no more smile with the household joy, nor mourn with the kindred sorrow; nor, should it succeed in manifesting its forbidden sympathy, awakening only terror and horrible repugnance. These emotions, in fact, and its bitterest scorn besides, seemed to be the sole portion that she retained in the universal heart.

BUT, Hester is a very, very resourceful homeless person that all of us aware of the homeless condition have to applaud! First off, despite her sad circumstance, she is a very very good mother to her young daughter, Pearl. And Pearl is this wild and intelligent child that is beguiling and a delight. The Hester-Pearl relationship is one of great benefit to each, as we would hope for any mother-child relationship.

Early in the book, clergymen consider taking Pearl from her disgraced mother for the benefit of the child. Somewhat ironically, it is Arthur Dimmesdale, the child's secret father, who voices the Puritan wisdom of why mother and child should be kept together such that they can stay together and do stay together. Wise words, these! Every homeless-family agency in Sacramento should mark these words, which follow (from the text):

"God gave her the child, and gave her, too, an instinctive knowledge of its nature and requirements--both seemingly so peculiar--which no other mortal being can possess.

... [Hester] recognises, believe me, the solemn miracle which God hath wrought in the existence of that child. And may she feel, too--what, methinks, is the very truth--that this boon was meant, above all things else, to keep the mother's soul alive, and to preserve her from blacker depths of sin into which Satan might else have sought to plunge her! Therefore it is good for this poor, sinful woman, that she hath an infant immortality, a being capable of eternal joy or sorrow, confided to her care--to be trained up by her to righteousness, to remind her, at every moment, of her fall, but yet to teach her, as if it were by the Creator's sacred pledge, that, if she bring the child to heaven, the child also will bring its parents thither! Herein is the sinful mother happier than the sinful father. For Hester Prynne's sake, then, and no less for the poor child's sake, let us leave them as Providence hath seen fit to place them!"

Of course, Buddhist heathen that I am I don't personally buy in to the Providence idea, but it is interesting and likely sound Christian reasoning.

To Hester's great credit she quickly gets to work laboring to fund the effort to take care of herself and her treasured Pearl. She begins a cottage industry, becoming a successful entrepreneur at her art, needlecraft. From the text:

By degrees, not very slowly, her handiwork became what would now be termed the fashion. Whether from commiseration for a woman of so miserable a destiny; or from the morbid curiosity that gives a fictitious value even to common or worthless things; or by whatever other intangible circumstance was then, as now, sufficient to bestow, on some persons, what others might seek in vain; or because Hester really filled a gap which must otherwise have remained vacant; it is certain that she had ready and fairly requited employment for as many hours as she saw fit to occupy with her needle. Vanity, it may be, chose to mortify itself, by putting on, for ceremonials of pomp and state, the garments that had been wrought by her sinful hands. Her needle-work was seen on the ruff of the Governor; military men wore it on their scarfs, and the minister on his band; it decked the baby's little cap; it was shut up, to be mildewed and moulder away, in the coffins of the dead.

Hester becomes more and more of a success as a person such that she makes major contributions to other poor people in the Boston community. Poor as she is, she is considerate and compassionate toward others. It comes to pass that the staunch Puritan society comes to appreciate Hester's many able aspects and basic good character.

Hester never put forward even the humblest title to share in the world's privileges--further than to breathe the common air and earn daily bread for little Pearl and herself by the faithful labour of her hands--she was quick to acknowledge her sisterhood with the race of man whenever benefits were to be conferred. None so ready as she to give of her little substance to every demand of poverty, even though the bitter-hearted pauper threw back a gibe in requital of the food brought regularly to his door, or the garments wrought for him by the fingers that could have embroidered a monarch's robe. None so self-devoted as Hester when pestilence stalked through the town. In all seasons of calamity, indeed, whether general or of individuals, the outcast of society at once found her place. She came, not as a guest, but as a rightful inmate, into the household that was darkened by trouble, as if its gloomy twilight were a medium in which she was entitled to hold intercourse with her fellow-creature. There glimmered the embroidered letter, with comfort in its unearthly ray. Elsewhere the token of sin, it was the taper of the sick chamber. It had even thrown its gleam, in the sufferer's bard extremity, across the verge of time. It had shown him where to set his foot, while the light of earth was fast becoming dim, and ere the light of futurity could reach him. In such emergencies Hester's nature showed itself warm and rich--a well-spring of human tenderness, unfailing to every real demand, and inexhaustible by the largest. Her breast, with its badge of shame, was but the softer pillow for the head that needed one. She was self-ordained a Sister of Mercy, or, we may rather say, the world's heavy hand had so ordained her, when neither the world nor she looked forward to this result. The letter was the symbol of her calling. Such helpfulness was found in her – so much power to do, and power to sympathise – that many people refused to interpret the scarlet A by its original signification. They said that it meant Abel, so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman's strength.

There is much much more to the novel -- about the men in Hester's life and the moral of the tale. And things come to a quick resolution of sorts that is somewhat dissatisfying. But all that is not our concern here. As a homeless person, Hester had spunk! She boldly took on the challenges in the unfair predicament she was in and always always forged forward, finally making a better life for herself while facing up to her responsibilities as a parent and as a compassionate member of a community.

Right on, Hester!

Homeless Lit.: The Tenants of Moonbloom

Bite the windy blackness and gasp: "I never was."

	Cover of the 2003 re-issue edition of Edward Lewis Wallant's 1963 novel.

The Tenants of Moonbloom is an amazing, almost-forgotten novel from the early Sixties, set in the early Sixties, about a thirty-three-year-old who had left being a perpetual college student to take up his first job, collecting weekly rent from the tenants of his slumlord brother's four buildings.

When Michaelann Bewsee, blogger of Michaelann Land, an excellent homeless-advocacy blog, recommended the book to me, she told me its homeless connection was weak. She wrote of Moonbloom's tenants, "No, they're not homeless, but they live in incredibly dilapidated apartment buildings in a poverty-stricken section of New York. [Yes, righto. An impoverished section of Manhattan. How New York has changed!]

"All of the characters are vivid and alive, but the real story is Moonbloom ... [who] is gradually awakened and transformed."

Indeed!

The tenant characters are impoverished, at the edge of homelessness. Like homeless people in real life — in Homeless World Sacramento, or in Homeless World Anywhere — they each have distinct personalities, ways of being, and realms of genius or insight. Some are astonishingly selfish; others, sainted and selfless. Some have gathered a concrete crust around them, to keep from being hurt; others are fragile. They span the spectrum: They are all of us; we, all of them.

Of overabundant importance to the tenant characters is Norman Moonbloom, who collects the rent [giving each renter a receipt for less than the cash that he receives], and who potentially may be able to improve conditions in the hovel where each tenant lives.

When Norman reports the enormity of the deluge of long-standing problems in the four buildings it only frustrates the detached landlord brother, Irwin, who instructs Norman to take control of things and spend a few hundred dollars here and there to shut the tenants up.

In the early part of the book, we follow as Norman Moonbloom collects rent with great reluctance. He hates doing so, in part because the tenants are chatty, eating up a lot of time, and because they complain — as well they should — and Moonbloom's excuse for never doing anything much to help them is that he is "just the agent," and not a decision maker.

But by the eighth page, the book gives us a first inkling of Moonbloom's transformation into a flesh-and-blood human being: "There had been no horrors in his life – only a slow widening of sensitivity. But he anticipated reaching the threshold of pain one of these days. It was like the fear of death; he could ignore it most of the time, although it was implacably there, to touch him with the very tip of its claw in moments of frustration, to bring dread to him during the 4:00 A.M. bladder call."

[By the way, a quick aside: In the quote above you can see how splendidly Wallant writes. Wallant writes with a flair all his own and is deeply penetrating. His observations seep into everything. While the book can seem to have a narrow topic and straightforward plot, truly it's a philosophical thunderstorm, about The Great All, no less.]

The first chapter ends with these words describing Moonbloom as we see him first going out to collect rent:

He locked the door, went up the steps, and headed for the subway that would take him to the upper West Side of town. He walked lightly and his face showed no awareness of all the thousands of people around him because he traveled in an eggshell through which came only subdued light and muffled sound.

I think that Moonbloom, at this point in the story, is the model of the majority of Sacramento-area homeless-aid workers, people utterly unaffected by the lives of the people they are supposedly there for (even though more than a few are former homeless folk themselves). For us in Sacramento, Moonbloom is just like the mental-health counselors who never step out of their officeplace, the bed-snatchers at the shelters, the dyspeptic crew at Overflow, and the bubbly volunteers who treat homeless people as if they are all slightly-retarded children. And Moonbloom is like absolutely every one of the feeble excuses for human beings who work [using the term "work," loosely] at the welfare office at 28th & Q.

In chapter 4, Norman and a tenant named Wade confront each other. Wade tells Norman, "I feel pain, I'm full of sensation. I've got an idea that you could watch a murder committed and smile your goofy little shit-eating smile. You're like a body under water you know that? Yeah, Moonbloom, that's the image, a god-damned Hebrew body wrapped in water. When you talk — glub, glub, bubble, bubble.

Later, before Norman gets away, Wade adds, "Do not go gently into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at the end of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light ..."

It's a call for Norman to use a crowbar and open up his spectrum of emotions, from those that are curlish and ugly to those that are compassionate and divine.

Of importance, something readers would have been keenly aware of when the novel was published in 1963, but which gets lost reading it now, is that Norman is a Jew in New York a scant 17 years after the end of WWII. Also, in 1963, antisemitism was rampant like it isn't today. Norman is too young to have served during the war, and there's much to suggest he had nothing to do with the military. His brother, Irvin, three years older than Norman, the same age as the Jewish author of this novel, might have served in the war, as Wallant did, valiantly. Some of the tenants are Jewish. One old man has a string of numbers tattooed on his arm, indicating he spent time in a concentration camp.

Norman and Irvin's jobs feed into the stereotype of Jewish moneygrubbing. A significant element of the novel is that Wallent faces Jewish stereotypes, and other stereotypes, head-on.

At the end of chapter 10 [just past the middle of the book], Moonbloom says something with the fragrant aroma of Zen: "I am no longer Norman Moonbloom," he said aloud in the great privacy of the city night. And then, seeing the floral brilliance of windows and distant sign lights, he was suddenly confronted with a more terrible possibility, which made him bite the windy blackness and gasp, "Or I never was."

ENOUGH of me giving away plot points in the book. READ The Tenants of Moonbloom, y'all!!

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Find out more about The Tenants of Moonbloom and its author Edward Lewis Wallant:

Info re the book at Amazon.
Info re the book at wikipedia.
Info re Edward Lewis Wallant at wikipedia.