| The Scarlet Letter's renown as what Lawrence Buell calls a "myth of American origin" has provoked several 20th-century writers to reconsider American origins in their own versions of Nathaniel Hawthorne's narrative. My dissertation argues that three such writers---John Updike in A Month of Sundays, Roger's Version, and S.; Bharati Mukherjee in The Holder of the World; and Suzan-Lori Parks in The Red Letter Plays---draw upon both Hawthorne's plot and his emphasis on a discrete letter of the alphabet in order to distinguish three different concepts of American origin, which I term "firstness," "rebeginning," and "newness.";American origin as "firstness" understands the New World as an Eden and the "American Adam" as a perfect innocent unencumbered by the past, but, writing at the 20th century's close, Updike, Mukherjee, and Parks find American fastness untenable. Their texts, therefore, explore whether alternate American origins exist, as either "rebeginning," a starting over that effaces the past, or "newness," which acknowledges the past but stages a radical departure from it. All three writers use specific letters to symbolize the American origins they explore.;Chapter One argues that, despite critical readings of Hawthorne's A as symbolic of American firstness, The Scarlet Letter finds its nation's origins problematical. The dissertation then turns to Updike's Scarlet Letter trilogy, contending that its novels dismiss Hawthorne's version of American origin as outmoded. Chapter Two reads the omega emphasized by A Month of Sundays as the symbol for American rebeginning, but Chapters Three and Four contend that Roger's Version, through its many initials and acronyms, and S., through its recycled "A" and approximate dollar sign, "S," depict an America whose encumbrances bar it from "clearing the ground" and, thus, from rebeginning. Chapter Five, conversely, claims that The Holder of the World affirms American origin as a hybrid rebeginning, but also maintains that Mukherjee's novel uses the letter to oppose what it understands as The Scarlet Letter 's definition of American origin as firstness. Chapter Six argues that Parks's Red Letter Plays enacts American origin as newness by appropriating the scarlet letter and subversively altering its symbolic meaning. |
