Introduction

Summary

Item one. In the “College” episode of the brilliant HBO series The Sopranos, mobster Tony Soprano finds himself sitting in a hallway at Bowdoin College, waiting for his daughter Meadow to complete her admissions interview. We have just watched Soprano set aside his role as bourgeois dad while he garrotes a gangster-turned-informer he has discovered in a nearby town. The camera then shows us the inscription chiseled into the wall above his head: “No man can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.” The author, of course, is identified as Hawthorne, and as the scene ends an undergraduate walks by, informing Tony that “He's our most famous alumnus.”

Item two. Dr. Leon R. Kass, the head of President George Bush’s Council on Bioethics, assigns the members of the council – a body established to advise the President and the National Institutes of Health on the moral questions raised by controversial research initiatives like cloning – to read Hawthorne’s story “The Birth-Mark,” and opens the council’s first meeting with a discussion of that tale of a scientific enthusiasm gone perversely awry.

Item three. “The Connection,” a call-in program on National Public Radio in the US, devotes a show, featuring a panel of Hawthorne scholars, to a discussion of the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Scarlet Letter. They take a call from Carolyn, in Boise, Idaho: “I would just like to say that I identified with the book because I was an adulteress, I was a single mother, and I had to raise my children by myself. I make no excuses for that, but because I not only had the shame but the children, I had to become more able, stronger, better at other things . . .