Two boys lose their mothers as babies. Both boys are raised in abusive environments. Both boys are told they are not like other children.

One boy grows up to be a murderous tyrant willing to destroy the world. The other boy grows up and willing lays down his life to save the world and people he loves.

If you know the story of The Boy Who Lived, then chances are you already know I am talking about Harry Potter and Tom Riddle. (spoiler ahead )

Today, October 31, marks the day that Voldemort attempted to kill Harry and failed because Harry’s mother, Lily Potter, stepped in front of the killing curse meant for her son.

This is how the world is saved. One act of love at a time.

***

I’m not an essentialist, so while I do think there is something distinct about mothers and women, I also think that the Archetype of Mother is genderless even if it predominantly displays its traits in one half of the human species.

When I think of what it means to love like a mother, I think of particularity. Some men, thank goodness, see the social value in fighting on battlefields to defend their country and its peoples’ freedoms. There is honor in submitting to a military life, even and especially when one disagrees with the country’s leader or a chain of command. I respect such men, and they should be lauded for their service and sacrifice, as should their families (especially their wives, who are some of the strongest women I know). But this is not a particular love. The country is a character known to all her citizens. Her values transcend family ties, and thus bring together men and women from many backgrounds to protect the rights of the people. But a mother will do things for her child that no one would ever do for that person. A mother does things for her child almost no one knows about, often not even the child’s father. This is a specific and particular love that, to this day, lacks public honor and respect.

My own mother has loved me in such a way.

My mother is an artist, and she was an art teacher for her entire career, one that was rather distinguished in the public school system where she worked. In retirement, she continues to teach art (and yoga), help organize the local art league, and raise money for high schoolers interested in pursuing art. She is a powerhouse: an amazing cook and baker, a serious long distance kayaker, artist, and gardener. (My dad is the head gardener of the house, but that is another story.) She knows how to keep a secret and hold down the fort. If you are in a crisis, she won’t ask what you need; she somehow shows up with everything essential. When I was in serious trouble, she was there for me. Including when she remained in loving stand-by the time I went off the communication grid.

This is nothing short of a god-like ability. Who else in the universe would love you if you just tailspin into no-contact because your life is so far afield of the plan you made at eighteen that you can’t even explain it to yourself?

Thankfully, I could put my trust in my mom’s philosophy.

She knew I walked away from the conventional and the easy at a time when most of my friends were settling down. Neither of us knew what that would look like, but I knew she understood that I finally had accepted my fate to be an artist. I make visual art, and watercolor and mixed media are my favorite mediums, but what I mean is something more archetypal.

The image of the Suffering Artist is real because the artist does suffer under their vision. Some may fall into vice along the way, and alas that is what we often focus on and depict as the the artist’s source of pain, but that is a shallow image of the artist’s turmoil because it isn’t the real one.

The real artist struggles because they are working from a place of unknowns. Their life isn’t immediately recognizable to others, and often not even to themselves. They are in pursuit, and they have to shed whatever extra baggage and weight is slowing them down. We think of artists as wantonly breaking all the rules to achieve their calling. Sometimes they do defy and flout the norm, but more often, events force them into lives that are complicated and not, perhaps, what they would have chosen if there were not such an intense call on their life that becomes too loud to ignore. (My Name is Asher Lev depicts this tension with beauty and depth. It is also one of my favorite books.) This is why, for me, “artist” is a broad category; it includes scholars, philosophers, poets, writers, and scientists.

But one day, the road ahead clears. The forest opens up and the open field and mountain peaks are glowing golden in the Autumn light ahead. One wonders at the intense fear, the haunting doubts, and the overwhelming temptation to leave the path even as one knew, deep down, there was no leaving anyway.

Living the artist’s life is a bit like the children’s book Going on a Bear Hunt (PSA: no bears are harmed). The children have to go through many obstacles, and I can still hear my mother reading in a kind of rhythmic chant:

“We can't go over it.
We can't go under it.
Oh no!
We've got to go through it!”

Oh yes.

Oh no! We’ve got to go through it!

Thankfully, my mother was there.

And when I imagined Lily Potter’s eyes at eleven years old reading the books for the first time, they were always my mother’s eyes. They share the same color. And just like Harry, I have my mother’s eyes, too.

Alexandra Barylski, MA (Yale University) is a poet, writer, the Executive Editor of the Marginalia Review of Books, and the Director of Publications at the Institute for the Meanings of Science (IMS). She is currently managing a grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation, which is funding the Meanings of Life Project: The New Biology and Marginalia’s IMS. Learn more: www.alexandrabarylski.com

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cover of my high school copy

Almost all the characters in the novel show complete contempt for anything or anyone as they pursue their aims, especially Catherine and Heathcliffe. They are blinded by their desires, and they possess nearly indomitable spirits to attain their objects. Nearly, I say, because a powerful will misdirected creates only chaos and despair. This is a story of proud wills wrecking lives with disregard.

As you read the novel, trace the characters choices and notice most lives are led to strange illnesses and sad deaths. As a teenager with plenty of self-righteous rebellion, I thought dashing one’s whole life against the rocks of grand causes or revolution or revenge marked one as a true original.

It took many years, and the teachings of a wise spiritual guide to show me nothing could be farther from the truth. I couldn’t see that this was case then because the path of many characters directed their passions at only one aim, and I mistook the will’s energy bent back on itself for real direction rather than the soul’s destruction.

When a life is not ordered to anything beyond itself, even the most goal-oriented person lives without any true, single point of reference. The energy spent and given to those aims may allow someone to attain all they desire, but the cost will be nothing less than their own well-being, their own life.

In this story, souls are damned by envy, drink, jealousy, and regret. But no one goes down without a fight, and the matches would be glorious if they weren’t so tragic. Brontë peoples her novel with characters of such potency that an untutored mind could easily mistake the conflicts within for wildly romantic acts (I did). Such flames, such force of the will, I once believed, were a wonderful trait—rebels all, chasing after what they desired. If only I had read the novel with different eyes, I might have saved myself from achieving my own aims at the expense of my physical health and spiritual sanity.

Life has dealt me some blows, and I now see repentance in a novel where all I once saw was rebellion to imitate. But new sight is only because my proud will finally bent its knees. Glimmers of heaven and hope appear in this novel, but it is almost too easy to miss them. At sixteen, I moved through the story as most of the characters do, and I mistook the smallest gestures of grace and kindness for weakness.

But the heart can not sustain its selfish passions. Characters blaze in the fires of their self-made hell and consume those around them in their inferno of defiance. But the end of the novel (an ending I disliked immensely as a teenager) suggests that years of anger, delusion, wicked lies, and petulance beyond imagining can all be redeemed. One softened heart moved to repentance can save more lives than their own, and the halo cast by this reviving light is an offering to the past so that new growth can emerge clean and bright in each tomorrow.

The strength born of pride lives hard and dies young because the strength of will born from pride is always and only the way to death. As the narrator says, “Proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves.”

I am grateful I am not the person I was. A tempering and fragrant breeze blew through my life and taught me what it means to yield, to repent, and to take up my life and live.

Thank you for your support in following me and for remunerating my work!

I’ve been MIA with a recurring cold (sniffling and sneezing are not great for audio recordings), and I found myself busier than anticipated shortly after launching The Scarlet Letter Project. Thank you for your patience. I will return with more on Hester Prynne and Co. in the New Year, in addition to a few more full chapter audio recordings with commentary for my paying subscribers. I aim to conclude the project in the mid-Spring of 2026, and to create a complete audio course from all the podcast recordings, plus a few bonuses, so that they will be available in one place. Paying subscribers will receive a significant discount on this audio course when it becomes available.

But before 2025 is out, I will bring you my recorded conversation with the truly delightful poet, writer, theologian, and host of NPR’s Poetry Unbound, Pádraig Ó Tuama. If you are looking for holidays gifts for people who love to think about the world through the lens of their favorite books or poems, I highly recommend his memoir In The Shelter, which I reviewed with much praise.

Thank you to everyone who has read, listened, and shared my work. I look forward to being with you all in The Scarlet Letter again soon.

With gratitude and warm holiday wishes,

Alexandra Barylski (The Poetry Peddler)

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What does it mean to be a woman?

We are still looking for answers.

To find one, we must begin with clarity in the category that contains all women: the human. That is why Hester Prynne’s story provides one answer to the two essential questions of our time, which are also the core questions of my life:

1. What does it mean to be human?

2. What does it mean to be a woman?

One of my goals for The Scarlet Letter project is to think publicly about what it means to a woman (and human) in 2025. I began the series by asserting that all our stories begin in prison, then introduced common female archetypes (the witch, the gossips, and the Madonna) through the drama of chapter two, and I left you to ponder the mystery and necessity of self-knowledge in my most recent episode.

Going forward, I will be grouping three chapters (10-15 minute units) into single episodes (30-45 minutes). Thanks to positive feedback, I am keeping the chapters self-contained units of time because I’ve heard the length is ideal and that the “Alex-Sparknotes” version of each chapter is both fun and useful. I’ll be releasing episodes on Tuesdays going forward, and I am glad to learn these are relevant for people who love literature, homeschooling moms, and teens in school.

This book is often taught in American high schools, yet, the most difficult or bizarre points that connect to everyday life are often overlooked in the classroom. I think this is because the story is so real and the existential stakes are so high.

In his book Why Read, writer and University of Virginia Professor of English, Mark Edmundson, like a true prophet, critiques his own tribe. Many English professors do not treat their subject like it has much to do with the urgent existential needs of their students, but it does.

“Literature,” Edmundson says, “is our best goad toward new beginnings, out best chance for what we might call secular rebirth.” Literature and poetry provide real options, hope of a future, and the possibility of a new life. I agree, because literature and poetry gave me all this as a young person looking for options, a future, and a life. They still do. To “talk about poetry as something that can redeem a life, or make it worth living” is the reason I became an English teacher.

Trigger Warning

So I give you fair warning that in upcoming episodes I will be engaging a serious and triggering topic: the global rise in s**cide among people 15-29. The U.S., U.K., South Korea, and Canada show the sharpest rise in s**cide rates among young women. This data intersects reports on the negative effects of social media and AI use. There is an overwhelming amount of reading and videos on this topic, including last month’s video with Tristan Harris, co-founder for the Center for Humane Technology, speaking with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.

Responsibly thinking through why there is a world-wide rise in mental anguish and instability is inseparable from the question: What does it mean to be human?

The world of spectacle, social pressure, and judgement based on a wrong choice, and treating people as if they don’t exist, isn’t that far from the 1640’s Puritan world of Hester Prynne; it is the world many young women today are trying to survive amidst the pressures of school and the pitfalls of social media.

As a teacher in secondary and college classrooms, I saw, and still see, how challenging life is for young women. The mental anxiety girls and women experience has concerned me practically my whole life, first as a teen girl trying to figure out who I was and now as an adult woman who works with teen girls and women of all ages.

The story of Hester Prynne helps us think through this crisis with hope by carefully engaging the harrowing facts of her reality as a woman. So in Chapter 4, 5, and 6, I will use the gripping narrative as an occasion for a hopeful discussion of the serious topic of wanting there to be no tomorrow, because when we are willing to look with clarity at the cause—hint: it’s spiritual, psychology is the study of the soul (psyche)—then a solution will present itself. What I love most about teaching literature is that it is a powerful physick for our spirit.

Many young people find their daily lives overwhelming and meaningless, and they live in a perpetual state of fear, especially young women. I think literature, taught well, is a charm to ward off the understandable terror that they now feel.

Ted Gioia recently shared part of a letter from a young person on his Substack in his post, “A Young Person Asks for Help.” The young man says:

“I want to share a report from someone living inside Gen Z: many of us are worried—some even petrified—about the future. Few of my peers feel able to envision a tangible future. . . How can Gen Zers (like myself) engage more intentionally with the world around us?”

Gioia gives some good advice: cultivate time away from screens, meet people in person, go to places in nature that you love, cultivate new skills, and encourage people to join you.

They are all good things. I love that someone as popular as Gioia responded so thoughtfully to the young man’s request with a public post. But why these things and not others? Because, I think, everything Gioia recommends are things that will put you back in touch with your soul.

Are You a Woman with A Soul?

Feminism is in a state of confusion because we have forgotten the soul. The foundation of women’s rights (and the fight for all human rights) was rooted in the reality that all humans have souls, and that our soul is what makes us all equal.

Women in the Nineteenth Century by Margaret Fuller, the original Editor for The Dial, defined the women’s liberation genre in America. She, like the British Mary Wollstonecraft did before her in Vindication of the Rights of Woman, asserts in her introduction to the book that the soul is what makes us equal. The fight for women’s rights, for human rights (she was among the Transcendentalist abolitionists) is dependent on the reality of the soul.

Both of these women defied what we would call the gender norms of their time (both suffered for it), and both were encouraged to cultivate their intellect and read, write, and think as deeply and as seriously as men.

In an era when wife beating was still upheld in courts and women did not have the right to vote, she says:

“I am still subject to your laws. Why am I not entitled as a rational being to a voice in shaping them?. . .In short, why am I not regarded by the law as a soul, responsible for my acts to God and humanity, and not as a mere body devoted to the unreasoning service of my husband?”

The italic emphasis on the word soul is her own. And where were women getting this idea?

From reading Plato and reading the men and women who read Plato.

Plato taught, long before Christianity, that the soul exists and that it is eternal.

In Plato’s Phaedo (a dialogue about the soul), Socrates’ students are grieved that he must drink the hemlock, the method of his unjust execution. His students are so human in their fear and sadness of losing their beloved teacher, and Socrates’ spends his final embodied hours comforting them by teaching them about the true nature of the soul:

“You seem to have this childish fear, Simmias, that the wind would really dissolve and scatter the soul, as it leaves the body, especially if one happens to die in a high wind and not in calm weather.”

Cebes laughed and said, “Assuming that we were afraid, Socrates, try to change our minds…perhaps there is a child in us who has these fears; try to persuade him not to fear death like a bogey.”

The soul, according to Socrates, is immortal and invisible. It won’t blow away in a gale. The soul is the Kingdom of the Divine inside of you, the pearl of great price. Hester has much to teach us about this pearl and what it means to give all one has for it. Yet most of the young people I have met over the years aren’t sure they believe in the idea of a soul, so they are even less sure that they might have one.

Socrates urged everyone to spend every penny they had in pursuit of caring for their soul, seeking wisdom from any and all who might possess the good, true, and beautiful ideas that cultivate it. This is philosophy as a way of life. That is why we need the right guides who can help reorient us so that we learn to find our own way on the spiritual path. I believe our guides come from many traditions, especially the Platonic tradition.

Celebrating Plato Today

Today is Plato’s birthday, by some standards of reckoning. Each November 7th, Lorenzo de’ Medici threw a seriously smashing birthday celebration in honor of Plato.

In recent interview at The Free Press, philosopher Dr. Cornel West (who, fun fact, is in the second Matrix movie), explains why we still need Plato and why the existential stakes are high: What are you going to tell yourself when you don’t want to wake up tomorrow? He doesn’t pretend young people do not face this question. Plato gives a compelling and beautiful answer to why its worth being here. So does Hester Prynne.

Plato saved my life. So did reading great works of literature.

This year, I am reading all of the works of Plato for the Plato Parsha Project, a public project lead by philosopher and scholar of religion and science, Samuel Loncar, Ph.D. (Yale University), who is also the founder of the Becoming Human Project. Loncar and I are partners, building institutions and projects that find ways to unify our backgrounds in education, poetry, and philosophy. The first episode, “Why Ignorance Rules the World,” explains why Socrates’ ideas went viral and caused a crisis that landed him in prison for disturbing the social order (aka, “the way things are”). We have both designed our episodes so that anyone can follow along without doing the reading, but we hope you join us in the texts.

If you want to feel the thrill of philosophy as a way of life and witness the lived beauty of Plato in the modern world, I highly recommend the recent Becoming Human conversation with philosopher, scholar and Neoplatonist, Gregory Shaw, Is Platonism the Answer to our Existential Crisis? How an Ancient Syrian Platonist Helps us Today.

So many young people are like the one who decided to write Gioia. They are in existential despair, fearful and unable to imagine a meaningful future, yet some are doing their best to seek answers. Several of the young women I work with struggle to navigate conflicts I could not have imagined when I was their age, yet some of their trials are as old as the oldest stories in human history. Literature, philosophy, and poetry remind us we are not alone.

Through teaching literature, I have always sought to give my students a sense of hope. There are few characters in literature who, when we meet them, seem to have less hope for a meaningful future in the world that they inhabit than Hester Prynne. And while the ending is not one, I think, anyone would consider conventionally happy, it is an ending that I think is true and good, and therefore genuinely hopeful. Hope is always a true idea no matter how dark things seem in your story. That idea comes from Plato, too.

Hawthorne, like many New Englanders of his time, knew his Plato. So I want to show you how The Scarlet Letter gives one answer to what it means to resurrect the soul in a secular age, what it means to be human, and what it means to be a woman in 2025

In my recent episode, I read one the poems from new collection, Necessities of Mending, “All Women Once Knew Living was an Emergency,” which captures the themes of this post as I’ve felt them in my own life, and alchemized them into poetry through the slow and mysterious practice all artists know, but struggle to describe. Keep in mind this poem, when you hear it, begins the journey of the collection. Like Hester’s own story, it begins with a woman in a difficult place, before the appearance of hope.

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Free Resources & Editions That I Recommend of The Scarlet Letter

If you want to read it for free online, I have two version to recommend. The first is this illustrated Project Gutenberg version, which is a clean scroll on a phone. The second, which I love seeing, is a PDF of the 1874 second edition with illustrations, but the downside is that it’s facing pages and harder to use on phones.

If you are looking for physical editions of The Scarlet Letter, depending on your taste, I highly recommend 2 of the 3 versions that I own.

The first book is a beautiful hardback with an introduction and commentary by the longtime English professor, reader, and writer, Dr. Karen Swallow Prior. [Fun fact: she was my English professor many years ago, and she sent me to my first poetry workshop.] I love the A’s made from needle and thread on the cover of this book because they capture the text and look elegant.

On the opposite end of the visual spectrum is my Deluxe Penguin Classic edition with cover art that gives it a trendy and contemporary vibe.

Personally, I think one should always own at least two copies of a favorite book, so you may want to get both, plus my collection of poetry, for less than the price of a new pair shoes and a pair of yoga pants at Target.

The introduction + chapter one, chapter two, and chapter three are all available on every major podcast platform through Becoming Human, a podcast and project dedicated to bringing philosophy as a way of life to everyone (where I have been a producer for five years). The episode mentioned in this post is now available, and it covers chapters 4,5, and 6. You can listen to it in the player below.

My next interview is in production, and I look forward to bringing you my conversation with poet, theologian, and host of NPR’s Poetry Unbound, Pádraig Ó Tuama very soon!

Thank you for joining me, The Poetry Peddler, for The Scarlet Letter series,
A.

Alexandra Barylski, M.A. (Yale University) is the Executive Editor of the Marginalia Review of Books, the Director of Projects and Publications at the Institute for the Meanings of Science, and the Co-Founder of The Writing College, where she directs The Women’s Writing Institute.

In Hawthorne’s books, the veils between the worlds are thin, and you are always catching glimpses—a trick of the light, perhaps—as you walk the everyday streets of another time.

But the themes in The Scarlet Letter (1850) feel eerily present to our world today, and I think we all have much to learn from the fact that Hawthorne begins his tale in a prison, invoking the name of Anne Hutchinson, known for questioning religious male authority. (Martin Luther questioned religious authority, too, and caused the revolution that gave us the modern world—happy Reformation Day!)

In this episode, I introduce Nathanial Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter through a discussion of the often skimmed (or skipped) introductory chapter, “The Custom House” before my discussion of “Chapter One: The Prison.” I read some ghostly passages from introduction directly, which are perfect for Halloween, so you’ll get a taste of Hawthorne’s own language through my audio plus my unorthodox reading of the introduction.

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In my previous episode, you can also hear my read poems from my new book of poems, Necessities of Mending, which you can find on Amazon.

The episodes on the book begins tomorrow, October 31, and to whet your appetite for what’s to come, I had a conversation with Samuel Loncar, Ph.D. (Yale University) philosopher, scholar of religion, and the creator and host of the Becoming Human Project. (Our conversation is embedded in an audio player at the end of this post)

Loncar and I are partners and co-founders of the The Writing College and the Editor-in-Chief and Executive Editor of the Marginalia Review of Books. For seven years, we’ve been building and finding ways to unify our backgrounds in education, poetry, and philosophy, with me as a producer and creative designer for Becoming Human.

For many years, I taught literature and writing in middle, high school, and college classrooms. Since 2020, my classroom has been independently run, with enrolled students and clients at The Women’s Writing Institute at The Writing College. This is the first time that I am teaching publicly online, and I hope you will join me.

The project is not only about a classic work of literature, it is about literacy:

What is reading?

Why does it matter?

How is the act of reading essential—the act of making a meaningful judgement based on what we understand—to the human experience?

Women are texts long misunderstood and misinterpreted. Hawthorne knew it, and he is trying to atone for it.

As part of the project, I am recording every chapter of the book individually with my commentary.

As English teacher of many years, this is one the primary ways that I taught my students how to read deeply and think philosophically. “[U]ltimately, the novel is about the act of interpretation itself,” writes longtime English professor, reader, and writer, Karen Swallow Prior, in her introduction to this beautiful hardback edition of The Scarlet Letter.

The public will receive episodes on the text, delivered in units of 6 chapters with about 10 minutes of my teaching on each chapter, which will provide historical and philosophical context in addition to a my original interpretation of the text and why it is essential reading for our current moment. The complete audio book will be released chapter by chapter, and in those episodes I will expand on my public work and give more detail on the text. These episodes will only be available for my paid Substack subscribers.

I am also thrilled to announce that my second collection of poetry, the Necessities of Mending, released yesterday, and at the end of this episode I read two of my poems from the collection: “What Chavah Said” and “Walking Across the Field of Memory.”

One is about what Eve said to Adam and very much related to the themes of this novel. And I highly recommend poet, critic, and translator Boris Drayluk’s translation of Julia Nimerovskaya’s “Adam” from the original Russian, which he reads beautifully, and you can access the audio in that article.

Thank you so much for joining me and Samuel Loncar in our conversation about The Scarlet Letter, Puritan America, the surprising connections between fashion and philosophy, and how flaming A’s might become the hottest trend.

You can also listen here on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or any other major audio platform.

Alexandra Barylski, M.A. (Yale University) is a deep literacy specialist, poet, writer, and the Executive Editor of the Marginalia Review of Books, an independent magazine and think tank. She is the co-founder of The Writing College (2020), where she directs The Women’s Writing Institute.

For the moment, let’s keep it a secret while I tell you a story.

Recently, I was speaking with a highly intelligent young woman, a college student who impresses me with her sobriety, strength of spirit, and remarkable work ethic.

She told me that she doesn’t believe love has much value. She presented a sound case for her position, and pressed me hard for an answer: How is that people who say they love us, and sometimes do, still cause us the most harm, the deepest wounds? Is that love? Is that worth risking everything for?

A mother or father loves their child—the child feels it, truly, some of the time—but parents also can hurt the child in ways no one else can. A close friend or a romantic partner may say they love us, and yet, they may be the very person to betray us, to strike our most tender point.

What do we do with the fact that much of our trauma often comes from the people who say they love us? Perhaps this is why so many modern people, especially women, find ourselves doubtful of love. We struggle to work out the sum of love’s worth or whether or not romance is real. And if it is real, is it personally possible?

At sixteen, the romance novels that most interested me were Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850).

Wuthering Heights is a gripping gothic novel of pride, obsession, and revenge. I re-read the novel about 4 years ago with a sober eye and a heavy heart, seeing what I could not—or would not—see when I read it in my teens and early twenties. I think that reading may be my last.

The Scarlet Letter is a spell, an incantation, an enchantment that captivates me more each time I read the novel. Hawthorne is an unparalleled conjuror, and in the novel he sets before us a riddle about women and love that I am still working out. The Scarlet Letter (subtitled, A Romance) is a novel I will read every few years for the rest of my life. This year, I am inviting you to join me.

For the next four weeks, beginning on October 31, I will be posting a four part audio course on The Scarlet Letter through The Poetry Peddler.

The novel is 24 chapters, so each course episode (one per week) will address 6 chapters at a time (the chapters are relatively short, averaging about 10 pages).

As part of sharing my reading with you, I plan to record my reading of the entire novel because the way I have taught students to read for decades is to read out-loud to them and gloss the text with my commentary.

These 24 audio chapters (one per day for 28 days, beginning October 31, skipping 4 Saturday’s) will be for my paying subscribers, but small portions will be released to the public.

I will begin reading the novel at Chapter 1: The Prison-Door, not the Custom-House Introduction, because it’s nearly 3x the length of many of the chapters. However, I will cover it in my first episode (released on Halloween!) because I love Hawthorne’s humorous sketch of working for Uncle. And the conceit of finding the scarlet letter in the Custom’s House is important to understanding Hawthorne’s personal act of spiritual atonement in writing the novel and the the strange, real, and tender-hearted story that follows.

What I love most about Hawthorne’s work is the way the supernatural is essential to the world we enter, and his writing, to me, has something of the quality of iconic early American work like Irving’s “Sleepy Hollow,” but with greater psychological depth. The mists and chill of Autumn mixed with tales of bygone witches and the anticipation of little ghosts trick-or-treating at the door always feels like the perfect time to read Hawthorne.

His work has much of the wonderful about it, in the archaic sense, of something relating to awe, a thing to marvel at.

A little known work (or at least, rarely read and hardly mentioned) by Hawthorne is the short story “A New Adam and Eve.” In the story, Adam and Eve wake up in a modern city after the extinction of humans. They wander around and wonder at modern institutions such as a church, a bank, and prison. It’s a story that believes in romance and love and the possibility of a world renewed despite the human species losing its way and falling from the heights of its true glory.

That is the marvelous story I believe Hawthorne tells over and over, the story of humans renewed and saved by love. The story is full of things wondrous strange, eerie and uncanny, and he tells it most compellingly in The Scarlet Letter. Ultimately, it is not the conventional love story, but a story about what it means to be a human, and, specifically, a woman.

Hawthorne understood a woman in love is not really something we understand, or can describe, without a great deal of darkness and magic.

Do I believe in love? Maybe the better question is, what does believing in love really mean?

Follow along and find out.

Alexandra Barylski, M.A. (Yale University) is the Executive Editor of the Marginalia Review of Books, Director of Projects and Publications at the Institute for the Meanings of Science, and the Founder of The Writing College, where she directs The Women’s Writing Institute.

She put her spell on me when I was 16. Silas Marner was assigned in my AP lit class, and I fell completely in love with her by the end of the first paragraph.

Portrait of Mary Ann Evans (1860) by Samuel Lawrence

Born in rural Warwickshire, England, she was unusually educated for a woman of her time, with a strong background in literature, philosophy, and science. In fact, she was better educated than many men of her time and was one of the most profound minds of her age.

How did she gain her outstanding education?

She acquired it through a smattering of formal schooling, personal tutors, the discipline of rigorous self-study, and the encouragement of writers and philosophers who recognized her talent.

In her novel, Adam Bede, which is set in rural England and populated with many tradesmen and women and farming families, there is a night school run by the bachelor, Bartle Massey. His subjects are primarily reading and writing. Massey is described by Adam as someone whose “tongue is like a sharp blade—it never touches anything but it cuts.” When Massey speaks, you know his mind, whether you like what he says or not, such as when he declares that “college makes most people like bladders—just good for nothing but t’hold the stuff as is poured into ‘em.” I have a few college degrees myself, and I am grateful, especially as a woman, to have the equal opportunity to attend institutions of higher learning. But Massey’s point, taken generally, is the same one all reformers of education since Plato have been making: true learning is not about holding facts and opinions; it is about training your ability to reason in and through language. The root of human skilled power is the word, creating the foundation of self-consciousness through articulacy.

Eliot’s words cut clean along the bone.

She was a poet, journalist, and novelist, and she worked as a translator and editor, notably for The Westminster Review (a journal for philosophical radicals) before turning to fiction. Her work as translator gave us, in English, Strauss’s highly controversial Life of Jesus and Feuerbach’s highly influential Essence of Christianity.

These are some of the most profound texts in German theology and philosophy, and their deep influence is felt and expressed in her fiction.

Her personal life was unconventional; she lived openly with philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes (who was married but separated) in a relationship that lasted over 20 years until his death. Later, she married John Cross, who was 20 years her junior. Her life may not have been approved of by the Victorians, but her ethics and morals are as strong and solid as you could wish for.

Her heart and mind understood the frailty and strength of our human condition, and I think she is essential reading for everyone. She is a master of blending intellectual rigor with emotional insight, and her works are a testament to Humanism at its finest.

Here is a bit of sound thinking for you from Eliot herself, found in Adam Bede:

“Until it can be proved that hatred is a better thing for the soul than love, I must believe that Mr. Irwine’s influence on the parish was a more wholesome one than that of the the zealous Mr.Ryde … who insisted strongly on the doctrines of the Reformation, visited his flock often in their homes, and was severe in rebuking aberrations of the flesh … but I gather from Adam Bede, to whom I talked of these matters in his old age, that few clergymen could be less successful at winning the hearts of their parishioners than Mr. Ryde.”

This is from a chapter where the narrative is interrupted, and the narrator directly addresses (for a few pages) the anticipated complaints of the reader regarding Mr. Irwine’s actions in the previous chapter. The experience is that of the fourth wall breaking, like when the actor suddenly turns from the drama of the world on stage and faces the audience with a direct address. I have always found that effect uncanny and wonderful; it startles you out of yourself and causes the spirit to come to attention.

The effect is much the same in Adam Bede.

Eliot recognizes some readers may have a mental protest against Mr. Irwine’s pastoral judgment, and she devotes a whole chapter to addressing their objections. She calls the reader’s attention to our tendency to to measure others according to our idea of how we think they should believe and behave. But Eliot says she is not the kind of novelist to write idealized people. She will not give readers the clergyman they deem proper and right, in line with their strict sense of how his behavior ought to be. She gives us a country parson as he is, one whom is comfortably situated and well loved by his flock, though he may lack interest in expounding on the finer points of theology.

If you are a thoroughly modern (secular) reader, you might be wondering why she spends so much time on this point. While we may no longer have public and even violent debates between Calvinists and Arminians and Methodists (a women Methodist preacher is central to the drama of Adam Bede), we do live in a world much like the the one in her novel because we are its inheritors, a culture completely built on the ideals of the Protestant Reformation.

Then, as now, everyone is “weighing and sifting what this text [value] means and what that text [value] means.” All this “weighing and sifting”—our (self)righteous quest to possess the correct thought or idea—has shaped our modern world.

As my partner in poetry peddling, philosopher and scholar of religion, Samuel Loncar (Yale University), explains in episode eight of Becoming Human: Origins,1 Protestantism created the problem of responding to different interpretations on a mass scale. Why? Because like our own legal system, a person’s life depended on an interpretation of a text. Nine people’s interpretation of a text decides your rights. It’s call the Supreme Court. So having the correct interpretation is not relegated to the realm of English majors debating poetry, it’s the skill your life depends on. The historical fact is that people killed people who disagreed with them or made them social and political exiles, unable to participate in life and culture. As Loncar reminds the listener, you may not believe in any gods, but there is a good chance you do believe in the reality of the Supreme Court. So you accept that your earthly life is greatly affected by an interpretation of a text even if you do not believe your everlasting life depends on one. The foundation of America is Protestant.

Adam says that all this bickering and debating can not truly be what religion is about. He likes Mr. Irwin because his words are “good” and one was always “wiser for remembering them.” Mr. Irwine, by the way, has a large stock of common sense and much kindness for all.

Orthodoxy is not the sole realm of what we call religion. We find orthodox believers who put their faith in Presidents, in social values, in political ideals. In every case, one must have the right belief, the correct thought, and the proper interpretation to remain a part of the group. But the group Eliot is most interested in is the Human.

Any idea, value, philosophy, or religion that makes us more human, that strengthens our feeling for our neighbor so that we take a sincere interest in them and care for them, is a good one. Any movement towards making our world more true, beautiful, good, and just is the right movement for our species. Mr. Irwin loved his Greek classics and poems, perhaps, a little more than Christian texts and doctrines. But he was open-hearted to everyone and all faces brightened when he passed by their field or farmhouse.

The sunshine of one soul on another soul is not to be lost for all the so-called right thinking in the world. What are all our doctrines and values and words worth if they do not comfort and uplift our fellow humans? This essential work, as Eliot knows, does not mean speaking with false happiness or glib cheer. Often, it means weeping with those who weep and mourning with those who mourn.

George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) is concerned that we know what it means to touch our own humanity, because if we can not, then there is a slim chance we will ever really be able to do the good we desire in this world. To me, that is also the work of poetry and philosophy and science as ways of life. The human in all its folly and everyday faithfulness is the heart of her work, and she sings the goodness of existence. May this be the heart of our work, too.

BIO