You may not think that The Scarlet Letter, a novel set in Puritan America, has much to say about our contemporary crisis around what it means to human, and therefore what it means to be a woman, the plummeting literacy rates, and the ongoing debates about feminism. I think, it does. And I will prove it to you in these series.
As part of the project, I am recording every chapter of the book 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. So, this series is also very much about the act of reading itself, the act of interpretation, which is a major theme of Nathaniel Hathorne’s The Scarlet Letter. The full audio book, released chapter by chapter, will be available for my paid Substack subscribers.
The project is not only about great literature, it is about literacy: What is reading? Why does it matter? And how is the act of reading—or we might say, the act of making a meaningful judgement based on what we see, hear, or read—essential to the human experience. Women have been texts long misunderstood, and Hawthorne knew it and is trying to atone for it.
I am also thrilled to announce that my second collection of poetry, the Necessities of Mending, released with the start of the project, and at the end of the first episode I read two of my poems from the collection. One is about what Eve said to Adam and very much related to the themes of this novel. Thank you so much for joining me and Samuel Loncar, the creator and host of Becoming Human in our conversation about The Scarlet Letter, Puritan America, the surprising connections between fashion and philosophy, and how flaming A’s may become the hottest trend. And thank you for listening, subscribing, and following along with my free series on The Scarlet Letter.
Christian Wiman on the Wonder of the Uknown in Love & Poetry, Part 1
Christian Wiman on AI, Consciousness, and the Power of Life, Part 2
Christian Wiman is the Clement-Muehl Professor of Communication Arts at Yale Divinity School and the author, editor, or translator of fourteen books, including Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair (FSG, 2024), Hammer is the Prayer: Selected Poems (FSG, 2016), My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (FSG, 2013), and Stolen Air: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (HarperCollins/Ecco, 2012). Of his work as a whole, Marilynne Robinson writes, “His poetry and scholarship have a purifying urgency that is rare in this world. This puts him at the very source of theology, and enables him to say new things in timeless language, so that the reader’s surprise and assent are one and the same.”
Wiman has been a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford and a visiting assistant professor of English at Northwestern, and for three years he served as Visiting Scholar at Lynchburg College in Virginia. From 2003 until 2013 he was the editor of Poetry magazine. During that time the magazine’s circulation tripled, and it garnered two National Magazine Awards from the American Society of Magazine Editors. Wiman has written for the New Yorker, Harper’s, the New York Times Book Review, the Atlantic Monthly, and numerous other publications. He is a former Guggenheim Fellow and holds two honorary doctorates.