New Perspectives on Hawthorne and Utopia
Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, Spring, 2025
Editors: Monika Elbert and Andrew Loman
In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne writes, “The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably found it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison” (CE 1:47). This famous sentence deploys a number of key terms – the colony, virtue, happiness, projection, necessity, virginity, the cemetery, the prison – all of them interlinked with the sentence’s key term, Utopia.