Humanities Teacher Award winner Dr. Mikki Galliher (Blue Mountain College) will present her public lecture titled, “Fallen Ministers and Reformed Seductresses in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Alice Cary’s Hagar, A Story of Today.” Reception to follow.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic text has much in common with another novel, Hagar, A Story for Today by Hawthorne’s contemporary Alice Cary. Both novels feature a young woman who is seduced, impregnated, and then betrayed by her lover. However, while Hawthorne’s novel is a beloved classic studied in high school and college classrooms, Cary’s work has fallen into obscurity, unchampioned even by most feminist recovery projects despite Cary’s popularity and influence during her lifetime. I posit that much of the reason for the disparity in reception lies in the way that Hawthorne’s text elicits empathy for the male seducer, while Cary does not.
