Revising The Scarlet Letter: Race and Motherhood in In the Blood and Little Fires Everywhere

Abstract

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter has generated numerous adaptations. Its depiction of race has made it a problematic ‘master text’, however, especially since it was published in the same year as the US Fugitive Slave Act. This essay examines three recent adaptations across a variety of media that focus on the relationship between race and motherhood, revealing the ways in which Hester Prynne can be integrated into society as a single mother in ways that non-white mothers cannot. Suzan-Lori Parks’ 1998 play In the Blood stages ‘Hester, La Negrita’ as a homeless mother of five who cannot escape the ‘hand of fate’ of racial oppression. Celeste Ng’s 2017 novel Little Fires Everywhere reinvents Hester as a surrogate mother whose efforts on behalf of a birth mother in a trans-racial adoption dispute highlight how race differentially impacts maternal rights. The 2020 Hulu television adaptation of Ng’s novel casts the Hester and Pearl figures, along with an artist named Hawthorne, as black women whose activism forces the Richardson family to acknowledge their white privilege. Together, these adaptations examine how the ‘monstrous birth’ of slavery that Hawthorne only belatedly acknowledged has had a lingering afterlife in constructions of race and motherhood.