FILM FILM - University of Macau Library

66 Transition and Transformation
ally chose to stay close to the content of scripts written by others rather than
himself, and remained faithful in rendering both their tragic and comic dimensions.
As I will be arguing in this chapter, if Sjöström adds anything, it is rather
on a purely stylistic level, as he captures central thematic aspects of his story to
instead express them visually, through symbolic or metaphoric images.
Hester Prynne and the Spectacle
In her analysis of The Scarlet Letter, the main argument put forward by
Brouwers is that Hester Prynne, Hawthorne’s seventeenth-century heroine, is
turned into a modern flapper girl in the screen version. Daring, or even ahistorical,
as this hypothesis may seem, the urban flapper girl of the 1920s seems to
have little to do with Puritan settlers around 1650. Brouwers grounds her argument
in a thorough analysis of both the portrayal of modern woman in The
Scarlet Letter and of the society of the spectacle of which Hester in Marion’s
and Sjöström’s version is clearly a part: “Hester as a filmic creation is all about
seeing and being-seen, a seeing that is always communal, as the film experience
was originally meant to be communal.” 10
Brouwers also reflects on the slightly anachronistic relation between
Hawthorne’s literary portrayal of his heroine in 1850 and of the Puritan society
from around 1650 –“shaped by nineteenth-century discourse on ‘true womanhood’
as well as the growing presence of women’s voices in public discourse” –
an anachronism reoccurring in the formation of the same roles seventy years
later in another medium: “so the film’s Hester comes closer to notions of womanhood
that prevailed during the twenties”. 11
The discussion focussing specifically on the flapper may evoke counter-arguments
in relation to this particular screen representation: the Hester Prynne
character, which may seem too historically distant from the flapper for the parallel
between them to be drawn in its entirety. However, the main argument of
Brouwers’ analysis, that of the idea of portraying the modern woman in the
script, born from the society of the spectacle, and making her the focus of the
film, seems valid enough. Whereas Hester in Hawthorne’s novel fully remains a
Puritan, permanently conscious of her own sin and struggling for reconciliation
and peace of mind, her inner life in the film is not that apparent. She appears as
more rebellious and also seems more opposed to the Puritan society, separated
from them by different visual cues.
The most obvious example of the two different readings of Hester is the history
of the letter A, which is different in the novel and the film. In the film and
in the novel, Hester tears it off during a brief moment of freedom with her be-