Analysis of Intertextual Correspondence in Nathanial Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and John Updike’s The Scarlet Letter Trilogy

Abstract

The twentieth century intellectual and historical processes like deconstruction and
decolonization have repudiated centuries held myths of universality, originality and
ahistoricity of the texts. The myth of originality of a text is replaced by the
phenomenon of intertextual correspondence. A text is a composite picture of
quotations which is not only inspired from previous texts but also transforms them.
The communication between the author and the reader is always partnered by an
intertextual relation between written words and their prior existence in past texts.
In the past several years, the body of criticism on the intertextual correspondence
between the writers has grown tremendously due to the renewed interest in
classical stories/myths among contemporary writers. The present study is a study
in intertextual mode which examines and evaluates intertextual correspondence
between Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and The Scarlet Trilogy by John Updike
because it is widely perceived that Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is one of the
major influences on Updike’s The Scarlet Letter Trilogy. The conceptual
framework of this research is Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality. This study will
focus upon the larger or more general influences of Hawthorne on Updike.