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Possession: 1. the action or fact of possessing, or the condition of being possessed. 2. the holding or having of something as one's own, or being inhabited and controlled by demon or spirit . . .The definition of possession cancels itself out. The relationship between possessor and possessed is, like ownership is, multidirectional.
- Suzan-Lori Parks
IN THIS ESSAY, I explore the ways in which Suzan-Lori Parks, the contemporary playwright, a MacArthur Fellowship and Pulitzer Prize winner, takes up Nathaniel Hawthorne's Hester, in order to explore one version of the modern American drama in which an author comes to be possessed of her subject and even by her subject.1 The Scarlet Letter is shot through with possessiveness-of former lovers of their past, a mother of a daughter, a cuckolded husband of revenge. Famously, in "The Custom-House" essay that precedes the book, Hawthorne almost obsessively works out his own relationship to his book, and to the claims his ancestors and audience and home make on him. For Hawthorne and Hester, possession is a problem that is never resolved. It is a problem for the person, Hawthorne, and his character, Hester, and it is a problem for him as an artist, as he figures himself in relation to his audience and to literary tradition.
Both Hawthorne and Parks are possessed by the idea of being possessed by the past, a past that they cannot escape even if they wish to. For Parks, of course, as an African American, the past is a place where her ancestors were possessed in deed, such that the past both is and is not experienced as one's own. Racial history in the United States inflects all of Parks' work, even, or especially as she overturns expectations and a white Hester becomes black. To be possessed, that is, to be dispossessed, is an equation with particular historical intensity for Parks. Both she and Hawthorne are keenly aware of the force of history, and rarely is it a force for liberation. The lens through which they view their versions of the story about the scarlet letter, as Deborah Geis writes, is the "lens of our cruel and continuing histories of oppression" (Geis, 87). The plot, there is no doubt, of Hester and her scarlet...