The Scarlet Letter and The Rapture of Canaan Compared

Introduction: Religious Fanaticism and Female Experience

Ninah's repressed desire for intimacy and sensual experience in Sheri Reynolds' The Rapture of Canaan has an enormous impact on the novel's themes, and makes a powerful statement about how not to raise a child — one that could easily be used in psychology classes. To be raised by a religiously fanatical family that holds the fear of Hell over a young girl's head is a tremendous emotional burden.

Fanatical and outdated views of religion, emphasizing the fear of eternal punishment if obedience is not forthcoming — enforced as a narrowly defined perversion of spiritual truth — are, when obsessively pushed onto children as rigid rules, more harmful than what the fanatical characters espousing those rules are trying to protect their children from. The hints and clues are everywhere in both novels. In The Rapture of Canaan in particular, they amount to evidence of a far too strict child-rearing environment for Ninah, who is confused and tormented — sexually and socially — by guilt set against her entirely natural human desire for sensual attention.

As for the guilt and the obsessive social impulse to punish Hester Prynne, this character fights back against the community that branded her with the letter "A." She keeps her child and her sanity while everything around her seems bizarre, and the community and its enforcers lack any stable grip on their own professed values.

Ninah's Repression and Distorted Desire in The Rapture of Canaan

The clothespins placed on Ninah's body offer the reader a perverted, twisted view of her family. That perversion likely contributed to Ninah's vivid and disturbing dream (pp. 72–73), which occurs during a youth retreat — a dream in which she sees Jesus on a cross outside her window, holding a handful of azaleas.

"I dreamed I went outside in just my gown, and walked up to him. He was too nearly dead to speak, but all he had in his eyes was love for me." As Sigmund Freud — who was truly the pioneer of dream analysis, and whose work was often tied to literary interpretation — would recognize, this dream is ripe for psychological unpacking. Ninah then "walked up to the wound in his side where he'd been stuck with a sword. I put my mouth on that wound and began drinking from it, swallowing his blood."

When Jesus' side wound "became a mouth," Ninah, still in her dream, was being "kissed back" by this wound: "…I could slip my tongue into the wound, feel the inside of his skin with my tongue, circle it there, tasting him."

Without reaching for pseudo-psychological theorizing, it seems clear that the sexual repression and religious fanaticism in Ninah's life have combined to produce this disturbing religious-sexual fantasy. In the typical Christian communion ceremony, the pastor says, as the wine is served, "This is the blood of Christ" — an image that may well have filtered into Ninah's unconscious dream state.

After Jesus transforms into James — Ninah's prayer partner, with whom she prays in an almost militarily disciplined routine — Ninah "sat up and peered around the dark room. Bodies lay everywhere, sleeping against walls and beneath tables. I didn't know where James might be." So entirely is Ninah consumed by her repressive state that when Everett asks why she would have a bad dream at a youth retreat, and adds, "Is something on your chest?" (p. 73), she thinks only of the clothespins she "should" have with her — but does not.

On page 89, Grandpa lays down the law regarding physical contact: "…we could hold hands in prayer if we felt the need, but we weren't to hold hands at any other time." This rule gave Ninah the perfect sanctioned excuse to have at least some physical contact with a boy — contact she desperately craved. We also learn on that same page that most prayer was performed individually, and that it was "an unusual circumstance for the prayer partners to meet together in the first place."

Prayer, Physical Longing, and Spiritual Irony

When Grandpa permitted James and Ninah to go into the living room together to pray — and to hold hands — Ninah reflected that it was strange to know they "were trusting us" to be alone together, when "I couldn't even trust myself"; and she "surely couldn't trust James." When James smiled at her, her heart fell into her pelvis, "like it'd been doing so often." She also loved the feeling of his hand on her leg — "his big man's hand on my long, long leg" — though she didn't know "if what I felt was a thrill or a fear, but it was bigger than anything I'd known."

Here again, Ninah is experiencing a perfectly natural sensual rush — a physical heat in her body — and she can justify whatever guilt arises through the framing of prayer, since prayer can, in her world, erase a multitude of sins.

On page 90, the author may be embedding subtle sexual irony in her language when she writes: "All that winter James and I came together as prayer partners, and all that winter he never touched me." It is also telling that James washed out Ninah's gym suit, and she washed his — a form of quiet intimacy that stops just short of the physical.

Things become more overtly physical on page 121, where the intertwining of sensuality and spirituality is on one hand almost absurd — justifying kissing and petting by listening for a word from God — but on the other hand, deeply understandable, since this moment has been building for a long time, all wound around the ritual of prayer. "Lord, maybe I'm confused. Maybe I'm the one who's summoned to be your holy conduit for Ninah," James said to God. "Give me your words, Precious Lamb."

Ninah, struck by how James was speaking "so honestly, so totally sincerely," wanted only to keep her heart "open to God…and then I felt his knees next to mine, so close, and I recognized his breath, warm and tinted with something that smelled like grass, and I wanted to be his holy conduit too, whatever that was." That last phrase — "whatever that was" — is key. For young, repressed Ninah, it came down to: this really feels good, being so close to a boy, and I want more of it. "And then his mouth was next to mine, and he was speaking into my mouth, and I hoped it might be Jesus, so I didn't pull away." James whispered down Ninah's throat as though addressing Jesus, "and then he kissed me like a waterfall, and I kept my mouth wide open until he called out, 'Ninah, this can't be right. We have to pray.'"

"God, I think we're getting mixed signals" — an ironic and perfectly apt statement that sums up much of the novel's treatment of the relationship between James and Ninah. "And then I leaned into him and kissed him on the throat and at the place where his soft shirt rested against his neck."

Conclusion: Rising Above Fanaticism

Hester rose above the twisted values of the society of her time, and became strong enough — by repudiating Puritan values — to become something of a hero to women who sought strength in their moments of weakness and sorrow. In this respect, both Hester Prynne and Ninah serve as literary examples of what happens when rigid religious communities impose repressive codes on women and girls: those codes distort, damage, and ultimately fail to contain the human desire for connection, love, and dignity. The hints and clues are everywhere in both novels — and in the end, they amount to a sustained indictment of fanaticism itself.

References

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter: A Romance. New York: Libra, Incorporated, 1960.

Reynolds, Sheri. The Rapture of Canaan. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1995.