SCARLET
LETTER
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Scarlet
Letter is considered Nathaniel Hawthorne's most famous novel--and the
first quintessentially American novel in style, theme, and language. Set in
seventeenth-century Puritan Massachusetts, the novel centers around the
travails of Hester Prynne, who gives birth to a
daughter Pearl after an adulterous affair. Hawthorne's novel is
concerned with the effects of the affair rather than the affair itself, using
Hester's public shaming as a springboard to explore the lingering taboos of
Puritan New England in contemporary society.
Adulteress Hester
Prynne must wear a scarlet A to mark her shame. Her lover, Arthur
Dimmesdale, remains unidentified and is wracked with guilt, while her
husband, Roger Chillingworth, seeks revenge. The Scarlet Letter's symbolism
helps create a powerful drama in Puritan Boston: a kiss, evil, sin,
nature, the scarlet letter, and the punishing scaffold. Nathaniel Hawthorne's
masterpiece is a classic example of the human conflict between emotion and
intellect.
The Scarlet Letter was an
immediate success for a number of reasons. Hawthorne's novel offered a uniquely
American style, language, set of characters, and--most importantly--a uniquely
American central dilemma. Besides entertainment, then, Hawthorne's novel had
the possibility of goading change, since it addressed a topic that was still
relatively controversial, even taboo. Certainly Puritan values had eased
somewhat by 1850, but not enough to make the novel completely welcome.
But Hawthorne was not
concerned with a prurient affair here, though the novel’s characters are.
Hawthorne chose to leave out the details of the adulterous rendezvous between
Hester and Dimmesdale entirely. Instead, he was concerned with the aftermath of
the affair--the shaming of Hester, the raising of a child borne of sin, and the
values of a society that would allow a sin to continue to be punished long
after it would seem reasonable. Hawthorne takes advantage of his greatest
assets as a writer--the interiority of his writing, his exploration of thoughts
and emotions--and uses them to humanize all the parties involved in the affair,
as well as to demonize the thoughts that become consumed by it. Chillingworth,
notably, becomes the embodiment of Puritan values, which led people to lynch
and destroy in the name of God but motivated in large measure by the people’s
own repressed sins of lust, greed, and envy.
The three most important
aspects of The Scarlet Letter:
- The scarlet A worn
by Hester Prynne stands for "adulterer." Because her
daughter Pearl was born more than nine months after Hester left
her husband in England to come to America, her fellow Puritans know that
she was impregnated by someone to whom she was not married: a sin.
- Much of the novel's introductory
section, "The Custom House," is true, and is based on
Hawthorne's employment in the building of that same name in Salem,
Massachusetts. The part about finding a letter A made of cloth that has
been wrapped in a parchment manuscript, however, is entirely fictional.
- The Scarlet Letter is a gothic romance, not a
historical novel. It takes place at a recognizable place and time, the
Massachusetts Bay Colony during the 17th century, but many of its details
are fanciful rather than accurate. For example, the governor's house, as
Hawthorne describes it, has a brilliantly decorated exterior, which would
have been unlikely in Puritan Boston.
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