The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
“A man who confessed nothing rotted alive. A woman who confessed everything was reborn. Hawthorne wrote this about his own ancestors — and never forgave himself.”
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The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850) · 272pages · Romantic / Dark Romanticism · 14 AP appearances
Summary
In seventeenth-century Puritan Boston, Hester Prynne is condemned to wear a scarlet 'A' for adultery after giving birth to a daughter, Pearl, out of wedlock. Her secret lover is the revered minister Arthur Dimmesdale, who cannot confess. Her estranged husband Roger Chillingworth arrives, disguises himself as a physician, and devotes his life to psychological torment of the guilty clergyman. Hester survives through labor and love; Dimmesdale collapses under concealed guilt; Chillingworth, robbed of his prey, withers and dies. The novel ends with Hester returning voluntarily to Boston to wear the letter — transformed, by her own agency, from mark of shame into badge of meaning.
Why It Matters
The Scarlet Letter is the first major American psychological novel — the first to locate its drama primarily in the interior lives of its characters rather than in external events. Published in 1850 as a 'romance' (Hawthorne's term, distinguishing his mode from the realist novel), it established ...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: Deliberately archaic, Latinate construction, Puritan theological vocabulary — a prose that sounds as if it emerged from the seventeenth century even though it was written in 1850
Narrator: Hawthorne's narrator is a peculiar construction — he speaks in the past tense about events that are themselves three ...
Figurative Language: Very high
Historical Context
Published 1850 — set in 1640s Puritan Boston; written during the Antebellum period with active debates about women's rights, abolition, and religious orthodoxy: Hawthorne sets the novel in 1642 but writes it in 1849-1850, when the questions the novel raises — women's autonomy, individual conscience versus community law, the relationship between inner life ...
Key Characters
Talking Points
- Hawthorne says the scarlet letter 'had not done its office.' What was its intended office? What did it actually accomplish? Is that a failure of the punishment or a triumph of the punished?
- Why does Hawthorne set the story in the seventeenth century while writing in 1850? What does the historical distance allow him to say that he couldn't say about contemporary American society?
- Is Pearl a realistic child or an allegorical device? Does she have to be one or the other? Find two moments where she functions as a symbol and two where she behaves like a person.
- Hawthorne adds a 'w' to his surname, partly to distance himself from his witch trial ancestors. Then he writes a novel about the injustice of Puritan condemnation. Is the novel an act of penance, a prosecution, or both?
- Dimmesdale's concealed guilt produces his greatest sermons. His suffering makes him a better minister. Does the novel suggest that hypocrisy can be productive? Is this Hawthorne's most uncomfortable argument?
Notable Quotes
“I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them may be now ...”
“It seemed to me, then, that I experienced a sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat.”
“On one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems.”
Why Read This
Because every major theme in the novel is still operational: public shaming, the gap between private guilt and public reputation, the difference between punishment that reforms and punishment that merely performs. The social media pile-on is a dir...