The Scarlet Letter
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Summary
In Puritan Boston, Hester Prynne is condemned to wear a scarlet letter A on her chest for the rest of her life after bearing a daughter, Pearl, out of wedlock, and to stand on the public scaffold while the town demands, and never gets, the name of the child's father. That father is Arthur Dimmesdale, the town's own revered young minister, who lacks Hester's courage to confess and instead lets his guilt eat him from the inside for years, preaching with an intensity his congregation mistakes for holiness. Hester's husband, long believed lost at sea, arrives under the assumed name Roger Chillingworth, discovers Dimmesdale's secret, and spends years as the minister's physician and confidant, quietly tormenting him rather than exposing him, a private revenge crueller than public shame. Pearl grows up as a living, restless embodiment of her parents' sin and the town's judgment, drawn again and again to the letter on her mother's chest. Dimmesdale finally confesses publicly on the same scaffold where Hester once stood alone, and dies in the act; Chillingworth, his revenge complete, withers without purpose; Hester lives on, the letter now a badge she wears with something closer to authority than shame.
Hawthorne writes in dense, deliberate, morally probing prose, more interested in what guilt does to a person over years than in any single dramatic event, and the pace asks patience from a reader used to faster fiction. The reward is a psychological portrait, particularly of Dimmesdale's slow self destruction, that still reads as exact.
Hawthorne began the manuscript expecting it to fail commercially; it sold out its first printing of twenty five hundred copies within ten days.
Historical Context & Significance
Published in March 1850 by Ticknor, Reed and Fields, the novel provoked immediate objection in Salem over Hawthorne's introductory essay, a satirical account of his years at the customs house that offended local officials he named, and some contemporaries criticised the book's frank treatment of adultery and its sympathetic portrait of Hester; the critic Edwin Percy Whipple found a morbid intensity in its psychology even while praising the writing. George Eliot later called it one of the two most indigenous and masterly productions in American literature.
D. H. Lawrence's twentieth century judgment that it was a perfect work of the American imagination has held up as a common critical verdict, and the novel is regularly named among the founding texts of American fiction, still assigned in schools for its portrait of Puritan hypocrisy and public shame. It has been filmed repeatedly, from a 1908 silent version through a 1995 adaptation, and John Updike later wrote a trilogy of novels in direct response to it.