The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter
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Hester Prynne is brought out of a Boston jail with an infant in her arms and a scarlet A on her dress, and refuses to name the father. She raises her daughter on the edge of the settlement for seven years while the man keeps silent and her husband, arriving unannounced, sets about finding out who he is.
About the book
Published in 1850 and set in Boston two centuries earlier, The Scarlet Letter opens with Hester Prynne brought out of the jail with a three-month-old child and made to stand on the scaffold wearing the letter A. She will not name the father. Her husband, who sent her ahead from England and was believed lost, arrives in the crowd, takes a new name, and settles in the town as a physician with one purpose: to find out who the man is. Hawthorne prefaces it with a long sketch of the Salem custom house where he worked, and the novel that follows is his most controlled — four scaffold scenes, three characters and a child, and a moral argument that runs against its own setting. It is the secret, not the sin, that ruins the minister, and the revenge, not the adultery, that Hawthorne treats as unforgivable.
Characters
Hester Prynne — Protagonist
Made to wear the letter for a child she will not explain, and who stays in the town rather than leave.
Arthur Dimmesdale — Minister
The young clergyman the congregation reveres, kept alive and destroyed by what he does not say.
Roger Chillingworth — Physician
Hester’s husband under another name, attaching himself to the minister as doctor and tormentor.
Pearl — Hester’s daughter
Wild, quick and unnerving, treated by the town as the letter made flesh and by her mother as a question.
Governor Bellingham — Magistrate
The colony’s governor, who considers taking the child away from a mother in Hester’s position.
Mistress Hibbins — The governor’s sister
Reputed a witch, inviting people into the forest, and eventually executed as one.
About the author
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) was an American novelist and short-story writer descended from a judge at the Salem witch trials — a connection he was ashamed enough of to add the w to the family name. He spent twelve years after college writing in a room in his mother's house, worked at the Boston and Salem custom houses, and lived for a while at the utopian community of Brook Farm, which he later put into a novel. Herman Melville, who became a neighbour and a friend, dedicated Moby-Dick to him. His books include The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables and Twice-Told Tales.