The Scarlet LetterStudy Guide

A prison door in Boston is already old, iron-spiked, and weather-stained, as if a new colony had needed crime from the first season. Weeds choke the grass. A wild rose-bush blooms beside the portal. The crowd has come for a woman. When the door opens, Hester Prynne steps into sunlight by her own pace, carrying three-month-old Pearl and wearing a scarlet A worked in gold thread so brilliantly that shame looks like decoration. The town expected a broken face. It gets composure, and it hates her for it. Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter in 1850. What follows is seven years of one letter and two secrets.

Hester is the woman who will not name the father. Pearl is the living letter, wild, dressed in scarlet, asking questions no child is supposed to ask. Arthur Dimmesdale is the beloved minister who watches from the meeting-house balcony and later from a midnight scaffold he will not climb in daylight. Roger Chillingworth, once Roger Prynne, stands at the crowd's edge with one shoulder higher than the other, then moves into the minister's house as a physician. The townswomen want a hot iron on her forehead. Governor Bellingham will try to take the child. The pressure among them is not whether a sin occurred. It is who has to carry it in public.

Chapter 2 gives the door and the rose. Chapter 3 puts her on the scaffold with Pearl and the gold-thread A. Chapter 4 keeps her there. Dimmesdale, ordered to exhort her, begs her to speak the name and she will not. Chapter 5 is the jail cell. The husband she thought dead offers medicine and a bargain: she will keep his identity if he will not force the father's. He becomes the leech in Dimmesdale's rooms, probing, smiling, feeding on a secret he already half knows. Hester sews for a living at the edge of town. Pearl tells the governor she was plucked from the rose-bush. Hester says she will die before they take her. The hinge is midnight on the same scaffold. Dimmesdale stands there alone until Hester and Pearl join him. Pearl asks if he will stand with them tomorrow at noon. He says only at the judgment day. A meteor writes an A in the sky for him alone. In the forest she unfastens the letter and they plan a ship to Europe. Election Day he preaches, then climbs the platform in daylight, shows a mark on his own chest, and dies in her arms. Years later she comes back to the cottage and puts the letter on again, not because the town still requires it.

Hawthorne is not writing a sermon against adultery. He is writing a book about a colony that needs a visible sinner so the rest can stay clean. He found the letter, he says, in a Custom-House. He had a witch-trial judge in the family. The ending refuses a heavenly reunion. They share a stone and not quite a grave. The A outlasts the men who assigned it.

Read the full summary on the book page →