The Scarlet Letter

The Scarlet Letter is not so much about an adulterous affair as about a severe punishment inflicted by the Boston community and the psychological consequences for the central characters. The novel begins not with an adulterous attraction or discovery of the affair, but with the consequence of adultery—with Hester Prynne’s emergence from her prison cell to endure her exposure on the pillory and with glimpses of the other central characters’ private misery, which the novel explores in great depth in subsequent chapters.

To contemporary readers as well as to readers of Hawthorne’s time, the judgments of the Puritan society that brands Hester with the scarlet A, subjects her to an official sentence of public humiliation, and ostracizes her and her child are apt to seem disproportionate to the crime. Yet Hawthorne’s novel remains credible both as a reflection on a particular historical moment and as a portrait of the internal devastation caused by a particular transgression that, in America, at least, might today inspire an ambivalent mixture of censure, titillation, and indifference. That successive women’s movements and our purported sexual liberation and rationality have not rendered The Scarlet Letter irrelevant raises the suspicion that the moral relativism of contemporary times may be overstated, and that the crime behind the red letter might be more, or other than, simply of the flesh.