A Study Guide for Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781535839433

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The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne

1850

Introduction

Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter is famous for presenting some of the greatest interpretive difficulties in all of American literature. While not recognized by Hawthorne himself as his most important work, the novel is regarded not only as his greatest accomplishment, but frequently as the greatest novel in American literary history. After it was published in 1850, critics hailed it as initiating a distinctive American literary tradition. Ironically, it is a novel in which, in terms of action, almost nothing happens. Hawthorne's emotional, psychological drama revolves around Hester Prynne, who is convicted of adultery in colonial Boston by the civil and Puritan authorities. She is condemned to wear the scarlet letter A on her chest as a permanent sign of her sin. The narrative describes the effort to resolve the torment suffered by Hester and her co-adulterer, the minister Arthur Dimmesdale, in the years after their affair. In fact, the story excludes even the representation of the passionate moment which enables the entire novel. It begins at the close of Hester's imprisonment many months after her affair and proceeds through many years to her final acceptance of her place in the community as the wearer of the scarlet letter. Hawthorne was masterful in the use of symbolism, and the scarlet letter A stands as his most potent symbol, around which interpretations of the novel revolve. At one interpretive pole the A stands for adultery and sin, and the novel is the story of individual punishment and reconciliation. At another pole it stands for America and allegory, and the story suggests national sin and its human cost. Yet possibly the most convincing reading, taking account of all others, sees the A as a symbol of ambiguity, the very fact of multiple interpretations and the difficulty of achieving consensus.

Author Biography

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in the infamous village of Salem, Massachusetts, on Independence Day, July 4, 1804. His parents were Nathaniel and Elizabeth Clarke Manning Hathorne. (The surname had been written both with and without the w; Hawthorne chose to include it when he began his writing career.) Hawthorne's father, a sea captain, died far from home when Hawthorne was four years old. At the age of nine he injured his foot and could move about very little for the next two years, a time he spent reading literary classics. In 1820, while working for his uncle as a bookkeeper, Hawthorne complained to his sister, Elizabeth, that No man can be a Poet and a Book-keeper at the same time. This conflict between his literary interests and need to earn money would be a fact of Hawthorne's life for many years; it is made a specific subject of The Custom House, Hawthorne's introduction