The Scarlet Letter
Much to the surprise of its earliest readers, The Scarlet Letter opens not with its heroine but with a long Custom-House sketch in which Hawthorne claims to have discovered her story among old papers. The tale itself unfolds in Puritan Boston, where Hester Prynne is led from prison clutching her infant daughter, Pearl, and forced to wear a scarlet "A" for adultery. She refuses to name the child's father — the tormented young minister Arthur Dimmesdale — while her vanished husband returns in disguise as the physician Roger Chillingworth, bent on uncovering and destroying the guilty man.
Through Hester's quiet endurance and Dimmesdale's secret anguish, Hawthorne examines sin, guilt, hypocrisy, and the difference between public shame and private conscience. The scarlet letter, meant to brand and isolate, gradually becomes a mark of strength, dignity, and hard-won grace. A foundational work of American literature, the novel remains a piercing study of how communities punish, how individuals conceal, and how truth refuses to stay buried.
How it begins
uch to the author’s surprise, and (if he may say so without additional offence) considerably to his amusement, he finds that his sketch of official life, introductory to The Scarlet Letter , has created an unprecedented excitement in the respectable community immediately around him. It could hardly have been more violent, indeed, had he burned down the Custom-House, and quenched its last smoking ember in the blood of a certain venerable personage, against whom he is supposed to cherish a peculiar malevolence. As the public disapprobation would weigh very heavily on him, were he conscious of deserving it, the author begs leave to say, that he has carefully read over the introductory pages, with a purpose to alter or expunge whatever might be found amiss, and to make the best reparation in his power for the atrocities of which he has been adjudged guilty. But it appears to him, that the only remarkable features of the sketch are its frank and genuine good-humor, and the general accuracy with which he has conveyed his sincere impressions of the characters therein described. As to enmity, or ill-feeling of any kind, personal or political, he utterly disclaims such motives.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.