The Scarlet Letter

Image credit: Penguin Books Australia

It’s true that, for many modern readers, books from the 1800s can prove challenging, archaic, and sometimes downright unreadable. And while its horrendously easy to cling to this literary attitude of ‘oh it’s too dense for me’, I urge people to try and break themselves from it –especially those, like me, who have a passion for literature, voyeurism, and the absorption of knowledge and culture.

This train of thought and conclusive plea has come from my just finishing my chosen book of the week: The Scarlet Letter.

Set it in the fledgling, Puritan town of Boston New England, the book tells the sad and sombre tale of Hester Prynne, a woman subjected to the ridicule, ostracism, public defamation, and alienation of the community after she has an affair and is made to wear a red A for ‘adulteress’ on her bosom. Raising her illegitimate child, Pearl, alone and keeping the identity of her fellow sinner a secret for fear of destroying his reputation and livelihood, Hester’s life is made more perilous as her husband detects the guilty man and makes it his mission to wreak vengeance upon him.

Despite its dated dialogue and lengthy, philosophically poetic prose, The Scarlet Letter is one of the most loaded and complex books that I can recall reading. Hawthorne bombards his readership with –seemingly- thousands of philosophical questions about the nature of love, hate, faith, shame and, in doing so, opens the floodgates to release a torrent of discussion.

Image credit: IMDb

The book does not merely chronicle a scandal, a secret love, and a revenge story; it pushes the reader into wider, uncharted territories, exploring the nature of people and communities. Setting the story in a newly established village, it can be argued that the real saviour/villain of the piece is change and evolution as is depicted by Hawthorne’s constant contrast between various stages and depictions of people: adulthood vs. childhood with Hester and Pearl, civilization vs. savagery with the Boston townsfolk and the visiting native Indians who live in the forest, and tradition vs. human instinct to change and adapt as is most prevalent in the scarlet letter beginning the story as a symbol of shame, corruption, and degradation and morphing into one of strength, woman’s unearthly compassion, and comfort.

It’s the changing attitudes of the characters on the page that makes The Scarlet Letter so impressive and, funnily enough, its conclusion holds a lot of relevance to this very day, especially regarding the question of gender roles and the ever-raging battle of the sexes. More than this, the book itself is a compelling and immersive read that stimulates the entirety of the brain: the half that processes information and stores it for discussion and argument, and the part that visualises worlds and scenes and scenarios. It’s surprisingly good and easy to adapt to. 

The Scarlet Letter was written by Nathaniel Hawthorne and first published in America in 1850 by Ticknor, Reed & Fields.