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The Scarlet Letter (Bantam Classics) (Paperback)
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
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American Literature, Fiction, Classic |
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| MSL Pointer Review:
The novel is immersed in Gothic elements and in typical Hawthorne symbolism which deal with man's struggle versus sin and good versus evil.The theme of the violation of the human heart is the real strength of the novel. |
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Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
Publisher: Bantam Classics
Pub. in: February, 1981
ISBN: 0553210092
Pages: 256
Measurements: 6.8 x 4.1 x 0.7 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00795
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0553210095
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- Awards & Credential -
A diamond on the crown of America Literarure, which reaches a very deepth of American's moral roots in history. |
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- MSL Picks -
Hailed by Henry James as "the finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth in the country," Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter reaches to our nation's historical and moral roots for the material of great tragedy. Set in an early New England colony, the novel shows the terrible impact a single, passionate act has on the lives of three members of the community: the defiant Hester Prynne; the fiery, tortured Reverend Dimmesdale; and the obsessed, vengeful Chillingworth.
With The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne became the first American novelist to forge from our Puritan heritage a universal classic, a masterful exploration of humanity's unending struggle with sin, guilt and pride.
(Quoting from The Publisher)
Target readers:
Readers who love literature and classic novels.
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Hawthorne was a novelist and short-story writer, born in Salem, MA. Educated at Bowdon College, he shut himself away for 12 years to learn to write fiction. His first major success was the novel The Scarlet Letter (1850), still the best known of his works. Other books include The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Snow Image (1852), and a campaign biography of his old schoolfriend, President Franklin Pierce, on whose inauguration Hawthorne became consul at Liverpool (1853 - 7). Only belatedly recognized in his own country, he continued to write articles and stories, notably those for the Atlantic Monthly, collected as Our Old Home.
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Novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in 1850. It is considered a masterpiece of American literature and a classic moral study. The novel is set in a village in Puritan New England. The main character is Hester Prynne, a young woman who has borne an illegitimate child. Hester believes herself a widow, but her husband, Roger Chillingworth, returns to New England very much alive and conceals his identity. He finds his wife forced to wear the scarlet letter A on her dress as punishment for her adultery. Chillingworth becomes obsessed with finding the identity of his wife's former lover. When he learns that the father of Hester's child is Arthur Dimmesdale, a saintly young minister who is the leader of those exhorting her to name the child's father, Chillingworth proceeds to torment the guilt-stricken young man. In the end Chillingworth is morally degraded by his monomaniacal pursuit of revenge; Dimmesdale is broken by his own sense of guilt, and he publicly confesses his adultery before dying in Hester's arms. Only Hester can face the future bravely, as she plans to take her daughter Pearl to Europe to begin a new life.
(Quoting from The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature)
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Chapter 1
The Prison-Door
A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule, it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel. Certain it is, that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.
This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally over-shadowed it,-or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Anne Hutchinson, as she entered the prison-door,-we shall not take upon us to determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers, and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.
Chapter 2
The Market-Place
The grass-plot before the jail, in Prison Lane, on a certain summer morning, not less than two centuries ago, was occupied by a pretty large number of the inhabitants of Boston, all with their eyes intently fastened on the iron-clamped oaken door. Amongst any other population, or at a later period in the history of New England, the grim rigidity that petrified the bearded physiognomies of these good people would have augured some awful business in hand. It could have betokened nothing short of the anticipated execution of some noted culprit, on whom the sentence of a legal tribunal had but confirmed the verdict of public sentiment. But, in that early severity of the Puritan character, an inference of this kind could not so indubitably be drawn. It might be that a sluggish bond-servant, or an undutiful child, whom his parents had given over to the civil authority, was to be corrected at the whipping-post. It might be, that an Antinomian, a Quaker, or other heterodox religionist was to be scourged out of the town, or an idle and vagrant Indian, whom the white man's fire-water had made riotous about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into the shadow of the forest. It might be, too, that a witch, like old Mistress Hibbins, the bitter-tempered widow of the magistrate, was to die upon the gallows. In either case, there was very much the same solemnity of demeanor on the part of the spectators; as befitted a people amongst whom religion and law were almost identical, and in whose character both were so thoroughly interfused, that the mildest and the severest acts of public discipline were alike made venerable and awful. Meagre, indeed, and cold was the sympathy that a transgressor might look for from such by-standers, at the scaffold. On the other hand, a penalty, which, in our days, would infer a degree of mocking infamy and ridicule, might then be invested with almost as stern a dignity as the punishment of death itself.
It was a circumstance to be noted, on the summer morning when our story begins its course, that the women, of whom there were several in the crowd, appeared to take a peculiar interest in whatever penal infliction might be expected to ensue. The age had not so much refinement, that any sense of impropriety restrained the wearers of petticoat and farthingale from stepping forth into the public ways, and wedging their not unsubstantial persons, if occasion were, into the throng nearest to the scaffold at an execution. Morally, as well as materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old English birth and breeding, than in their fair descendants, separated from them by a series of six or seven generations; for, throughout that chain of ancestry, every successive mother has transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not a character of less force and solidity, than her own. The women who were now standing about the prison-door stood within less than half a century of the period when the man-like Elizabeth1 had been the not altogether unsuitable representative of the sex. They were her countrywomen; and the beef and ale of their native land, with a moral diet not a whit more refined, entered largely into their composition. The bright morning sun, therefore, shone on broad shoulders and well-developed busts, and on round and ruddy cheeks, that had ripened in the far-off island, and had hardly yet grown paler or thinner in the atmosphere of New England. There was, moreover, a boldness and rotundity of speech among these matrons, as most of them seemed to be, that would startle us at the present day, whether in respect to its purport or its volume of tone.
"Goodwives," said a hard-featured dame of fifty, "I'll tell ye a
piece of my mind. It would be greatly for the public behoof, if we women, being of mature age and church-members in good repute, should have the handling of such malefactresses as this Hester Prynne. What think ye, gossips? If the hussy stood up for judgment before us five, that are now here in a knot together, would she come off with such a sentence as the worshipful magistrates have awarded? Marry, I trow not!"
"People say," said another, "that the Reverend Master Dimmesdale, her godly pastor, takes it very grievously to heart that such a scandal should have come upon his congregation."
"The magistrates are God-fearing gentlemen, but merciful overmuch,--that is a truth," added a third autumnal matron. "At the very least, they should have put the brand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne's forehead. Madam Hester would have winced at that, I warrant me. But she,-the naughty baggage,-little will she care what they put upon the bodice of her gown! Why, look you, she may cover it with a brooch, or such like heathenish adornment, and so walk the streets as brave as ever!"
"Ah, but," interposed, more softly, a young wife, holding a child by the hand, "let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be always in her heart."
"What do we talk of marks and brands, whether on the bodice of her gown, or the flesh of her forehead?" cried another female, the ugliest as well as the most pitiless of these self-constituted judges. "This woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die. Is there not law for it? Truly, there is, both in the Scripture and the statute-book. Then let the magistrates, who have made it of no effect, thank themselves if their own wives and daughters go astray!"
"Mercy on us, goodwife," exclaimed a man in the crowd, "is there no virtue in woman, save what springs from a wholesome fear of the gallows? That is the hardest word yet! Hush, now, gossips! for the lock is turning in the prison-door, and here comes Mistress Prynne herself."
The door of the jail being flung open from within, there appeared, in the first place, like a black shadow emerging into sunshine, the grim and grisly presence of the town-beadle, with a sword by his side, and his staff of office in his hand. This personage prefigured and represented in his aspect the whole dismal severity of the Puritanic code of law, which it was his business to administer in its final and closest application to the offender. Stretching forth the official staff in his left hand, he laid his right upon the shoulder of a young woman, whom he thus drew forward; until, on the threshold of the prison-door, she repelled him, by an action marked with natural dignity and force of character, and stepped into the open air, as if by her own free will. She bore in her arms a child, a baby of some three months old, who winked and turned aside its little face from the too vivid light of day; because its existence, heretofore, had brought it acquainted only with the gray twilight of a dungeon, or other darksome apartment of the prison.
When the young woman-the mother of this child-stood fully revealed before the crowd, it seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the infant closely to her bosom; not so much by an impulse of motherly affection, as that she might thereby conceal a certain token, which wa...
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Matthew Yau (MSL quote) , USA
<2007-03-12 00:00>
One of the American classics, The Scarlet Letter tells of a woman named Hester Prynne in late 17th century who committed the then-unforgivable sin of adultery. She had been living in Boston for two years and had been found guilty of bearing a child (Pearl) by an unknown father. As punishment for her sin, Hester was forced to wear a scarlet A (adultery) on the bodice of her dress and to stand on a public scaffold before Boston's townspeople.
The opening chapter "Custom House" seemed irrelevant to the rest of the novel the first time I read the book. It was not until a couple of years later I found it not true when I re-read the novel. I do have to admit that Hawthrone's writing style can drag at times, the once-seemed boring opening chapter significantly set the mood for the rest of the novel.
"Custom House" does not seem to be an integral part of the story; yet the passage in which Hawthrone tells of having discovered, in the Salem Custom House, the faded scarlet A and the parchment foolscap sheets containing the facts which he says he used as the basis for this novel. The two landmarks mentioned at the beginning: prison and cemetry, point to the central themes of punishment and death, which will be combined in the climax of the novel. Prison might symbolize how Hester Prynne, who wore that scarlet A on the bodice, was forever locked in by her sin.
This entire tale is filled with symbolisms. The prison is described as "the black flower of the civilized society". The tombstone at the end of the book implies that crime and punishment may well bring about the death of such civilized life. The most popular and conspicuous symbol that is well sustained throughtout the book is the scalet A that is worn by Hester Prynne. Initially it is a red cloth letter which is a literal symbol of the sin of adultery. But the author makes the symbol A much more richly symbolic throughout the rest of the tale. The scaffold is not only a symbol of the stern Puritan code, but also a symbol for the open acknowledgment of personal sin. Night and day are symbols for concealment and openness. The sun symbolizes happiness and freedom of guilt. The list goes on and on...
Arthur Dimmensdale, Roger Chillingworth, Hester Prynne, and Pearl themselves, are symbols as well. They reflect certain view of sins and effects on humans and society. The book might take strength and effort to read; but it's not quite a bad read.
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Melissa Galyon (MSL quote), USA
<2007-03-12 00:00>
I re-read The Scarlet Letter for an American Literature class I'm taking this semester, and I have to admit, it hasn't lost its charm since the first time I read it over ten years ago. Nathaniel Hawthorne had an amazing ability to bring truth into his fictional offerings, in his many short stories and particularly in The Scarlet Letter. I highly recommend this affordable edition of the novel, a quick read, complete with introduction and bibliography.
The novel opens as Hester Prynne accepts punishment for an adulterous affair with an unknown secret lover. Her husband sent Hester over to Boston township a few years prior to the novel's beginnings, but until her sentencing, had not been heard from. Hester has been sentenced to the adornment of a letter "A" on her attire, signifying the adulterous affair. The young Reverend Dimmesdale, a sympathetic observer, turns out to be more than a friend, when it is discovered that he was in fact, Hester's secret love. As Hester is forced to stand on the town's scaffolds with her young infant, Pearl, an unknown man enters the crowd, and Hester realizes that it is her husband, finally arrived in Boston. The man calls himself Roger Chillingworth and pretends to be a physician rather than admit connection to the sinful woman.
As the novel progresses, Hester raises Pearl alone, a precocious child with an inquisitive nature. Banishment from the town fades as the years pass by, and though Hester still wears the letter "A", the town eventually accepts her as an eccentric member of the community. However, Reverend Dimmesdale has held all his remorse of the sins internally, resulting in external illness and loss of character. Roger Chillingworth wreaks vengeance upon the Reverend, ingratiating himself into Dimmesdale's household and encouraging Dimmesdale's degradation.
This short novel was a joy to read and to re-read. If you're in the mood for a little adultery, a little vengeance and a little redemption, this is the novel for you.
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-03-12 00:00>
I enjoyed reading The Scarlet Letter. I was not forced into by a Literature teacher; I picked it up on my own because I heard it was a great American classic; and, indeed, I have to agree. It is truly timeless. It has been almost five years since I have read this book and I can remember the scenes and words so vividly. Hawthorne's dizzying imagery provides an adventure into the life of a Puritan woman, Hester Prynne, that one does not soon forget.
Hester, practically abandoned by her husband is left to take care of herself in a lonely new world. She is flesh and bone with desires and passions like any other human being. Hester commits adultery and is found out by a cruel, judging community. She must wear a Scarlet A on the front of her dress; A for Adultery. Hester refuses to give the name of her lover Dimmesdale so he goes free and untouched by the damning society, but must face the tortures of his own conscience.
Hester is humiliated and must suffer the consequences for her actions but she is not a broken woman. She stands, brave.
Dimmesdale comes through in the end and admits his role in the dangerous game. Hawthorne takes the readers on a spinning ride to get to this point. Read it and know the exact ending for yourself. I recommend it; highly.
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David Litton , New Zealand
<2007-03-12 00:00>
I imagine that people who read this book in the days it was first published had mixed views pertaining to the story of a woman who is scorned for committing adultery. There were those who likely condemned the book (priests, conservative high-class citizens), while others heralded its many themes and praised its originality (women, other authors, and open-minded beings). I give this book five stars for Hawthorne's ability to move people to so many feelings, including myself, with his diction, his syntax, and his endless use of literary devices to convey Hester Prynne's suffering, the downfall of a minister loved by his parishioners, and a man whose lust for revenge feeds on itself time and again. Speaking from experience, in reading this, one must look over each sentence very carefully and shred it to pieces in order to gain the fully intended information which Hawthorne wished for readers to digest. While not the easiest read of one's life, it is certainly one of the most enlightening, with its naturistic and societal themes that set it apart from other works of any time period. This tapestry of Puritan life stands as a brilliant example of a novel that will touch many more in years that follow.
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