nathaniel hawthorne novel the scarlet letter

Hester's reflections on her relationship with Dimmesdale ('How deeply had they known each other then! And was this the man? She hardly knew him now') could be found in many modern novels. And very interesting about the price paid for the loss of love.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's understanding of the emotional transactions of the sexes is profound and modern, too. The process of Hester Prynne's acquisition of self-knowledge, the recognition of her sin and her ultimate restoration in a sequence of enthralling scenes, punctuated by moments of confrontation with Dimmesdale, is utterly compelling and, at times, deeply moving. The Scarlet Letter is an astounding book full of intense symbolism, as strange and haunting as anything by Edgar Allan Poe (No 10 in this series), a writer whom we know Hawthorne much admired. Such a bare summary does few favours to an extraordinary work of the imagination that burns from page to page with the fierce simplicity of scripture and an almost cinematic clarity of vision. Hester, too, eventually dies and is buried near Dimmesdale under a tombstone marked with a simple 'A'. After seven long years of painful rehabilitation, she emerges as a strong, inspiring woman, while the pastor, Arthur Dimmesdale, who seduced her dies of shame. Over many years, she challenges the two men in her life – her husband and her lover – with the dark truth of their emotional responsibilities and failures, while at the same time wrestling with her own sinful nature. Forced to wear a scarlet 'A', Hester slowly redeems herself in the eyes of Puritan society. In the 17th-century town of Boston, a young woman, Hester Prynne, is publicly disgraced for committing adultery and giving birth to an illegitimate child, a girl named Pearl. Here, in short, is the prototype of the psychological novel, a brilliant and groundbreaking example of a new genre within 19th-century fiction. Where a novel, as he put it, 'aims at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience', a romance expressed 'the truth of the human heart'. This distinction, in his mind, was important. N athaniel Hawthorne, describing 'a tale of human frailty and sorrow', insisted that The Scarlet Letter was 'a Romance', not a novel.

Nathaniel hawthorne novel the scarlet letter