The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings Read Online
| 1836 | Ralph Waldo Emerson’s groundbreaking essay Nature is published, heralding the blooming of the Transcendentalist movement in New England over the next few decades. |
| 1837 | Hawthorne publishes Twice-Told Tales, his first collection of stories, many of which had previously appeared in magazines. |
| 1839- 1841 | Hawthorne works as a weigher and gauger at the Boston Custom House. George Ripley, a Unitarian minister, founds Brook Farm, a cooperative living community in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. |
| During his brief stay at Brook Farm, Hawthorne enjoys the company of Emerson and other Transcendentalists. | |
| 1842 | The second volume of Twice-Told Tales is published. On July 9, Hawthorne marries Sophia Peabody, a student of Transcendentalism, in Boston. The couple moves to Concord and rents the Manse, one of Emerson’s family homes and now a historical landmark. Edgar Allan Poe reviews the second edition of TwiceTold Tales and defines the “short story” in Graham’s Magazine. |
| 1844 | Hawthorne’s daughter, Una, is born on March 3. |
| 1845 | Hawthorne completes the story “The Old Manse: The Author Makes the Reader Acquainted with His Abode.” |
| 1846 | Financially troubled, Hawthorne gets a job in May as a port surveyor at the Salem Custom House. In June, his autobiographical Mosses from an Old Manse is published. On June 22, his son, Julian, is born in Boston. |
| 1849 | Edgar Allan Poe dies; together with Hawthorne, he is credited with the creation of the American short story. |
| 1850 | Ticknor, Reed, and Fields (Boston) publishes The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne moves to Lenox, Massachusetts, where he becomes a friend of the novelist Herman Melville, who admires Hawthorne’s work. Melville’s essay “Hawthorne and his Mosses” appears in the August edition of the journal Literary World. Hawthorne completes The House of the Seven Gables. |
| 1851 | The House of the Seven Gables is published, as is Melville’s novel, Moby Dick, which is dedicated to the “genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne.” |
| 1852 | The Blithedale Romance, a reflection of Hawthorne’s time at Brook Farm, is published. Hawthorne returns to Concord, where he buys Hillside, the house owned by Louisa May Alcott’s family, and renames it The Wayside. He writes a campaign biography of his college friend Franklin Pierce. After Pierce is elected president, he appoints Hawthorne U.S. consul at Liverpool, England. |
| 1853 | In July, Hawthorne and his family depart The Wayside for Europe. |
| 1854 | Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods, an important Transcendentalist text, is published. |
| 1857-1859 | Hawthorne travels in France and lives for a time in Italy, collecting material for his last novel, The Marble Faun. He returns to The Wayside on the eve of the American Civil War. |
| 1860 | The Marble Faun is published. |
| 1862- 1863 | In July, “Chiefly About War Matters,” Hawthorne’s account of his travels to the Virginia battlefields of Manassas and Harpers Ferry and to the White House, is published in The Atlantic Monthly. In 1863, his last published work during his lifetime, Our Old Home: A Series of English Sketches, dedicated to Franklin Pierce, appears. |
| 1864 | Hawthorne works on several novels that are published posthumously. On May 19, he dies while visiting the White Mountains in Plymouth, New Hampshire. On May 23, he is buried at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts. |
INTRODUCTION
What Is a Reasonable Response to Hester Prynne’s Crime?
The Scarlet Letter is not so much about an adulterous affair as about a severe punishment inflicted by the Boston community and the psychological consequences for the central characters. The novel begins not with an adulterous attraction or discovery of the affair, but with the consequence of adultery—with Hester Prynne’s emergence from her prison cell to endure her exposure on the pillory and with glimpses of the other central characters’ private misery, which the novel explores in great depth in subsequent chapters.
To contemporary readers as well as to readers of Hawthorne’s time, the judgments of the Puritan society that brands Hester with the scarlet A, subjects her to an official sentence of public humiliation, and ostracizes her and her child are apt to seem disproportionate to the crime. Yet Hawthorne’s novel remains credible both as a reflection on a particular historical moment and as a portrait of the internal devastation caused by a particular transgression that, in America, at least, might today inspire an ambivalent mixture of censure, titillation, and indifference. That successive women’s movements and our purported sexual liberation and rationality have not rendered The Scarlet Letter irrelevant raises the suspicion that the moral relativism of contemporary times may be overstated, and that the crime behind the red letter might be more, or other than, simply of the flesh.
What Did Hester Prynne Do?
Several years before the opening scene of The Scarlet Letter, while still in England, Hester married a scholarly man many years older than herself. Hester is young, beautiful, and passionate, and the reader first encounters Mr. Prynne through her recollections of him as remote and misshapen, one shoulder higher than the other. The novel never makes explicit her reason for marrying this man, whom she candidly denies having ever loved, but the description of her parents’ genteel poverty supplies a practical explanation. Hester and Mr. Prynne lived together first in Amsterdam, until he decided they should settle together in the New World. He sent his young bride ahead of him, but Mr. Prynne has not arrived. Sometime after her arrival, Hester committed adultery and became pregnant with her lover’s child.
The novel opens with Hester emerging from prison to carry out her sentence. A panel of magistrates “in their great mercy and tenderness of heart,” spares Hester the statutory punishment of death and sentences her instead “to stand only a space of three hours on the platform of the pillory, and then and thereafter, for the remainder of her natural life, to wear a mark of shame on her bosom” (p. 54). The “mark of shame” is the letter A, made from scarlet cloth and fantastically embroidered by Hester.
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