Chillingworth, notably, becomes the embodiment of Puritan values, which led people to lynch and destroy in the name of God but motivated in large measure by the people’s own repressed sins of lust, greed, and envy. Hawthorne takes advantage of his greatest assets as a writer-the interiority of his writing, his exploration of thoughts and emotions-and uses them to humanize all the parties involved in the affair, as well as to demonize the thoughts that become consumed by it. Instead, he was concerned with the aftermath of the affair-the shaming of Hester, the raising of a child borne of sin, and the values of a society that would allow a sin to continue to be punished long after it would seem reasonable. Hawthorne chose to leave out the details of the adulterous rendezvous between Hester and Dimmesdale entirely. It was to some degree a career-threatening decision to center his novel around an adulterous affair (but compare the plot of Fielding's Tom Jones).īut Hawthorne was not concerned with a prurient affair here, though the novel’s characters are. Certainly Puritan values had eased somewhat by 1850, but not enough to make the novel completely welcome.

Besides entertainment, then, Hawthorne's novel had the possibility of goading change, since it addressed a topic that was still relatively controversial, even taboo. Indeed, still tied to Britain in its cultural formation, Hawthorne's novel offered a uniquely American style, language, set of characters, and-most importantly-a uniquely American central dilemma. First and foremost, the United States was still a relatively new society, less than one hundred years old at the time of the novel’s publication. The Scarlet Letter was an immediate success for a number of reasons. Hawthorne's novel is concerned with the effects of the affair rather than the affair itself, using Hester's public shaming as a springboard to explore the lingering taboos of Puritan New England in contemporary society. Set in seventeenth-century Puritan Massachusetts, the novel centers around the travails of Hester Prynne, who gives birth to a daughter Pearl after an adulterous affair. Published in 1850, The Scarlet Letter is considered Nathaniel Hawthorne's most famous novel-and the first quintessentially American novel in style, theme, and language.

The scarlet letter original book