Jesse’s Reviews > The Scarlet Letter > Status Update
Jesse
is on page 39 of 233
I read this book for my junior year of high school, which our English class was “American Literature”. I don’t recall and we probably skipped over the 38 page sketch that opens the book, where Hawthorne talks at great length about his time as a customs official at the port of Salem. It’s a fascinating study of Hawthorne’s inherited co-workers, an entire generation of elderly Americans.
— Apr 29, 2025 01:13PM
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Jesse
is on page 180 of 233
This is an important book but difficult to recommend because it’s so highly psychological and wrapped up in Hawthorne’s narrative voice rather than that of the characters. Very little actually happened in a physical sense over the last 50 pages: Hester tells Dimmesdale that Chillingworth that the latter is her husband—after telling Chillingworth that she’s going to do so—and they resolve to leave the town.
— May 01, 2025 09:53AM
Jesse
is on page 130 of 233
Hawthorne lays it on thick, here. Just like he avoids specifically saying what the A stands for, he shows pretty much everything that is going on in the background with Dimmesdale without explicitly saying “He’s the father!!!!” There’s enough ambiguity though, even in his vision of seeing Hester point from her letter to his chest, that it’s easy to say that we don’t definitively know.
— May 01, 2025 07:49AM
Jesse
is on page 86 of 233
The basic story is simple. Hester married an old man with a physical deformity, a scholar, as an orphaned young woman in England. She is sent ahead to the colonies but he fails to show, and after two years, she has a baby girl. She is condemned for adultery, even with her husband missing, presumed dead, but rather than death, she is sentenced to… The Scarlet Letter.
— Apr 30, 2025 10:06AM
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Apr 29, 2025 01:14PM
But that isn’t really what it’s about. It’s a framing device to present the story of Hester Prynne as though it is based on a true story that Hawthorne discovered during his time as a customs Surveyor.
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The sketch begins with an appeal to ancestry and history, with Hawthorne talking about his ancestors who had lived in Salem and through the witch trials. It’s a clever rhetorical device to heighten the historicity of The Scarlet Letter, and also helps Hawthorne to set the stage for the fact that the tale is set in the 1600s, roughly 200 years in the past. Idk how jarring this would have been to a contemporary reader; Hawthorne references Washington Irving’s Headless Horseman over the course of the sketch but we don’t have a grasp on American literature classics because, well, they didn’t really exist!! And lots of Americans critiqued Irving anyway by arguing that he courted Britishness too much
Like the sketch is fascinating on its own with it’s autobiographical elements of Hawthorne talking about how he took to finding out just how little the common American thought about literature; how he wanted to write but couldn’t do it while he was in office and was secretly horrified that he would never be able to write again, to being glad when the election happened and he got kicked out of office and could write; there’s a lot of stuff going on here.
Surveyor Pue is the dude who Hawthorne invokes to ground this story. And that is part of how he is lending credibility and weight to his narrative: he is presenting it as a true story of New England history that he has been compelled to write, to reveal.
I can’t imagine teaching this to teenagers and expecting them to sit through 38 pages of Hawthorne’s poetic prose and philosophical musings, wry though he may be, lol
