 Takes place over a seven-year period.
 Involves the familiar triangle of wife-lover-husband
 Is a struggle between good and evil, with the eternal souls of the characters at stake

 Suspense is built around these questions:
 Will the identities of the lover and the husband be revealed?
 How will the identities of the lover and the husband be revealed?

 The main psychological movement in the novel derives from the husband’s insatiable quest for revenge

 Boston in the mid-1600s
 Provides a framework of rigid social mores and religious beliefs
 a “people amongst whom religion and law were almost identical”

 The accepted traditional customs and usages of a particular social group
 Moral attitudes
 Manners or ways


Hawthorne’s form of the novel was writing innovative for 1850
 Instead of an ongoing chronicle of events, it is a series of separate, fully realized scenes interspersed with expository chapters

 omniscient
 Hawthorne reveals both the inner and outer lives of his characters with asides on social criticism, history and psychology

 Young Englishwoman
 Has been living alone in
Boston
 Her husband has been missing for several years

 Has given birth to a child
 Refuses to name the father
 She pays for her sin in many ways, although she never renounces her love for
Dimmesdale

 A popular and admired young clergyman
 Refuses to acknowledge that he is the father of Hester's child
 Undergoes intense internal suffering and becomes prey to
Chillingworth’s slow revenge


Hester’s husband
 A scholar much older than she
 Arrives in Boston after years of captivity
 Finds that his wife has just given birth to a daughter

 Is the major antagonist
 The novel chronicles his spiritual deterioration
 He takes revenge on
Dimmesdale, whom he suspects, correctly, of being the child’s father

 the daughter
 blithe
(happy, joyful)
 highly intuitive ( capable of knowing without deduction or reasoning)
 intelligent
 imaginative

 The effects of sin and the possibility of redemption

Hawthorne is interested primarily in the psychological and social consequences of sin on his characters and in their process of redemption

Theme 1: the effects of sin and the possibility of redemption
 Hester
 The consequence of sin is isolation from society
 Her redemption is worked out through a life of patient and selfless work

Theme 1: the effects of sin and the possibility of redemption
 Dimmesdale
 Consequence of his sin is internal anguish caused by his guilt and the psychological torment inflicted by
Chillingworth
 His redemption comes only with confession

Theme 1: the effects of sin and the possibility of redemption
 Chillingworth
 His sin is obsession with revenge and violating “in cold blood, the sanctity of a human heart”
 The consequence is a gradual shriveling of both soul and body
 Redemption escapes him

 Insight into the hearts of others is a secondary effect of the sin of all three characters
 As eating the forbidden apple brought a kind of knowledge to
Eve and Adam

Theme 1: Secondary Effect
Insight into the hearts of others
 Both Hester and Dimmesdale use this understanding to positive ends
 Chillingworth, however, uses his insight to torment the already suffering Dimmesdale

 Hypocrisy appears in the conflict between outer appearance and inner reality

 Depicted in the vindictiveness of the pious women of town toward Hester

 Illustrated in the portrayals of
Chillingworth and Dimmesdale
 Both live hypocritically
 Each poses as something other than what they are

 The scarlet letter itself is the central symbol
 It changes meaning for the people of Boston as Hester steadfastly works out her absolution
 The A also becomes the pathway to redemption for Dimmesdale

 The scaffold
 the cruel public exposure of private sins
 the means to redemption through confession

 Elements of nature are used to symbolize good and evil
 Evil : weeds, unsightly vegetation, darkness, and shade
 Good : flowers, sun, and light
 The forest is a changeable symbol representing both good and evil

 Situational Irony is central to the action of the novel
 Situational Irony is the contrast between the intention or purpose of an action and its result
 In situational irony, the expectations aroused by a situation are reversed

 The guilty Dimmesdale is able to minister brilliantly to his congregation

 Chillingworth is the wronged husband
 He might normally claim reader sympathy
 But he turns out to be a fiend
 A physician who destroys rather than heals