A Review of the Scarlet Letter
The novel opens with an explanation of how the romance of The Scarlet Letter came to be presented as a story in its existing form. Having always wanted to be a “literary man”, Nathaniel Hawthorne talks about his three-year stint as a Surveyor in the Salem Custom House. Mostly filled with older gentlemen, the workplace was a very political, Whig-influenced environment and charged with Puritan history. After brief character sketches of the personalities in the Custom House, Hawthorne then explains how he came upon a special package among the piles of papers. It contained a red cloth with the letter “A” embroidered in gold thread and a manuscript by Jonathan Pue (the man who once held Hawthorne’s job). Finding the story extremely interesting, the author thus retells the story of Hester Prynne from Massachusetts’s Puritan history.
The first chapter begins with Hester being led to the scaffold where she is......
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Approximate Word Count: 1277
Approximate Pages: 5 (260 words per double-spaced page) |