About the Author

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) was a New Englander who could not stop thinking about New England's past. He was born in Salem, Massachusetts, into a family that had helped build the town and, in one notorious case, helped disgrace it: his great-great-grandfather, John Hathorne, had been one of the magistrates who condemned accused witches to hang in 1692. Hawthorne added the "w" to the family surname in his twenties, a small spelling change that reads, in retrospect, like an attempt to put a little distance between himself and the ancestor whose name appeared in the court records. For most of his early career he was a struggling writer of allegorical short stories, published in obscure magazines. He needed a day job to survive, and between 1846 and 1849 he worked as the surveyor of the Salem Custom-House — a patronage position he lost when the opposing political party won the presidential election.

Getting fired turned out to be the break of his career. Forced back on his writing, he produced The Scarlet Letter in a single burst during the winter of 1849–50 and attached "The Custom-House," a long autobiographical preface, as an introduction. He married Sophia Peabody in 1842 after a long engagement and lived for a time at the Old Manse in Concord, on the edges of the Transcendentalist circle around Emerson and Thoreau without ever quite joining it. His closest literary friendship came later, with Herman Melville, whom he met in 1850; Melville dedicated Moby-Dick the following year "To Nathaniel Hawthorne, in token of my admiration for his genius."

Detailed Analysis

Hawthorne's ancestry is not background for The Scarlet Letter — it is the emotional engine of the book. "The Custom-House" makes the connection explicit: he imagines his Puritan forefathers, the witch-trial judge among them, asking what sort of descendant becomes "a writer of story-books," and he supplies their answer: "A degenerate fellow." The novel that follows is in part a reckoning with those men. Hawthorne grants them their seriousness — the magistrates who sentence Hester are not cartoons, and the world they have built has a terrible coherence — but he also arranges the plot so that the community's certainty about who is saved and who is damned turns out to be inverted. The judge's great-great-grandson writes a book in which the judges are wrong.

The biographical pressure shows up in the texture of the prose as well. Hawthorne's three years at the Custom-House, surrounded by aging clerks whom patronage had reduced to unproductive fixtures, soured him on routine public life and sharpened his interest in the inner lives people conceal beneath civic roles — a preoccupation that drives the Dimmesdale plot. Among his other works, "Young Goodman Brown" (1835) is the clearest companion piece, a short story in which a Puritan walks into the forest and discovers that his neighbors are not what they seem; The House of the Seven Gables (1851), written immediately after The Scarlet Letter, returns directly to the theme of inherited family guilt. Hawthorne's place in literary history is as the dark counterweight to the Transcendentalists. Emerson preached self-reliance and the goodness of the soul in nature; Hawthorne, living a few houses away, wrote books in which the human heart is a locked cabinet and the forest is a place where moral law temporarily loosens. Melville saw this immediately, and praised in Hawthorne a "great power of blackness" that he felt American literature had been missing.

Historical Background

The Scarlet Letter was published in Boston by Ticknor, Reed, and Fields in March 1850 and sold out its first printing in ten days. It belongs to two historical moments at once. The story is set in the Massachusetts Bay Colony of the 1640s — a theocratic settlement barely two decades old, where the civil government and the church were effectively the same body and sins like adultery were prosecuted as crimes. Hawthorne's immediate sources were the Puritan histories and court records he had been reading for years, particularly the chronicles of Governor John Winthrop (who dies during the course of the novel) and the trial accounts his own ancestor had participated in. But the book was written two centuries later, in the 1840s, while the United States was arguing bitterly about abolition, the rights of women, and whether the country's founding moral inheritance — inherited largely from New England — was a gift or a burden.

That double setting is why the novel reads so strangely alive. Hester's long solitude leads her to "speculations" about rebuilding "the whole system of society," language that belongs less to the 1640s than to the 1840s — to the Seneca Falls convention of 1848, to the utopian experiments at Brook Farm (where Hawthorne himself had spent an unhappy six months in 1841), to the abolitionist pamphlets circulating in every Massachusetts town. Hawthorne was not a reformer, and he tends to withdraw from Hester's most radical thoughts almost as soon as she has them, but he lets her have them. That is a historical fact worth noticing. A novel that places a morally serious, unrepentant adulteress at the center of its sympathy could not have been written fifty years earlier.

Detailed Analysis

The reception history of The Scarlet Letter has two distinct strands. The novel itself was an immediate critical success; reviewers recognized it at once as a work of rare seriousness, and sales were strong enough that Hawthorne could live, for the first time, on his literary income. "The Custom-House" preface, however, created a local scandal. Hawthorne had used it to sketch, by name and in unflattering detail, the elderly political appointees he had worked alongside in Salem, and the town responded with outrage. Hawthorne affected surprise in his preface to the second edition and declined to revise the sketch, but the episode effectively ended his ability to live in Salem; he and Sophia moved to the Berkshires later that year, which is how he came to meet Melville. The scandal had a useful side effect, too. It made the book news, and readers who bought it to see what the fuss was about ended up encountering one of the first American novels to be treated, in its own time, as literature rather than entertainment.

What the novel has meant has shifted substantially over the century and a half since. Nineteenth-century readers tended to read it as a cautionary moral tale about adultery; Henry James, in his 1879 critical study of Hawthorne, treated it as the finest achievement of a provincial but authentic American imagination. By the mid-twentieth century, New Critics were reading it as a nearly perfect structural object — three scaffold scenes, four characters, a controlling symbol — and it became a fixture of the American high-school canon on that basis. Since the 1970s, feminist and historicist critics have rebuilt the book around Hester rather than Dimmesdale, reading her suppressed radicalism as the novel's real subject and Hawthorne's ambivalence about her as the novel's real problem. Each of these readings has textual support, which is itself the strongest evidence of what Hawthorne accomplished: a book that keeps generating new meanings because its central symbol — that embroidered red A — was designed from the beginning to resist a single reading.