Dec 24, 2009
The Scarlet Letter, long considered Nathaniel Hawthorne’s greatest novel, is a complex investigation of the effects of secrecy and guilt. Set in seventeenth century Boston, the novel follows the life of Hester Prynne, a Puritan woman convicted of adultery and forced to wear a red patch, the letter A, as part of her punishment. Hawthorne’s sympathetic depiction of Hester’s struggle with this restrictive self-image is largely responsible for the book’s status as an American classic.
After her emergence from Boston prison at the book’s...
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