Like all historical novels, The Scarlet Letter is a work that looks back to the past, is anchored in the author’s present, and anticipates the future. It embodies conflicting messages and is open to widely—or perhaps wildly—varying interpretations. Though it takes place in the seventeenth century, it is a nineteenth-century story, a reimagining of the distant past, of a world that had already become long obsolete by Hawthorne’s time. The “Custom-House” introduction is the author’s attempt to provide a window to both present and past merged into one, a microcosm of the New England mind and its everyday concerns as a counterpoint to a mystery from the past.

Throughout his oeuvre, Hawthorne is obsessed with the concept of “sin” and the centrality it held for his Puritan forebears. His works transmute the belief in humanity as “fallen” beings, overlaying that ancient message with the emerging value system of his own time, which had only partially thrown off the legacy of the past. At the core of The Scarlet Letter and his other writings, there is an ambiguity the modern reader senses in this conflict between traditional morality and the desire to break free of it and create something in its place. If the "ghosts" of the past could see his work, they would view it through their lens, if they could understand it at all, as a simple parable of guilt, punishment, and (possibly) redemption.

Much of his contemporary audience, and even later generations, regarded it similarly: as a lesson in morality that nineteenth-century writers, even in their relative liberalism, could not avoid. Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina—the latter with its grim epigraph, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay”—embody the same message. But in these novels and others of the period, the author gives a qualified, ambivalent treatment of that theme. It is as if the “moral” aspect of the story negates itself. Arguably, it is only in today’s age that the ambiguities inherent in TheScarlet Letter, which Hawthorne might not have been fully aware of himself, can be understood. If on the surface the novel is a story of sin and redemption, of transgression and its resolution, it is also a nightmare of destructive and sadistic cruelty. But the real meaning of a story traditionally interpreted in conventional terms as a kind of apocalyptic sermon can just as readily be seen to embody a message not only at odds with the thinking of Hawthorne’s Puritan forebears, but with the morality of the author’s own time and times to come.

The injustice and hypocrisy of Hester’s punishment are clear. Hawthorne does not even need to cite Jesus’s injunction to the mob, “Let the one of you who is without sin cast the first stone.” The crucial question lies in the concepts of “sin” and “evil” at the basis of the story. When Hester and Dimmesdale meet in the forest, she asks him if the act for which they have been punished was not endowed with a “consecration” of its own. In their defiance of religious and societal strictures, the two have asserted their individualism. The scarlet letter is not a badge of shame, but an emblem of free will, a symbol of the human spirit in its ability to do both good and evil. In nineteenth-century America, one could not state this theme openly. Even British and European writers were impeded by the censorship of the time. Hawthorne’s tale of moral ambiguity could conceivably have remained only half understood had the world not eventually crossed into a realm in which “morality” means free choice, self-fulfillment, and...