Marcelo Neto US History Hon Mr. Hershaw 11/15/2012

The Scarlet Letter
By Nathanial Hawtorne

Summary

The Scarlet Letter opens with a long chapter explaining how the book came

to be written. The narrator was the surveyor of the customhouse in Salem,

Massachusetts, where the novel takes place. In the customhouse’s attic, he

finds a number of documents, among them a manuscript that was bundled with a

scarlet patch in the shape of an “A.” The manuscript detailed events that occurred

some two hundred years before the narrator’s time. When the narrator lost his

customs post, he decided to write a fictional account of the events recorded in the

manuscript. The Scarlet Letter is the final product.

The novel begins in the seventeenth-century Boston, when Hester is briefly

released from prison so that she can be paraded through town, displaying her scarlet "A"

embroided on her chest while standing on top of the town scaffold. She carries her baby

daughter, Pearl, in her arms. After being Hester steadfastly refuses to reveal the name of

Pearl’s father, so that he might be saved from punishment. Hester Prynne’s long lost

husband arrives in the midst of this parade through town. He visits her in prison before her

release and asks her not to tell anyone that he’s in town. His plan is to disguise himself so

that he can ferret out and seek revenge on her lover. Hester’s husband tells the

townspeople that he’s a physician, and he adopts a fake name: Roger Chillingworth.

Hester keeps his secret. Chillingworth soon realizes that the minister, the Reverend Arthur

Dimmesdale, is the likely father of Hester’s baby, and he haunts the minister’s mind and

soul, day and night, for the next seven years. The minister is