The Scarlet Letter

1. What is the difference between feeling guilty about something and feeling ashamed of it? Can a person feel one without the other?
2. When a community decides publicly that someone has done wrong, what does that public judgment accomplish, and what does it fail to accomplish?
3. Is a secret always a burden? What would make keeping one harder than admitting it?
4. How much of who you are is decided by how other people see you? What would it take to change a label that other people have attached to you?
5. Why might a society need someone to make an example of? What does the community get out of it?
6. Think of a symbol you wear or carry — a uniform, a badge, a piece of jewelry, a logo. Who decided what it means: you, or the people looking at you?

• Symbols in this book rarely hold still — watch how the meaning of a single object shifts depending on who is looking at it and when.
• Hawthorne repeatedly contrasts the settlement with the forest that surrounds it, and gives each one its own rules about what may be said aloud.
• The novel keeps testing the gap between a person's public reputation and their private knowledge of themselves.
• Notice how often the narrator offers you two or three possible explanations for the same event and declines to choose between them.
• Light and dark, sunshine and shadow, are used with great deliberateness throughout — track who stands in which.
• The story returns more than once to the same physical place in the town, and invites you to compare those returns.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) was born in Salem, Massachusetts, into a family whose New England roots ran back to the Puritan founders — including a great-great-grandfather who served as a judge in the Salem witch trials, an ancestry that troubled him all his life and shows up everywhere in his fiction. He spent years after college writing in near-obscurity, publishing stories in magazines and gift books before collecting them as Twice-Told Tales. To support his family he took government posts, including a job at the Salem Custom House, and it was after losing that position in a political turnover that he wrote The Scarlet Letter in a burst of a few months. Published in 1850, it made him famous almost immediately, and he followed it with The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance. He wrote about the Puritan past not out of nostalgia but as a way of examining the moral machinery he had inherited from it.

The novel is set roughly two hundred years before it was written, in a Puritan colony where church and government were effectively the same institution, where public punishment was a normal instrument of law, and where a person's private conduct was legitimately the community's business. Hawthorne wrote it in 1849–1850, during the American Renaissance — the same decade that produced Moby-Dick, Walden, and Leaves of Grass — and at a moment when American writers were consciously trying to build a national literature out of American material. He called his books "romances" rather than novels, meaning he claimed the freedom to let the real world blur toward the symbolic and the supernatural, a mode critics now call Dark Romanticism: it shares the Romantics' distrust of institutions and their reverence for nature, but rejects the optimism of Emerson and the Transcendentalists in favor of a steady attention to guilt, secrecy, and the damage people do to one another.