What Does the A Stand For in The Scarlet Letter? Hester Prynne, Puritan Shame and a Symbol That Changes

In The Scarlet Letter, the red letter "A" that Hester Prynne is forced to wear stands for adultery: it is her punishment for having a child with a man who is not her husband. But the meaning of the letter changes over the course of the novel, and as Hester spends years helping the poor and the sick, many townspeople begin to say it means "Able" instead. That shift is the heart of the book. The Scarlet Letter is a historical novel by the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in 1850 and set in the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony between 1642 and 1649. It explores legalism, sin and guilt, and it is regularly named among the Great American Novels.

Hawthorne and the shadow of his ancestors

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804, into a family with deep roots in the town. His name was originally spelled Hathorne. One of his ancestors, John Hathorne, was a judge in the Salem witch trials, and Hawthorne probably added the "w" to his surname in his early twenties in an effort to distance himself from his notorious forebears. It is easy to see why a writer with that family history would return again and again to Puritan New England and its harsh judgments.

Before the novel, Hawthorne had worked as a government official. In 1846 he was appointed Surveyor of the port of Salem, and after a change of administration he lost the post. He then returned to writing and published The Scarlet Letter in 1850 with a long introduction, "The Custom-House", that described his years at the Salem custom house and poked fun at local figures. Many people in Salem were not amused.

The scaffold: a public punishment

The novel opens in Puritan Boston. A crowd gathers to watch Hester Prynne, a young woman who has given birth to a baby of unknown paternity, be punished. She must stand on a scaffold for three hours before the town and wear a scarlet "A" on her dress for the rest of her life. Many women in the crowd are angered by her beauty and quiet dignity. When she is ordered to name the father of her child, she refuses.

In the crowd stands a small, misshapen man whom Hester recognises: her own husband, long presumed lost at sea. He had sent her ahead to the New World and planned to follow. Learning of her disgrace, he vows to find her lover and takes a new name, Roger Chillingworth. Posing as a physician, he visits her in prison and makes her promise never to reveal who he is.

Hester and Pearl

After her release, Hester lives in a cottage at the edge of town and supports herself with needlework of extraordinary quality. She lives quietly with her daughter, Pearl, and does charitable work for the poor. Pearl, shunned like her mother and without friends, grows into a wild, unpredictable child with a strange fascination for the letter on her mother's chest. When church members suggest that Pearl be taken away, Hester appeals to the governor and the ministers, and the young minister Arthur Dimmesdale persuades the governor to let the child stay with her mother.

Pearl is one of the novel's most important symbols. Hawthorne describes her as the scarlet letter in another form, the letter brought to life. She is both the evidence of Hester's "sin" and the person Hester loves most.

Dimmesdale's secret

Readers soon guess what the town does not: Dimmesdale, the beloved young minister, is Pearl's father. His health begins to fail, and Chillingworth moves in with him as his physician. Suspecting that the minister's illness comes from unconfessed guilt, Chillingworth applies steady psychological pressure, and one night, pulling aside the sleeping minister's clothing, he sees something on Dimmesdale's chest that confirms his suspicion.

Tormented, Dimmesdale climbs the scaffold in the middle of the night and admits his guilt, but he cannot find the courage to do it in daylight before the town. Hawthorne makes the contrast sharp. Hester's sin is public, and she slowly grows stronger. Dimmesdale's sin is hidden, and it eats him from the inside. One critic described his story as a fall that begins in apparent grace and ends in corruption, the story of a man who deceives himself at every stage.

The forest and the final scaffold

Shocked by Dimmesdale's decline, Hester meets him in the forest, tells him who Chillingworth really is, and persuades him to escape with her and Pearl on a ship to Europe. For a moment the minister seems to come back to life. But on Election Day, after preaching one of the finest sermons of his life, Dimmesdale climbs the scaffold in front of the whole town, confesses and dies in Hester's arms. Afterwards, most witnesses say they saw a scarlet "A" on his chest, though some deny it.

Robbed of his revenge, Chillingworth dies within a year and leaves Pearl a large inheritance. Hester and Pearl leave for Europe. Years later Hester returns alone to her cottage and, by her own choice, puts the letter back on. When she dies she is buried near Dimmesdale, under a single slate tombstone marked with a red letter A on a black field.

Symbols to watch for

Besides the letter itself, Hawthorne fills the novel with symbols. The scaffold appears three times, at the beginning, middle and end, and marks shame, revelation and guilt. A wild rosebush outside the prison door offers a glimmer of beauty and hope in a grim setting. A meteor shaped like an "A" lights up the sky during Dimmesdale's midnight vigil; he reads it as a sign of his own guilt, while others take it to mean "Angel". Even Dimmesdale's name, with its root "dim", suggests weakness and gloom.

Physical appearance mirrors the inner life. Chillingworth's twisted body reflects the anger in his soul, just as Dimmesdale's illness reveals his inner turmoil.

Themes: shame, law and private conscience

The novel is often read as a critique of the extreme legalism of the Puritans. Hester is rejected by the community even though she spends her life helping the sick and the poor. Living mostly alone, she begins to think beyond what Puritan society would consider safe, and comes to believe that a person's earthly sins do not necessarily condemn them. Critics have also compared Hester and Dimmesdale to Adam and Eve: sin leads to exile and suffering, but also to knowledge.

Hawthorne called his book "A Romance", and in "The Custom-House" he describes the kind of space he wanted to write in, a neutral territory between the real world and fairyland where the actual and the imaginary could meet. His work is usually placed within dark romanticism, a strand of Romantic writing concerned with guilt, sin and evil.

How readers received it

The book was an instant best-seller and one of the first mass-produced books in America; its first mechanised printing of 2,500 copies sold out within ten days. Some religious critics attacked it, but most literary critics praised it. George Eliot called it one of the two most "indigenous and masterly" productions of American literature, and D. H. Lawrence called it a "perfect work of the American imagination". Henry James admired its "indefinable purity and lightness of conception".

Adaptations

The story reached the stage as early as 1858, and Walter Damrosch turned it into an opera in 1896. It has been filmed many times, including a 1926 silent version directed by Victor Sjöström, a 1973 version by Wim Wenders and a 1995 film starring Demi Moore. The teen comedy Easy A, starring Emma Stone, was partly inspired by the novel. Many readers who discover classic plays like Othello or A Midsummer Night's Dream find The Scarlet Letter a natural next step: it is shorter than it looks, and the language rewards slow reading.

Learn with The Scarlet Letter: English phrases

Phrase	Meaning	Example
a scarlet letter	a mark of public shame	That one mistake became his scarlet letter at school.
a badge of honour	something you are proud of, even if others are not	She wore her failures as a badge of honour.
to point the finger at someone	to blame someone	Everyone pointed the finger at the new employee.
holier-than-thou	acting morally superior	His holier-than-thou attitude annoyed his friends.
a guilty conscience	the feeling that you did something wrong	He couldn't sleep because of a guilty conscience.

Try this: Write three English sentences about how a community treats someone after a mistake, using "a scarlet letter" and "to point the finger at".