Key Facts
full title · The Scarlet Letter
author · Nathaniel Hawthorne
type of work · Novel
genre · Symbolic; semi-allegorical; historical fiction; romance
(in the sense that it rejects realism in favor of symbols and ideas)
language · English
time and place written · Salem and Concord, Massachusetts; late 1840s
date of first publication · 1850
publisher · Ticknor, Reed, and Fields
narrator · The narrator is an unnamed customhouse surveyor who
writes some two hundred years after the events he describes took
place. He has much in common with Hawthorne but should not be taken
as a direct mouthpiece for the author's opinions.
point of view · The narrator is omniscient, because he analyzes the
characters and tells the story in a way that shows that he knows
more about the characters than they know about themselves. Yet,
he is also a subjective narrator, because he voices his own interpretations and
opinions of things. He is clearly sympathetic to Hester and Dimmesdale.
tone · Varies—contemplative and somewhat bitter in the introduction; thoughtful,
fairly straightforward, yet occasionally tinged with irony in the
body of the narrative
tense · The narrator employs the past tense to recount events
that happened some two hundred years before his time,
but he occasionally uses the present tense when he addresses
his audience.
setting (time) · Middle of the seventeenth century
setting (place) · Boston, Massachusetts
protagonist · Hester Prynne
major conflict · Her husband having inexplicably failed to join her
in Boston following their emigration from Europe, Hester Prynne
engages in an extramarital affair with Arthur Dimmesdale. When she gives
birth to a child, Hester invokes the condemnation of her community—a
condemnation they manifest by forcing her to wear a letter “A” for
“adulteror”—as well as the vengeful wrath of her husband, who has
appeared just in time to witness her public shaming.
rising action · Dimmesdale stands by in silence as Hester suffers for
the “sin” he helped to commit, though his conscience plagues him
and affects his health. Hester's husband, Chillingworth, hides his
true identity and, posing as a doctor to the ailing minister, tests
his suspicions that Dimmesdale is the father of his wife's child, effectively
exacerbating Dimmesdale's feelings of shame and thus reaping revenge.
climax · There are at least two points in The Scarlet
Letter that could be identified as the book's “climax.”
The first is in Chapter XII, at the exact center of the book. As
Dimmesdale watches a meteor trace a letter “A” in the sky, he confronts
his role in Hester's sin and realizes that he can no longer deny
his deed and its consequences. The key characters confront one another
when Hester and Pearl join Dimmesdale in an “electric chain” as
he holds his vigil on the marketplace scaffold, the location of Hester's
original public shaming. Chillingworth appears in this scene as
well. The other climactic scene occurs in Chapter XXIII, at the
end of the book. Here, the characters' secrets are publicly exposed
and their fates sealed. Dimmesdale, Hester, and Chillingworth not
only acknowledge their secrets to themselves and to each other;
they push these revelations to such extremes that they all must
leave the community in one way or another.
falling action · Depending on one's interpretation of which scene constitutes
the book's “climax,” the falling action is either the course of
events that follow Chapter XII or the final reports on Hester's
and Pearl's lives after the deaths of Dimmesdale and Chillingworth.
themes · Sin, experience, and the human condition; the nature
of evil; identity and society
motifs · Civilization versus the wilderness; night versus day;
evocative names
symbols · The scarlet letter; the town scaffold; the meteor;
Pearl; the rosebush next to the prison door
foreshadowing · Foreshadowing is minimal, because the symbols tend
to coincide temporally with events, enriching their meaning rather
than anticipating their occurrence.
