quotA perfect work of the American imaginationquotDH Lawrence quotThe Scarlet Letter is so terrible in its pictures of diseased human nature as to produce most questionable delights The readers interest never flags for a momentHawthorne when you have studied him will be very precious to you He will have plunged you into melancholy he will have overshadowed you with black forebodings he will almost have crushed you with imaginary sorrows but he will have enabled you to feel yourself an inch taller during the processquotAnthony Trollope Nathaniel Hawthornes The Scarlet Letter is a razorsharp novel set in a seventeencentury puritan community The book examines the contradictions of good and evil what is apparent and what is hidden and the power of redemption After Hester Prynne the protagonist of The Scarlet Letter has a child out of wedlock she is branded with the scarlet letter quotAquot on her dress Shunned in her community as she refused to identify the father of her child Hester lives with in a small cottage with her daughter Pearl Roger Chillingworth an elderly physician joins the community and unbeknownst to all except for Hester he is her longdeparted husband who was presumed to be dead In his absence Hester had an affair and subsequently gave birth to a child Covertly aiming for revenge on the father of the child Chillingworth descends on Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale the young minister who he suspects in the illicit affair Within the remarkable character of Hester...
