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Foreword to the Penguin Classic Edition of

The Scarlet Letter

Like millions of American teenagers, I first encountered The Scarlet

Letter as an assigned text in a high school English class. And like

millions of American teenagers before and after me, I found the book

strange and difficult, bordering on oppressive. It just seemed so

foreign—so cold and forbidding and buttoned-up—and so remote, as if

it had been written not just in another century, but on another planet, a

nightmare world where someone’s whole life could be ruined just

because she committed the “sin” of fornication, or whatever they called

it back in those creepy, long-gone, witch-burning Puritan days. What

did that have to do with America in the freewheeling late 1970s, post–

Roe v. Wade and pre-AIDS, with the Sexual Revolution in full swing?

I didn’t give Hawthorne’s novel much thought in the years that

followed. It just got filed away in that mental drawer reserved for

“mandatory classics,” those books you had to read because the guard-

ians of the culture had decided they were good for you, bitter spoon-

fuls of literary medicine that everybody had to choke down, whether

you liked it or not. The only good thing about reading a mandatory

classic like The Scarlet Letter was the knowledge that I’d done my

civic duty, and would never have to read it again.

But then a funny thing happened. Not long ago, a producer from the

radio show Studio 360 asked if I’d like to participate in a piece they

were doing on The Scarlet Letter. She thought I might have an

interesting perspective because my novels Little Children and The

Abstinence Teacher explored some of the same themes Hawthorne had

addressed—the conflict between religion and desire, the ostracism of

sex offenders, and the unruly emotions seething beneath the orderly

surface of small-town life. I warned her that I disliked the book and

would be speaking as a hostile critic rather than as a booster. She said

that would be fine; differing opinions were welcome. So I picked up the

novel—my old nemesis—hoping to gather ammunition for my long-

delayed takedown of this frigid !classic, and discovered that I was an

idiot. The Scarlet Letter wasn’t the novel I thought it was—it was

something far stranger and more !beautiful than anything I’d read in a

long time. By the time I showed !up for the interview, I was a convert,

an unabashed fan and advocate !for a book that I had totally

misunderstood and woefully underestimated. I wanted to go find

Hawthorne and apologize. !

Of course it wasn’t The Scarlet Letter that had changed since the late

1970s, it was me, and it was the world around me, or at least my sense

of that world. For one thing, I had read a lot more, enough !to recognize

in Hawthorne’s story the source of a powerful gothic !strain in

American fiction—a rich tradition that combines elements !of the

supernatural with closely observed social realism—that has !informed

the works of writers like Flannery O’Connor, Joyce Carol !Oates, Toni

Morrison, and Stephen King, among others. I had also !lived through

decades of conservative religious backlash against the !perceived

excesses of the Sexual Revolution, and could see that the ! battle

Hawthorne was depicting between individual freedom and !theological

control—a battle I had naively consigned to the distant !past—was still

being waged in twenty-first-century America. In !some parts of the

world, it’s even worse than that: women are still !being stoned to death

for committing adultery, or murdered for the “crime” of being raped, or

otherwise “dishonoring” their families. !By the standards of our world,

you might even say that Hester !Prynne got off easy, only having to

wear that embroidered letter !“A” on her dress all those years,

advertising her shame to everyone !who knew her. !

One of the things I hadn’t fully appreciated the first time around is that

The Scarlet Letter is a historical novel, its setting as distant !from

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s time as Hawthorne’s is from ours !today.

Writing his novel in the mid-nineteenth century, Hawthorne !was

squinting two hundred years into the past, trying to understand his

Puritan ancestors and the dark legacy they’d passed down to the

generations that had followed. Placing Hawthorne in his proper

historical moment helps us to see The Scarlet Letter as part of another

great literary tradition—the nineteenth-century novel of adultery—and

to set Hester Prynne beside characters like Emma Bovary and Anna

Karenina. The comparison is illuminating.

The European adultery novels feel sophisticated and contemporary and

immediately relevant. They feature recognizably “modern” women

rebelling against the dull misery of unhappy marriages, seeking their

salvation in romance and illicit sex. Tolstoy and Flaubert address the

topic of infidelity head-on; we see Emma and Anna make the choices

that doom them, then watch in horror as they get betrayed by their

lovers. Both women are martyrs to passion; once they cross the fateful

line, there’s no way forward, and no turning back.

Compared with Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, The Scarlet

Letter is disappointingly chaste and old-fashioned. Hawthorne refuses

to provide even a fleeting glance of the original sin, the love affair that

turned Hester into a disgraced single mother and Reverend Dimmesdale

into a pious fraud. Even their happy reunion scene, late in the novel,

sparks little in the way of physical fireworks. There’s only breathless

conversation—erotic in its own way—and a single act of abandon,

when Hester “undid the clasp that fastened the scarlet letter, and, taking

it from her bosom, threw it to a distance among the withered leaves.”

But Hawthorne offers us something that neither Tolstoy nor Flaubert

can provide—a glimmer of hope, and a paragon of courage. Instead of

a sexual martyr, we get a hero, a strong woman at peace with her own

conscience, willing to accept the punishment for her rebellion, but

refusing to admit that it was a sin. “‘What we did,’” she informs

Dimmesdale, “‘had a consecration of its own.’” She tells her cowardly

lover that he needs to answer only to himself, and to find a way to live

honestly, even if it means losing his social position and striking out for

the wilderness. “‘There is happiness to be enjoyed!’” she declares.

“‘There is good to be done. Exchange this false life of thine for a true

one.’”

Dimmesdale can’t do it, of course. In an astonishing climactic scene, he

stands before the community and confesses his guilt, exposing himself

as a hypocrite, poisoned from the inside out, literally !consumed by his

shame. In the European novels, it’s the woman who !dies, but in The

Scarlet Letter, not only does Hester survive, she !thrives, growing

stronger with the decades, raising her child, and !eventually becoming a

sort of celebrity, a wise woman and emotional healer. Even the scarlet

letter takes on a new meaning: it “ceased !to be a stigma that attracted

the world’s scorn and bitterness, and became a type of something to be

sorrowed over, and looked upon with !awe, yet with reverence, too.” !

Exchange this false life for a true one.

That’s the line that really resonates today, the command that ! brings the

novel into focus for a contemporary audience. At its heart, !The Scarlet

Letter is a coming-out story. I couldn’t see that back !when I was a

teenager—you weren’t allowed to be gay in my high !school, so no one

ever came out—but I can see it now. The Scarlet !Letter wants us to

know that happiness isn’t possible if you’re living !a lie. It also

understands that living your truth might not be easy, !that you might

have to pay a high price for that luxury. But the price !for hypocrisy—

for living a false life—is even higher.

So this is my mea culpa, Mr. Hawthorne. The Scarlet Letter is an

amazing novel—passionate, grotesque, horrifying, heartbreaking, and

weirdly uplifting. Everyone should read it. Not because it’s !good for

us—though it is—but because it illuminates our world. !More than any

other American novel, The Scarlet Letter knows !who we are and how

we got this way. It doesn’t just remind us who !we used to be in the bad

old days when “religion and law were almost identical,” it points the

way to a different and brighter future, !where a truer life might be

possible. !

-- Tom Perrotta