The Scarlet Letter Analysis

The prison door is described as having never known "a youthful era," i.e., innocence (1.2). It’s made of iron and is a little worse for wear, if you catch our drift. Yet, the wild rosebush that g...

(Click the map infographic to download.) In the 17th century in England, the state religion was Church of England, which had broken off from the Roman Catholic Church about 200 years earlier. The C...

Our narrator is omniscient, all right. Here's a good example:She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness; as vast, as intricate and shadowy, as the untamed forest, amid the gl...

Mystery? Check. Malevolent villain? Check. Quasi-supernatural events, like meteors and bloody markings of uncertain origin? Also check. There may not be a castle or ghost, but we're definitely in f...

Yeah, that's a lot of tone to pack into one novel, but Hawthorne is a good writer. Check out this sentence from a very early part of the novel:The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human...

Get out your passports: Hawthorne's style is so strange to our modern ear that it's almost like visiting a foreign country. (It was rough going for the time, too; check out a book like Charles Dic...

Back in the day (colonial times, that is), law and religion were inseparable, like peanut butter and jelly. When a woman cheated on her husband—even if that husband had been missing for two year...

When Chillingworth dies and leaves all his money to Pearl, mom and daughter can finally escape the judgy ways of the Massachusetts Bay colonists. In fact, they've been able to put an entire ocean b...

Honestly, we were tempted to give this one a 10. No lie: it's a toughie. Check out this sentence:Doomed by his own choice, therefore, as Mr. Dimmesdale so evidently was, to eat his unsavory morsel...

GPS, Puritan-StyleWelcome to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It's got everything a thriving colonial town needs: a public square and a prison. Why start us off with a prison? Why not the bustling ma...

Hester Prynne and the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale are both Guilty with a capital "G," but only one of them is getting publicly shamed, and—spoiler—it's not the one with the "Reverend" in front...

Shame, Shame, ShameHester is publicly shamed for her sin but refuses to name her partner-in-crime. Her long-lost husband returns, discovers her adultery, and, not content with having his wife shun...

Hawthorne knew John Milton's Paradise Lost really well—so well that he'd argue with his big sister about the ways in which Satan is portrayed in the poem. Sounds just like our sibling fights...

Despite the sex we're sure Hester Prynne and the Reverend Dimmesdale had, this book is more about the guilt, shame, and suffering than the bodice-ripping and heavy breathing. Definitely PG material...

Matthew 13:45-46, the Pearl of Great Price: The reference to the "pearl of great price" (8.16) is an allusion to parable found in the Gospel of Matthew: "Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a...