The Scarlet LetterHawthorne’s greatest romance, The Scarlet Letter, is often simplistically seen as a timeless tale of desire, sin, and redemption. In his introduction, Michael J. Colacurcio argues that The Scarlet Letter is a serious historical novel. If Hawthorne’s fiction rigorously and faithfully subjects Hester and Dimmesdale to the limits of seventeenth-century possibility, it nonetheless looks forward to the better, brighter world of Margaret Fuller and Fanny Fern, of Charles Fourier and John Humphrey Noyes. |
Contents
The PrisonDoor | 45 |
The MarketPlace | 47 |
The Recognition | 58 |
The Interview | 68 |
Hester at Her Needle | 76 |
Pearl | 87 |
The Governors Hall | 98 |
The ElfChild and the Minister | 106 |
Hester and the Physician | 167 |
Hester and Pearl | 174 |
A Forest Walk | 182 |
The Pastor and His Parishioner | 189 |
A Flood of Sunshine | 199 |
The Child at the BrookSide | 206 |
The Minister in a Maze | 214 |
The New England Holiday | 226 |
The Leech | 116 |
The Leech and His Patient | 127 |
The Interior of a Heart | 138 |
The Ministers Vigil | 146 |
Another View of Hester | 158 |
The Procession | 236 |
The Revelation of the Scarlet Letter | 248 |
Conclusion | 258 |
Selected Bibliography | 265 |