Our Scarlet Letter Complex

From the very beginning of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic nineteenth-century novel The Scarlet Letter, it is easy to hate the Puritans he so carefully describes. They are not simply content to make his heroine, Hester Prynne, wear a scarlet A because she had a child out of wedlock. They also want to humiliate her by forcing her to reveal the name of her lover. In Hawthorne’s eyes, the Puritans’ conduct is far worse than Hester’s. He will, however, concede their moral seriousness. Although they make Hester stand alone on a scaffold in the town square, there is on their part “none of the heartlessness of another social state which would only find a theme for jest” in her predicament.

We are a long way from P...