Episode 15
Featuring Megan Marshall
Audio episode · 15 min
Megan Marshall on The Scarlet Letter
The third scaffold scene completes the design: Madonna, crucifixion, Pieta. Marshall reads the confession as an atonement generations late, the deathbed tableau as Hawthorne's own family fantasy, and the strange heraldic last line of the book as an epitaph the New World didn't expect to need.
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The A never holds still: adulteress at the scaffold, able and armor at the cottage, awe by the end — Marshall tracks a symbol its makers couldn't control.
Go deeper →Hester breaks the world's law in her mind; Thoreau breaks it with his feet. Marshall and Kaag on what deciding your own law actually costs.
Go deeper →Yes, Marshall argues: Hawthorne put Margaret Fuller's feminist theory in Hester's mind, atoning for a family history of silencing women — blind spots and all.
Go deeper →No — and Marshall reads Hawthorne's suspended question as widening the guilt past Dimmesdale and Chillingworth to the whole community standing in judgment.
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