Episode 10
Featuring Megan Marshall
Audio episode · 14 min
Megan Marshall on The Scarlet Letter
Seven years of lying have made Dimmesdale the most moving preacher in Boston. Marshall anatomizes the untrue man, asks why Hawthorne gives his whodunit away so early, and reads the midnight meteor as a study in how people decide what signs mean.
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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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