Episode 11
Featuring Megan Marshall
Audio episode · 15 min
Megan Marshall on The Scarlet Letter
Nobody pardons Hester; she frees herself. Marshall follows the self-ordained Sister of Mercy to the freedom of thought her century punished women for, and can tell you almost to the page where Hawthorne found those ideas. The deepest question of the stretch: are these people fated, or choosing?
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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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