Episode 12
Featuring Megan Marshall
Audio episode · 16 min
Megan Marshall on The Scarlet Letter
Hester walks Pearl into the forest to do what the town made impossible: speak. Marshall reads the sunshine that runs from the mother, the child in the waiting room of adulthood, and the answer Hester gives when Pearl asks about the Black Man, then goes digging in the period's own vocabulary.
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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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