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# What Does the A on Hester's Chest Actually Mean?
- URL: https://www.rebindclassics.com/scarlet-letter-a-meaning/
- Published: 2026-07-28T22:09:17.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T18:27:17.000Z
- Description: 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.
- Author: John Kaag
- Tags: Megan Marshall on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, #essay, #recently-published

The letter never holds still. That is the first thing to understand about it. The A that the magistrates of Boston pin on Hester Prynne is meant to fix her meaning forever, to make her legible at a glance as one thing: adulteress. The novel spends its entire length proving that a symbol cannot be controlled that way, and Megan Marshall, in her Rebind commentary, tracks the letter as it slips loose from its makers and becomes, by the end, almost the opposite of what they intended. Adulteress is only the first reading: across Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel the A comes to mean able, art, even armor, and finally, in Marshall's phrase, awe.

Start with the color, because Marshall does. The Scarlet Letter is, as she puts it, "kind of a monochromatic story, except for the color red — or sometimes gold." Against the somber black of the magistrates' cloaks, the letter blazes. And red, Marshall points out, is doing far more than marking shame. "The color red, which has so many associations — it can be like the rose, full of life, the blood of life, the blood of Christ." It is the blood of the crucifixion and the wine of communion at once, sorrow and sacrament in the same hue. Then Marshall adds the association that the magistrates would never have intended: revolution. "There's also the red of revolution on Hester's chest, by her heart." The French revolutionaries flew red. The letter meant to brand her as a transgressor also marks her, in the color alone, as something closer to a rebel.

Marshall lingers on the geometry of the capital A and finds it doubling as something sacred. "It seems to me almost like a pillory, or a crucifix," she says. "In some ways the geometry of it, maybe a kind of female crucifix in a different shape, less phallic." The instrument of public punishment and the instrument of holy suffering share an outline. Hawthorne hands the reader a letter that is supposed to mean disgrace and builds it in the shape of martyrdom.

## **The Letter That Had Not Done Its Office**

The novel itself flags that the symbol has gone rogue. In a line Marshall reads as one of the book's quiet hinges, Hawthorne writes that the scarlet letter had not done its office. The punishment was supposed to diminish Hester, to make her a warning. Instead it became a kind of credential. Marshall describes Hester taking on, by sheer force of how she lives, "[the office of the letter](https://www.rebindclassics.com/this-is-her-walden/)," [self-appointing as a Sister of Mercy](https://www.rebindclassics.com/scarlet-letter-feminist-novel/), becoming a public figure in a community that grants women no such standing. The A that was meant to cast her out has, against every intention behind it, given her a role.

## **Armor Starts with an A**

There is a sharper reading still, and Marshall offers it almost in passing: what if the letter is not a wound but a defense? "[Armor starts with an A](https://www.rebindclassics.com/no-law-for-her-mind/)," she says. "Is there any way that this letter is armor for Hester going through the world, and particularly when it's now inflated almost like a shield, to mirror the armor of these men?" The letter, in this reading, is not a mark of vulnerability but a breastplate, and Marshall lands the thought plainly: "So maybe she's ready to do battle." The magistrates armed her without meaning to.

The letter is also the work of Hester's own hands, and that changes everything about what it can mean. She embroiders it. Gold thread, what Hawthorne calls a gorgeous luxuriance of fancy. Marshall connects this directly to the cottage where Hester does her needlework and reads the letter as [a piece of her art](https://www.rebindclassics.com/monstrous-woman-shelley-hester/), not just her sentence. The same skill that produces the embroidered A produces the gloves and dresses the town's grandees pay for. The punishment and the livelihood are stitched by the same needle. Hester does not just wear the letter; she makes it, and remakes it, beautiful.

## **The A Is for Awe**

By the novel's end the transformation is complete, and Marshall names the final meaning plainly. The letter, she says, "ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world's scorn and bitterness and became a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe and reverence, too. So the A is for awe." The community that once read the letter as adultery comes, over decades, to read it as something closer to reverence. Hester returns to Boston of her own free will, the letter still on her breast, worn now by choice rather than by sentence. The symbol that was imposed has been claimed.

What the A actually means, then, depends entirely on when in the book you ask. At the scaffold it means adulteress, a brand the state has stamped on a body. By the cottage it means able, art, even armor. By the conclusion it means awe. The genius of Hawthorne's central device, in Marshall's reading, is that it was never stable to begin with, and the novel knows it. A letter is a sign that points to a meaning, and Hawthorne chose the one piece of the alphabet that the whole book could spend three hundred pages quietly redefining. The magistrates thought they were labeling a woman. They were handing her a blank to fill.

That is finally why the book has outlasted the punishment it describes; the actual historical statute Hawthorne drew from, [a real Massachusetts law](https://www.rebindclassics.com/a-consecration-of-its-own/) requiring offenders to wear a cloth A on their garments, fixed the letter's meaning by force. Hawthorne took that two inches of cloth and let it become unfixed, alive, contested, until the symbol meant whatever Hester's life made it mean. The letter on her chest is the one thing in the novel that everyone in Boston can see and no one can finally read. Two centuries of readers have been trying to read it ever since.