Episode 5
Featuring Megan Marshall
Audio episode · 16 min
Megan Marshall on The Scarlet Letter
The husband arrives under a borrowed name, and Marshall knows the real man behind it: William Prynne, the Puritan pamphleteer branded S.L. She reads Chillingworth's medicine as an 1850s culture war, his prison confession as a marriage exposed, and his vow as something colder than revenge.
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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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