The Scarlet D

In the fifth chapter of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1920), somebody says the word "divorce" at the Archers' table, and Wharton records the effect: "The word had fallen like a bombshell in the pure and tranquil atmosphere of the Archer dining-room." Newland Archer changes the subject. A few chapters later the Lovell Mingotts send out cards for a formal dinner to meet the Countess Olenska, and one by one the regrets come back. Nobody says why, and nobody has to.

In the second chapter of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850), the gossips of Boston stand at the foot of the scaffold and review the sentence. One says it should have been death. A young wife, holding a child by the hand, answers more softly: "let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be always in her heart." Two communities, two marked women, and only one of them has been handed a needle.

Roxane Gay, in her Rebind commentary on The Age of Innocence, supplies the connection herself, in passing: "it's clear that Olenska is about to be painted with a scarlet D." Megan Marshall, in her Rebind commentary on The Scarlet Letter, never mentions Wharton, and Gay never mentions Hawthorne. But read side by side, the two commentaries make a case neither sets out to make. The visible, legislated cruelty of the theocracy leaves the marked woman more room than the invisible, deniable cruelty of old New York, and the reason is the difference between a mark you can see and one nobody will admit to giving.