Allegory

Dimmesdale is Pearl's father. Marshall wants to know when you worked it out. In high school it took her until the scaffold scene at the end of Chapter 12 of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, three figures hand in hand under a blazing letter in the night sky. Rereading, she finds the breadcrumbs Hawthorne dropped, including the moment when Pearl takes Dimmesdale's hand and he kisses her head while the town fathers notice nothing.

Then the A words pile up. Hester's letter magnified in Bellingham's armor, Pearl as 'the scarlet letter endowed with life,' an artist standing in for an author, a name that sounds like Arthur, a sky the townspeople read as 'Angel.' Marshall adds one Hawthorne never says: America. She reads the novel's first page, where a new colony's first needs are a cemetery and a prison, and asks whether English settlement was itself the sin. Her last question: can Hester, whose giant has followed her to the New World, still get a fresh start?