Episode 6
Featuring Megan Marshall
Audio episode · 15 min
Megan Marshall on The Scarlet Letter
Free to leave Boston, Hester stays, takes a cottage on the edge of town, and picks up her needle. Marshall claims the chapter as the book's quiet self-portrait: Thoreau chose his solitude, Hester had hers chosen for her, and what she makes of it is art.
Subscribe to continue reading
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.
Go deeper →