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Megan Marshall on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

Episode 16

To Live Is to Bear Secrets

Featuring Megan Marshall

Audio episode · 14 min

Megan Marshall on The Scarlet Letter

The book is finished; the biographer remains. Marshall opens her own workshop: the secrets at the heart of all three of her subjects' lives, the one her childhood house kept, and the discovery that her own ancestors march through the novel's procession. It ends where the book began, in an actual Boston burying ground.

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What Does the A on Hester's Chest Actually Mean?

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.

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Two Kinds of Nonconformity

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.

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Is The Scarlet Letter a Feminist Novel?

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.

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Did Hester Prynne Sin Alone?

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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