Episode 9
Featuring Megan Marshall
Audio episode · 13 min
Megan Marshall on The Scarlet Letter
Boston lodges its failing young minister with the providential new doctor, and the book quietly becomes a hunt. Marshall reads the leech pun, the tapestry of David and Bathsheba on the wall, and the real first-fleet tombstone Pearl dances across in the burial ground next door.
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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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