Hyderabad: The novel tells a story of a feisty lady left alone by her husband who is assumed to be lost at sea and then abandoned by her lover to give birth to a child outside of marriage in the 1600s. Hawthorne gets to the point immediately with a public scene of shaming where Hester Prynne is made to stand in the middle of a town-square on a scaffolding to be shamed publicly for taking a lover while her husband was gone. In Boston when women were expected to only raise their children and support their husbands, Prynne showed her character by not only taking up the responsibility of her unborn child alone with her meagre income but also single-handedly taking up the blame too.
As the novel progresses, we understand exactly why. Prynne meets her husband who joins in the criticism and personally tries to persuade her to reveal her lover’s name so that he could vindicate his male ego. His abandonment firmly put aside with remarkable ease, he takes up a new name — Roger Chillingworth — and begins a new life after arm-twisting Prynne into a deal where he would spare her lover, whose identity he said he would find out, if she did not reveal her husband’s identity to the people – “One token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide another.”
In the course of the novel, Hawthorne exposes the levels of shame in the Puritanic society — and a very daring act at that — through the injustice meted out to Prynne. However, it is through these unjust acts against her that Hawthorne also tests and shows Prynne’s mettle as she accepts the repercussions of a ‘crime’ she was not solely responsible for, her husband’s frivolity and her lover’s indifference as she wears her scarlet ‘A’ and raises daughter Pearl with her meagre earnings. But Hawthorne elevates Prynne to a pedestal when her lover is revealed to be the Minister of her church, Arthur Dimmesdale.
Even when Dimmesdale is only able to accept his mistake partially and wear his scarlet letter under his shirt, Prynne encourages and inspires him for a better life in Europe. However, he dies soon after and she continues to live with her scarlet letter and her daughter and is later buried beside Dimmesdale. But through her sorrow and misery, Prynne was what Puritan America needed to realise that a woman had a bigger role to play in society.
A resolute woman of courage, comfortable in her sexuality and insulated by self-reliance, she leads life on her own terms, despite that the scarlet letter assigned to her that she is made to live with as Hawthorne writes: “She had wandered, without rule or guidance, into a moral wilderness. Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in woods. The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude had been her teachers.”