nd Roger Chillingworth, Hawthorne works out many of the themes and concerns associated with both Puritan society and transcendentalism, but the characters transcend both by reflecting universal experiences.
The opening of The Scarlet Letter is an account by the narrator of how he came to write the book. The anonymous narrator is a Customhouse surveyor who finds some documents in the attic of the customhouse. Among them is a text that has a scarlet embroidered letter ôAö on the front. The text was written by a former surveyor who recounts events that occurred two centuries before the narrator discovers the text. It is the ôstoryö of The Scarlet Letter.
The Scarlet Letter takes place in the Puritan town of Boston in 1642. A woman named Hester Prynne is led from jail carrying her daughter, Pearl, with a scarlet letter ôAö on her chest. Hester is convicted of adultery and condemned to stand on a scaffold to endure three hours of public shaming. Her husband is o
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