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What does the scarlet letter A mean in Hawthorne's novel?

May 25, 20264 min readbook-analysis

The scarlet letter A in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter begins as a symbol of shame and adultery imposed by a Puritan community, and transforms over the course of the novel into something its original designers did not intend: a mark of authenticity, suffering, and ultimately strength.

Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter in 1850, set two centuries earlier in the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony. The letter is embroidered in red and gold on the dress of Hester Prynne, a woman condemned to wear it publicly after bearing a child outside of marriage. What the letter means -- and who gets to decide what it means -- is the central question of the novel.

What does A stand for?#

Officially and initially: adultery. The letter is the Puritan community's attempt to fix Hester's identity permanently as that of a sinner. It is meant to be legible, permanent, and humiliating. The community wants the letter to control how Hester is seen and how she sees herself.

But the letter's meaning is not stable. Hawthorne is a writer deeply interested in the gap between what symbols are meant to do and what they actually do. Over the course of the novel, the letter is reinterpreted by nearly every character who encounters it.

How does the letter's meaning change?#

For Hester herself, the letter becomes the center of her identity in a way its designers did not intend. Rather than submitting to shame, she embroiders the A in gold thread with elaborate artistry -- making it beautiful, conspicuous, and defiant. She cannot remove it, but she refuses to be diminished by it.

As years pass, the townspeople begin reading the A differently. By the novel's middle section, many have come to see it as standing for "able" -- a reference to Hester's tireless charitable work among the poor and sick of the community. The letter that was meant to mark her as an outcast has become, for some, a mark of her usefulness and worth.

For the Reverend Dimmesdale, Hester's secret partner in the adultery, the A is a source of psychological torment. He cannot wear it publicly -- he is too important, too admired -- and the hidden guilt destroys him from within. Hawthorne draws a direct comparison between Hester's public shame and Dimmesdale's private one, and argues that public suffering honestly borne is less corrosive than private guilt concealed.

What does the letter represent about Puritan society?#

Hawthorne was the great-great-grandson of John Hathorne, one of the judges in the Salem witch trials. His relationship to his Puritan heritage was complicated and self-conscious -- he added the w to his surname to distance himself from that history. The Scarlet Letter is partly a reckoning with what Puritanism's certainty about sin and judgement does to human beings.

The letter represents the violence of communal judgment: the belief that a community has the right to fix an individual's identity by marking them publicly. This is a permanent, non-negotiable act. Hester cannot argue, cannot appeal, cannot change the letter's meaning through her behaviour -- except that, as the novel demonstrates, she does change it, slowly, through the sheer force of her character.

For a comparison with another novel where a symbol's meaning shifts dramatically over time, what Dorian Gray's portrait represents covers similar ground about the instability of moral markers.

What does the letter say about identity?#

The deepest argument of The Scarlet Letter is that identity is not fixed by external markers, however authoritative those markers seem. Hester is more than the A. Dimmesdale is not what his reputation says he is. Roger Chillingworth, Hester's returned husband, allows his desire for revenge to turn him into something genuinely monstrous -- without any external mark to show it.

The letter, in the end, marks the person who wore it with the most dignity of any character in the novel.

Further reading#

For the broader tradition of American literature that Hawthorne helped establish, the best classic science fiction in the public domain covers other 19th-century American writers.

To read the novel: The Scarlet Letter is in the Foxing catalog, free.

For other books that use a single symbol to carry the weight of a novel's moral argument, understanding the classics: themes, symbols, and meaning is the companion guide.

Sources#