What’s it like to live as a fallen woman in a small town? We’ll fill you in, so SPOILERS AHOY! Hester Prynne, protagonist of The Scarlet Letter, is 100% a fallen woman, and that exact term comes up in the novel. If you had to read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter in high school (and if you live in the United States, you probably couldn’t escape it), remember that it’s good to face your fears. Let’s hold hands and be brave and return to Salem, Puritans, and meteors writing capital A’s in the sky. Why are the meteors doing this? Naturally, Nature echoes the embroidered “A” that Hester famously wears as a punishment for having a child out of wedlock.

In this lively discussion, Sonja and Vanessa will explore what dimension Hawthorne’s telling of Hester’s life adds to the fallen woman narrative. Is it in any way a feminist story? What do the novel and the historical record suggest about Hawthorne’s own feelings about women? Should you read the novel? When you do, should you skip over “The Custom House,” which is the introduction to the novel, or is it worth reading? And if you read this book under duress back in high school…is it worth a second read? And do we–in 2026–still shame women and give them the equivalent of a “scarlet letter”?

Along the way, Sonja expresses distaste for the word “bosom” and then goes on to say it repeatedly, and Vanessa can’t help wondering how energetic the right Reverend Aruthur Dimmesdale is in bed.

REFERENCES:

Here is a link to Nina Baym's article on Hawthorne's Feminism on JSTOR. If you make a free membership, we’re pretty sure you can read it online for free.

Here is a link to an appreciation of Nina Baym from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, on the occasion of her passing in 2018. It helps one appreciate how much she contributed to our appreciation of women’s literature. One critic in the article says, “She changed the way a generation of scholars of American literature came to understand 19th-century women’s writing.” No small accomplishment!