Bingo Chart Review: The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

I have actually read a couple of classics this year in my “Reading the Classics” project, but for some reason I never ticked them off my Bingo Chart. So I figured it was time with this one. 

“The Scarlet Letter” is about a woman, Hester Prynne, who is caught cheating on her absent husband, when she falls pregnant. Unluckily for her, she lives in the Puritan colonies of the America’s in the 18th century. She is sentenced to wear a scarlet letter on her dress, so everyone will recognize her and judge her. She refuses to give up her accomplice, and when her husband unexpectedly returns, she refuses to even tell him. He decides to hide who he really is in order to avoid being connected with her and sets about finding out who his wife’s lover is. 

I rather quickly figured out who the lover is, and so it seems does the husband. He sets out to take his revenge, but I can’t really figure out how. He pretends to befriend the lover and acts as his doctor, but I can’t tell if he uses this position to actually poison him or if he just “looms over” him bringing a bad feeling to the lover. 

The book is blurbed as a classic tale of love and revenge, but I must say there wasn’t much of either in my opinion. The revenge part seems to consist of evil eyes only and the love part only comes out in the very end. 

As for the characters I thought all of them were quite intense and a bit over the top. Hester is so proud she willingly casts herself out of society and even when there is talk of allowing her to give up the branded letter, she won’t do it. The lover is so plagued by his actions, that he is succumbing to his guilty conscience, but at the same time he pretends to be, and apparently thinks he really is, a Godly and humble man. The husband starts off as an okay dude, but then succumbs to his wish of revenge, which must be very unfulfilling in my opinion, given that it just consists of hovering over his victim. I feel like if the characters just would have been a bit more proactive they could have led happier lives. But that’s just me. 

There is not a whole lot of plot in the book, but there are a number of reflections on forgiveness, woman’s place in the world and religion, but most of these I just found to be quite boring and if not exactly out of place, then at least too longwinded. I feel like in these older books the author often uses the story as an excuse to give long expositions on topics that maybe could be better dealt with in an essay or something of the sort. For example in Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, he talks about language, the Paris sewer system, the nature of law….not the place, man! And I got a little of the same feeling here. 

In the end I gave this 2 stars out of 5 on Goodreads.