Honors Literature Writing #2: The Scarlet Letter

"In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in Hamlet and The Iliad, in all scriptures and mythologies, not learned in schools, that delights us."

Choose a novel that you may initially have thought was conventional and tame but that you value for its "uncivilized free and wild thinking." Write an essay in which you explain what constitutes its "uncivilized free and wild, thinking" and how that thinking is central to the value of the work as a whole. Support your ideas with specific references to the work you choose.

The novel, Scarlet Letter, takes place in 17th century New England. It is a story about a woman named Hester Prynne who commits adultery and faces the lifelong guilt and shame that follows with it. At first glance, this book seems like a "tame" book about a woman silently living with her guilt after committing adultery. Along with many other post-Pilgrim-era and pre-20th-century-era material, it could be just another book about how women should be constricted with chastity belts, as it is the way it should be before marriage.

However, further reading into this book, you could tell that it would be a whole other story. It starts off with a prosecution: the "whore," Hester Prynne, is sentenced to 3 hours standing on a scaffold, and the rest of her life wearing a scarlet letter ("A," for Adultery) on her chest. The first few pages of this in the book even defied my initial thinking that adultery was a shushed subject, hence why chastity belts were kept under the clothing. However, my thoughts were changed even after reading the opening scene.

Another example of my pre-existing thoughts proven wrong was the outcome of adultery: Pearl, Hester's illegitimate child. Sometimes, people fail to realize that intercourse is meant for procreation. The general idea of prostitution and whoring in the 17th century was left at sex and that's all. Scarlet Letter reminded us that prostitution leads not only to prosectuion, and the subject of Pearl was a major subject in the book, without her the story would be very incomplete.