SCARLET LETTER, THE Definition & Meaning

Scarlet Letter, The

noun

a novel (1850) by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The Scarlet Letter

(1850) A novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne about Hester Prynne, a woman in seventeenth-century New England who is convicted of adultery. Forced to wear a scarlet letter A on her dress as a sign of her guilt, Hester refuses to reveal the identity of her lover. Eventually, a young minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, publicly admits his part in the adultery and dies in Hester's arms.

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Example Sentences

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I thought about that with the way women were treated in "The Scarlet Letter," the way that the Puritans blamed women, and they believed in original sin and that women were responsible for that because of Eve.

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When Leiby mentioned the Scarlet A, I thought of Suzan-Lori Parks’s take on “The Scarlet Letter” — the one of her Red Letter Plays whose title we can’t print here — with its heroine, Hester Smith, who is described in the list of characters as “the Abortionist.”

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"But in a small town, in a small jurisdiction -- and I don't know that this is the case -- then that could be the scarlet letter, the stigma. I will never go to that lawyer," he concluded.

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The questions asked on early IQ tests—about the author of The Scarlet Letter, the diet of squirrels, and the city where the Declaration of Independence was signed—required background knowledge.

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Not that it was about him; it was about those far less fortunate than him, who would carry this scarlet letter the rest of their lives.

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