The scarlet letter: A critical review

© Bloomsbury 2014. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century romance The Scarlet Letter centers on the simple transgression of adultery and its social consequences. Hawthorne’s narrative and storytelling skill, however, are far from simple; the author manages to subtly and cleverly set the tale within a framework of other transgressions. Ideas of space and other social constructions, including language and belief systems, are tested and subverted in this description of a seventeenthcentury Puritan settlement. In this article David Littlefield and Rachel Sara critically analyze this classic American text to build an original argument that identifies the multiple forms of transgression outlined within the text. This argument is explored within the context of the theme “Body + Space” and innovatively demonstrates how the book pre-figures much twentieth-century thinking on the subject