![]() ![]() Hester, too, eventually dies and is buried near Dimmesdale under a tombstone marked with a simple "A". ![]() After seven long years of painful rehabilitation, she emerges as a strong, inspiring woman, while the pastor, Arthur Dimmesdale, who seduced her dies of shame. Over many years, she challenges the two men in her life – her husband and her lover – with the dark truth of their emotional responsibilities and failures, while at the same time wrestling with her own sinful nature. Forced to wear a scarlet "A", Hester slowly redeems herself in the eyes of Puritan society. In the 17th-century town of Boston, a young woman, Hester Prynne, is publicly disgraced for committing adultery and giving birth to an illegitimate child, a girl named Pearl. Here, in short, is the prototype of the psychological novel, a brilliant and groundbreaking example of a new genre within 19th-century fiction. Where a novel, as he put it, "aims at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience", a romance expressed "the truth of the human heart". ![]() This distinction, in his mind, was important. N athaniel Hawthorne, describing "a tale of human frailty and sorrow", insisted that The Scarlet Letter was "a Romance", not a novel. ![]()
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