Abstract
Will Gluck's new teen adaptation of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter stars a perky Emma Stone who steals the film as Olive Penderghast. Like Clueless, the story takes place in a California high school where Olive is enrolled. Hawthorne's novel has been adapted to film numerous times since the beginning of cinema, though never very well, and Easy A enjoys staging its own relation- ship to the most unfaithful adaptations, including the notorious Roland Joffe version with Demi Moore. When we shift our assumption about which character from the novel Olive represents, we discover a hidden theme of the film, one never fully adopted but cunningly introduced through sly references to Leslie Fiedler's reading of another American classic, Huckleberry Finn. Easy A drops the theme of unwanted pregnancy so important to Hawthorne's tale. Yet, the nod towards clos- eted sexuality that this allows is not fully sustained by the drive towards a happy ending.
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