Abstract
Whoever would seek the soul of New England has to reckon with the mean- ing and influence of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. More than the sermons of Cotton Mather or the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, more than the poetry of Robert Frost or the histories of Samuel Eliot Morison, Hawthorne's slim tale of adultery and punishment holds the promise of revealing deep truths about God's covenanted people and the nation they helped create. Written in the nineteenth century about the seventeenth cen- tury, The Scarlet Letter has been the twentieth century's textbook on Puri- tanism and the Puritan legacy to America. Nor do its truths stop there. Through Hester and Pearl Prynne, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth, we locate the specific New England soul in a sexuality, psy- chology, and tragedy that transcends time and space.
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