"I think hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go.
- Neil Gaiman
I feel that adequately sums up the gist of this book.



If you don't already know, this tells the story of a young woman who had an adulterous affair with a man she refused to name which resulted in a child. It's not hard to for the reader to figure out who he is, and when her husband comes back to town he also figures it out, then sets about mentally torturing him for years.
Meanwhile, because the woman committed the crime/sin of adultery, she is sentenced to wear a piece of cloth with the letter A emblazoned on it.
In scarlet. <--in case you hadn't guessed that part.



I have to give a mention to the "introduction".
Now, I read this book back in high school for my English class. And this time around I re-read it with my daughter who is also reading it for her high school English class - except now they call it Language Arts, I think. Anyway, her teacher told her they could skip the introduction. But being a full-grown adult, I decided to read the whole thing.
And I did, but damn my mind wandered.
There was a lot of nonsense just to say that our anonymous narrator found a scarlet cloth with the letter A on it, and a short explanation about Hester Prynne which inspired him to write a story about her.
I said all that to say this, maybe my kid's teacher had the right idea.

This is not the easiest book to read thanks to Hawthorne's penchant for using twenty words when one would do, so it's not the most interesting thing to hand to high school kids. Honestly, I don't know why they continue to make children suffer through so many of these classics and then wonder why kids don't like to read anymore, but there you go.



Alright.
I don't know if the ending is supposed to sound hopeful, but it makes me ill to think that someone might have actually felt that way about it.
The townspeople respect her when it's all said and done with because she persevered and took her lumps like a boss. But who cares if you win the respect of sanctimonious assholes?
She should have stayed with the then-grown Pearl, wherever she was. Why not enjoy your daughter? Why not find someone new? Or better yet, just find something new to do? Move on, goddammit.
But she couldn't let go of that guilt.
And the thing is, most guilt is relative to a belief system, not to any reality. I mean, would she feel so oppressively guilty now?
No.
She would have gotten a divorce from her husband, or not married him at all. And I'm betting he would have just simply decided that women were the pits & gone back to his research.
Who knows, she & Arthur might even have lasted for a few years before she decided he was a douchy waste of space. At which point, they would have parted ways and he and Hester would have shared custody of Pearl.
The end.



This book is a lot of things, and you can take so much away from reading it.
A look at the old Puritanical New England, an expose on women being punished more severely than men when it comes to sexual morality, or even the hypocrisy that allows someone to preach against the thing that they themselves are guilty of doing in the dark.
For me personally, my main takeaway is that wasting your life feeling guilty is maybe the biggest sin out there. You have to forgive yourself and move on.
If not, you'll end up just like Hester. Alone on the outskirts of town, sitting in a cottage giving (probably terrible) advice to young women who are in trouble, hoping that it will eventually be enough penance to earn you a place in Heaven.

You get what anybody gets - you get a lifetime.
- Also Neil Gaiman

DON'T WASTE YOURS.

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