The Scarlet Letter

“Some authors, indeed, do far more than this, and indulge themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as could fittingly be addressed, only and exclusively, to the one heart and mind of perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at large on the wide world, were certain to find out the divided segment of the writer’s own nature, and complete his circle of existence by bringing him into communion with it.”

Before detailing how he came to write The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne explains his decision to include a personal preface to the novel. In doing so, he introduces a theme that will be central to the narrative itself: the relationship between personal identity and public image. In the above passage, for instance, he implies that the public persona one adopts will inevitably be interpreted in unintended ways; the only person who could feel “perfect sympathy” with the self an author projects in his works is in fact “the divided segment of the writer’s own nature”—that is, the author himself.

“With his own ghostly hand, the obscurely seen, but majestic, figure had imparted to me the scarlet symbol, and the little roll of explanatory manuscript. With his own ghostly voice, he had exhorted me, on the sacred consideration of my filial duty and reverence towards him,—who might reasonably regard himself as my official ancestor,—to bring his moldy and moth-eaten lucubrations before the public.”

Although Hawthorne’s story of how he came up with the idea for The Scarlet Letter is likely embellished (if not entirely fabricated), it does have figurative significance. The narrator’s account of feeling a “filial duty” toward his “official ancestor”—that is, his predecessor at the Custom House—humorously echoes his attitude toward his real ancestors; Hawthorne was ashamed of the role his family had played in events like the Salem witch trials, and (as he explains earlier in the Introduction) he felt obliged to atone for their actions. Implicitly, the novel itself is his way of doing this, with the evolution of the “scarlet symbol” over the course of the