A is for Adultery.

After yet another random hiatus due to driving - I am back to el blog.

I have been away from blogging – but not away from reading, so that’s a plus. Basically I cruised through The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne like it was no big deal and that made me a very happy little camper. I’ve always wanted to read this book. I’m pretty sure 95% of American High School kids have read this book and I, for some reason, was not one of them. I always thought that was super lame – so one day I bought the novel, and then put it on my bookshelf, and there it sat. And sat. And sat. 

So Vwalla! I have read it. Go me! Take THAT random high schoolers, I am just as cool as you!

I have to say I really did like this book. I can’t be sure that I would have loved it when I was sixteen, but now that I have a stronger appreciation for literature, I can see why this has always been regarded as a classic.

Basically – for anyone else who may not have read it – the story is set in Puritan times. There is a lady – Hester Prynne – who is convicted of adultery (her husband has been in England for two years, and the story opens with her holding a brand new baby… so, unless the gestation period in the 1600s was longer than 9 months, it doesn’t add up). She is forced to wear a large scarlet “A” on her chest, and she refuses to name her lover.

On the day of her sentencing, while standing on a giant scaffold for three hours, with the towns people staring at her and the scarlet letter she is forced to wear, a traveling man comes along and sees her up there.

The traveling man turns out to be her husband and he forces her to swear she won’t tell the townspeople who he is because he is going to come up with a new identity and act as a physician. He also says he is going to find out who the man is that helped her commit her crime.

Hester devotes herself to being a pious woman, sewing to make money for herself and her daughter, Pearl. The “physician” Chillingworth (aka husband) latches on to the town’s minister, whose health is failing rapidly due to a mysterious ailment.

This book is labeled as a romance, and I guess it sort of is, but most of the book lacks in the romance factor. It is mostly just about Hester raising her crazy daughter and always feeling very guilty because of the scarlet letter that she must bear on her chest. There is only a little section of romance, and then tragedy, and then the story ends.

Mostly it’s a very lonely book.  

So, sadly, I also missed Short Story Saturday. Dang. And I was so excited to have started something new! Oh well, Saturday will be here again before we know it. So look forward to that, and until then, on to reading!