Write your own The Scarlet Letter story

The Narrator / Surveyor of the Revenue

A writer and democratic politician who serves as Surveyor at the Salem Custom-House before being swept out by a change in administration. He is a descendant of stern Puritan ancestors—a soldier-judge and a witch-trial participant—whose legacy weighs on him. While sorting through the Custom-House's forgotten upper room, he discovers a scarlet embroidered letter and a manuscript detailing Hester Prynne's story, which he then edits and presents to the public.

Hester Prynne

The protagonist of the inner narrative, a woman condemned by the Puritan community of Boston for the sin of adultery. She is forced to wear a scarlet letter 'A' on her breast as a permanent public mark of shame. Hester raises her illegitimate daughter Pearl alone and over time transforms from an outcast into a quiet figure of compassion and endurance.

Pearl

Hester Prynne's young daughter, born of her adulterous union and regarded by the Puritan community as an elf-child or symbol of sin made flesh. Pearl is wild, perceptive, and strangely beautiful, seeming to embody the moral complexity of her origins. Her legal custody becomes a point of conflict with colonial authorities.

Roger Chillingworth

Hester's estranged husband, described as a wrinkled scholar whose eyes glow with cold intensity. He arrives in Boston under a false name and attaches himself as a physician to the ailing minister Arthur Dimmesdale, secretly pursuing a course of psychological torment and revenge. He is associated with herbalism, dark knowledge, and sinister manipulation.

Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale

A beloved and eloquent Puritan minister in Boston who is secretly the father of Pearl and tormented by hidden guilt. He is outwardly revered by his congregation but inwardly broken by his unconfessed sin. His arc moves toward eventual public confession and revelation.

General Miller – The Collector

The aging Collector of the Salem Custom-House, a celebrated New England military hero of the Niagara frontier campaigns, known for his motto 'I'll try, Sir!' He is physically infirm but retains an indestructible moral solidity, integrity, and genuine benevolence. He serves as a figure of heroic endurance in decline, contrasted against the mundane bureaucracy around him.

The Permanent Inspector

An eighty-year-old Custom-House officer of extraordinary physical vitality but minimal intellect or moral depth, the son of a Revolutionary-era customs collector who created his post. He is preoccupied almost entirely with memories of fine meals and shows no spiritual weight whatsoever. He serves as a comic counterpoint to the narrator's reflective sensibility.

Salem, Massachusetts

A coastal New England town with deep Puritan roots, Salem is the narrator's native place and the site of the Custom-House. It is described as flat and wearying, its wharves fallen into decay, its long streets stretching from Gallows Hill to the almshouse. The town carries a heavy ancestral weight, shaped by generations of settlers who mingled their lives—and moral failures—into its soil.

The Custom-House

A large brick edifice at the head of a decaying Salem wharf, flying the federal banner and guarded by a fierce carved American eagle. Inside, aged Custom-House officers doze in tilted chairs, and the Surveyor occupies a cobwebbed office furnished with an old pine desk and stacks of Revenue Law digests. The building's unfinished upper room contains barrels of forgotten official documents, among which the narrator discovers the manuscript of Hester Prynne's story.

Boston, Puritan Colony

The primary setting of the main narrative, a seventeenth-century Puritan settlement in Massachusetts governed by strict religious and civil law. Its central features include a market-place used for public punishment, an old prison, a governor's hall, and surrounding forest. Society here enforces moral conformity through shame, law, and communal judgment.

The Prison-Door

The iron-studded oak door of Boston's colonial prison, one of the first structures built by the Puritan settlers. It represents the colony's acknowledgment that crime and sin are inevitable in human society. A wild rose-bush grows beside it, offering a natural contrast of beauty against the gloom of punishment.

The Market-Place

The public square of Puritan Boston where community gatherings, announcements, and punishments such as time on the scaffold take place. It is the space where private sin is made a public spectacle and where social order is visibly enforced before the eyes of the congregation.

The Governor's Hall

The residence of the colonial governor, a symbol of civil and religious authority in Puritan Boston. Characters visit it when the community debates matters such as the custody of Pearl, reflecting how governance and theology were inseparable in the colony.

The Forest

The wilderness beyond the bounds of Puritan Boston, associated with freedom, moral ambiguity, and encounters outside the law. Characters retreat to the forest for private conversations and confessions that would be impossible within the town's watchful society.

The Puritan Community of Boston

The governing social body of seventeenth-century colonial Boston, organized around strict Calvinist religious doctrine and communal moral oversight. The community enforces conformity through public shaming, legal punishment, and ecclesiastical authority. It is both the judge of Hester's sin and the congregation that unwittingly reveres the secretly guilty Dimmesdale.

The Custom-House Officers

A corps of mostly elderly men, former sea-captains and federal appointees, who staff the Salem Custom-House under the Collector's nominal authority. They are characterized by political loyalty (predominantly Whig), physical torpor, and nostalgia, having drifted into comfortable sinecures after lives at sea. Their world is one of bureaucratic stagnation and government patronage.

The Scarlet Letter 'A'

A richly embroidered scarlet cloth letter 'A' that Hester Prynne is condemned to wear on her breast as a mark of adultery. The narrator discovers a physical specimen of the letter among the Custom-House documents, and claims to feel a burning sensation when he holds it against his own chest. Over the course of the story the letter's meaning shifts and deepens beyond simple condemnation.

Manuscript of Surveyor Pue

A document discovered by the narrator in the Custom-House's dusty upper room among old official papers, written by a previous Surveyor named Jonathan Pue. It purports to contain the authentic record of Hester Prynne's history, which the narrator uses as the basis for The Scarlet Letter. It is the fictional device that legitimizes the inner narrative as historical fact.

Puritan Law and Public Shame

In the Puritan colony of Boston, sin—especially sexual transgression—was treated as both a religious offense and a civic crime, punishable by public exposure on the scaffold, forced wearing of marks of shame, and communal ostracism. The community believed that visible punishment served moral instruction for all witnesses. Private guilt was considered as dangerous as public sin because it corrupted the individual unseen.

The Hawthorne Family's Puritan Legacy

The narrator's ancestors include a first-generation Puritan magistrate who persecuted Quakers and a son who was a judge in the Salem witch trials, whose actions left what the narrator calls a moral stain on the family bloodline. The narrator publicly repents for their cruelties and reflects on how deep Puritan roots shape identity across generations. This ancestral guilt colors the entire frame narrative and connects the nineteenth-century narrator to the seventeenth-century story.

The Wild Rose-Bush at the Prison Door

A rose-bush blooming beside the prison entrance is presented as a symbol of natural beauty and moral complexity persisting alongside punishment and sin. It may have sprung from the footsteps of Anne Hutchinson, a historical antinomian exile, lending it associations with religious dissent and the survival of grace in harsh conditions. The image frames the entire narrative with ambiguity about sin and redemption.

Chronological Layers of the Setting

The story operates on two distinct time layers: the nineteenth-century frame, set in the declining port of Salem around the 1840s during the narrator's tenure at the Custom-House, and the seventeenth-century inner narrative set in early Puritan Boston circa the 1640s–1650s. The frame narrator bridges these eras by discovering Surveyor Pue's manuscript, positioning himself as editor of a much older moral history. Salem's own decline mirrors the exhaustion of its Puritan founding energies.