The Scarlet Letter

They have kept thy better part in bondage too long already! "It cannot be!" answered the minister, listening as if he were called upon to realize a dream. "I am powerless to go! Wretched and sinful as I am, I have had no other thought than to drag on my earthly existence in the sphere where Providence hath placed me."

Tripartite moral drama—public shaming, seven years of secret torment, forest revelation and Election Day collapse—converges on the scaffold rather than adventure, so plot scores 88.

On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A. It was so artistically done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore.

Hester, Dimmesdale, Chillingworth, and Pearl are locked in a symbol system where character is allegory made flesh; the embroidered A on the scaffold defines Hester as dignified transgressor, so cast scores 90.

Come along, Madame Hester, and show your scarlet letter in the market-place! A lane was forthwith opened through the crowd of spectators. Preceded by the beadle, and attended by an irregular procession of stern-browed men and unkindly visaged women, Hester Prynne set forth towards the place appointed for her punishment.

Symbolist tempo—scaffold, needlework, leech, vigil, forest—each chapter a tableau advancing moral condition until Election Day releases accumulated pressure, so pace scores 82.

Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of Divine Maternity—something which should remind him, indeed, but only by contrast, of that sacred image of sinless motherhood.

Hawthorne's weighted, qualified sentences turn every paragraph into moral meditation; the Custom-House frame and forest moonlight are among the most studied passages in American prose, so prose scores 91.

A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and grey steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.

Puritan Boston as moral theater—the prison door, the scaffold, the Governor's Hall, the forest as outlaw space—forms a complete symbolic geography of public shame and private agony, so world scores 93.

On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A. It was so artistically done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration.

The prison-door crowd and Hester on the scaffold with the infant Pearl—one of the most famous openings in American fiction; the scarlet letter visible before any backstory is told, so hook scores 90.

On a field, sable, the letter A, gules. It bore a device, a herald's wording of which might serve for a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend; so sombre is it, and relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow.

The American symbolist novel—sin externalized as embroidery, guilt as physician's leechcraft, child as living hieroglyph—works through emblem rather than event, so innov scores 92.

"ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES." So said Hester Prynne, and glanced her sad eyes downward at the scarlet letter. And, after many, many years, a new grave was delved, near an old and sunken one, in that burial-ground beside which King's Chapel has since been built.

The shared tombstone, the heraldic A, and Dimmesdale's scaffold confession inscribe sin and penitence in stone; no cheap redemption, only the legend Hester's charity earns after death, so ending scores 89.