Hawthorne is likely as good as any writer, and as bad, there is an indecent candidness to his novel 'The Scarlet Letter'. To establish such a sick and slick concept but be supernaturally unable to commit to either side of its transgressions, it's essentially commercial and literary at the same time, it's wonderful and babbling at once, strict and severe but always caught in fantasy. To say nothing of the prose, alive at times with all of the art's mental slack ("inevitable development"), there is one of the first and likely the forever most important, of American writing's attempt to garner the abhorrent essence of our country. In the North East woods, the Black Man, witchcraft, Indians, puritans, a constant back and forth between 1850 and the 1600s,—old world and new,—a light of economic future and vast conquerable distance—through 'god'—demonstrated by a mother and daughter alone, and the two strange, sad men involved in the 'evil' and 'sin' of passion and true, corrupt, possession. Pearl, as the always elfish daughter, likely represents Hawthorne's own children, if not in symbolic intent, at least in detail. Irrelevant really but like how I think Gatsby is Jewish, I think 'SCARLET LETTER' is clearly supposed to imply 'UNITED STATES' (and Pearl is America too obviously). The romanticism and sadness of its story, as well as its ideas of shame, particularly adultery in its most vivid social form, are borderline esoteric: the contemporary standards of gender studies only further emphasize: our deep inefficacy: "Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart!"