It took three readings, but I think I've finally got it.

When I first decided to tackle classic literature, The Scarlet Letter was one of my first essays into that strange and daunting idea. I understood the thrust of it, but was mostly indifferent to it by the time I finished it. A couple of years later, I found myself in an AP Lit classroom, obligated to rehash Hawthorne in the painstaking let's-find-the-literary-device sort of way. But this time around, in American Lit, I think I'm finally at a place where I can appreciate what a work the novel really is. Hawthorne's words evoke early wild coastal New England: "little boats out of birch-bark," "scintillating," "sprite," "lichens," "sparkling sand," "shells and tangled sea-weed." And Hester's sin functions not so much as an instructive example to her Puritan neighbors, but more as a vehicle through which she, as an outsider, can detachedly observe her society and contemplate its development.

It is remarkable, that persons who speculate the most boldly often conform with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations of society. . . . Indeed, the same dark question often rose into her mind, with reference to the whole race of womanhood. Was existence worth accepting even to the happiest among them? As concerned her own individual existence, she had long ago decided in the negative, and dismissed the point as settled. A tendency to speculation, though it may keep woman quiet, as it does man, yet makes her sad. She discerns, it may be, such a hopeless task before her. As a first step, the whole system of society is to be torn down, and built up anew. Then, the very nature of the opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit, which has become like nature, is to be essentially modified, before woman can be allowed to assume what seems a fair and suitable position. Finally, all other difficulties being obviated, woman cannot take advantage of these preliminary reforms, until she herself shall have undergone a still mightier change; in which, perhaps, the ethereal essence, wherein she has her truest life, will be found to have evaporated. A woman never overcomes these problems by any exercise of thought. They are not to be solved, or only in one way. If her heart chance to come uppermost, they vanish.