I'd like to point
out that I do indeed understand that the book is called The Scarlet Letter and that I thus have no right to complain
about the fact that it keeps showing up but SERIOUSLY. Everywhere Hester
looked, that red letter just kept showing up. Now Dimmesdale is having the same
problem. Chapter 12 , our friend
Dimmesdale is climbing the scaffold (I don't know why but this word trips me up), and there's "a scarlet token on his
naked breast", and he's yelling, and then there's that giant A that shows
up in the sky "marked out in lines of dull red light".
(I'm visualizing the bat signal here, except red, and shaped like an A, so I guess not really the bat signal)
Okay, I get seeing the A everywhere. Actually, this is something everyone should get. This is the
Baaeder-Meinhof phenomenon: which is basically when you start seeing a random
thing all over the place. It just pops out. For instance, say Richard Ladd has
a crush on a girl named May Dillon (I just made these people up.) Richard might
look at a calendar and see the month of May
and think of this girl named May Dillon. Then he'll be watching an episode of
Grey's anatomy and he'll keep hearing the word maybe.
Then he'll be trying to put some condiments on a hamburger and see the Mayonnaise. I feel like that's what's happening
here. People are seeing this A everywhere. Is it actually there? I doubt it. I
don't think there people (other than Hester who legitimately has an A sewn into
her clothing) have a scarlet letter on them. I don't think there's an actual A
in the night sky (maybe it's a trippy arrangement of oddly colored stars, I
don't know fam). At first I thought that A was for
adulterer/adulteress/adultery. But then there was that line at the end of the
chapter saying it stood for "Angel".
What. The. Heck.
Now people think it stands for angel?! What is with this crew?
What does it stand
for? Anger? Asphyxiation? Anxiety? Abomination? Aberration? Aggression?
Anarchy? Does it stand for one of these things at all? All of them? I respect Mr. Hawthorne's creative license but in all honesty sometimes
I just wish he'd say what he meant.
Everyone seems to be
seeing this A, but it seems to have so many different meanings, or at least
many possibilities of different meanings. I'm baffled.
But it MUST mean something, or the symbol wouldn't be the title of the entire book right?
Challenge accepted, Nathan H., challenge accepted.
(look at that red lettering...)
Glad we don't live in Boston in the 1640s,
Anne
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