Scarlet Letter Writing Assignment: The Missing Scene
Your task is to envision a scene that Hawthorne might have written in an early draft of The Scarlet Letter, but which—alas!—was lost to a winter storm that broke through the old, worn clasp of his window shutters and ravaged his desk with wind and rain until Hawthorn’s cramped and careful script bled, paled, and smeared beyond legibility, robbing all posterity of a small piece of his literary genius never to be reconstructed.
Or, whatever. At any rate, this scene should be a scene that fits somewhere in The Scarlet Letter. Perhaps you longed for a flashback that would tell us more about Hester and Dimmesdale’s affair. Maybe you thought that Dimmesdale should have visited Hester in prison, or that little Pearl should have appeared to Dimmesdale in a dream to accuse him of shirking his duty as a father. Maybe you thought that the sections about Hester’s interactions with the gossips in town needed more elaboration, or that Hester should have encountered Mistress Hibbins in the woods as Hester is walking out to meet Dimmesdale.
Whatever scene you imagine, it should
· Have a specific location in the text (e.g. inserted between Chapters 2 and 3, or on page 72 between the paragraph about Hester’s house and the paragraph about her needlework skill, or…). Feel free, however, to insert it as a flashback or a vision of the future.
· Be consistent with the characters and plot of the rest of the novel
· In some way add to our understanding of the characters or their situation
· Reflect the themes and motifs of the novel as a whole (you might consider working in one or more of Hawthorne’s key images of ideas, such as “ignominy,” the red rose, the scarlet letter, etc.)
· Be written entirely in Hawthorne’s style٭, with the goal of being stylistically indistinguishable from the actual chapters of the novel.
Requirements:
Missing Scene: 1-2 pages