In the 1600's, while searching through a dusty room in the Custom House in Salem, Massachusetts, Nathaniel Hawthorne came across a piece of red fabric and several pages written about a woman of humiliation and shame. With these few pieces of evidence and a knowledge of how it could have been, Hawthorne wrote his novel The Scarlet Letter, a religious and psychological allegory about a lustful sin in Colonial Boston and the years that follow. Like all allegories, the novel uses symbols, such as little Pearl as the living scarlet letter, to develop and add meaning to the story. Pearl's relati…
