Critics and readers have often mistaken the true significance of this book. It is vaunted as a masterpiece of story-telling, and a masterpiece it is in its main lines, despite some awkwardness in the development of the action, and if it is not judged too severely for repetitions which mar especially the last part of the book. The great mistake would consist in interpreting “The Scarlet Letter” as a plea for Puritanism. It is, in my opinion, quite the contrary. Very few critics have grasped the real viewpoint from which Hawthorne conceived the characters of Hester Prynne and Dimmesdale. (Excepting D. H. Lawrence, in a chapter of his imaginative but penetrating “Studies in Classic American Literature.”)[12] I do not wish to introduce Doctor Freud everywhere, nor do I want to exaggerate Hawthorne’s immoralism, but if there has ever been a piece of literature written to prove the dangers of the famous Freudian inhibition and to try to cure it, that work is certainly “The Scarlet Letter.” The wealth of psychological intuition in this novel is remarkable. It is the most human, the least moralizing (I was about to say the most personal of Hawthorne’s novels), excepting of course the ending, edifying and conventional as could be desired, but which is neither better nor worse than all Hawthorne’s endings. We will remember the tragic story of Hester Prynne, the beautiful Puritan seduced by the Reverend Dimmesdale. Hester gave everything to love. She was put in the stocks and condemned to wear embroidered on her blouse the letter A (adultery), an ignominious insignia which her heroic coquetry succeeded in converting into a bit of finery. Note well--Hester Prynne has no shame, no remorse for her sin. She is proud of it. The world has condemned her but she does not cease to love, no matter how cowardly Dimmesdale behaves. From the beginning to the very end of the book, Hester Prynne saw love only. If this is not the last word as it would probably be on the screen of the “movies,” especially the American “movies,” it is not far from being so and is the fault of neither Hester Prynne nor Dimmesdale but of Hawthorne himself, grown, as often happens with him, too timorous at the end of the book. Hawthorne is very canny in attributing to the Puritan Hester a rich, a voluptuous and almost “oriental” temperament. There does not exist, to my knowledge, even in Zola’s famous description of the Paradou (in “La Faute de l’abbé Mouret”) a more impetuous and eloquent burst of passion than the ending of “The Scarlet Letter,” particularly the scene in the forest between the spirited Hester and the timid Dimmesdale whom she rescues from his hysterical inhibitions by her impassioned declarations.