Excerpts from chapters from Understanding The Scarlet Letter: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents by Claudia Durst Johnson (courtesy of Greenwood Press)

"In appraising her early fiction, critics have highlighted issues in Morrison's work that are similar to those in Hawthorne's. Her novel Beloved (1987) has elicited the most pointed comparisons to Hawthorne's work, particularly The Scarlet Letter. In Beloved, the central character Sethe is haunted by the past. A former slave, Sethe ran away from the Sweet Home plantation in Kentucky, crossing into the free state of Ohio before the Civil War and Emancipation. Fearing that she was to be captured and returned to slavery, she killed her daughter Beloved to prevent her from growing up as a slave. When the novel opens, Sethe is living on the outskirts of Cincinnati with her daughter Denver in a house '124' haunted by the ghost other dead child. Like Hester and Pearl, Sethe and Denver live as outcasts, and the pain of isolation has weighed heavily on Denver. Like Pearl, she is a source of both pain and comfort to her mother. While Hester wears a fabric letter as a sign that carries multiple meanings, Sethe is marked by a 'tree' scarred into her body from a whipping. Although elements of Sethe's story contain parallels to Hester's, Caroline Woidat argues that Morrison's, 'reinterpretation' of The Scarlet Letter offers a 'counter- narrative' to the vision of American identity offered in Hawthorne's novel (529-530). Morrison does not want her character to quietly submit to the expectations of a dominant culture, as Hester does. Through Sethe's actions, Morrison invites the reader to confront the vision of the past and its legacy as perceived by an African American woman" (21).