This all got me thinking about why Hawthorne made the letter scarlet in the first place, instead of other "sinful" colors, like crimson or black. Fun fact: crimson is actually closer to the color of human blood than scarlet (source: the always faithful Wikipedia). Thoughts?
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Scarlet
After doing some more (totally coincidental) research on the Scarlet Letter, I decided to investigate the color scarlet itself. I looked up the definition for scarlet on Dictionary.com, and the first few definitions described the sharp red color we've all come to know. The last definition, though, defines scarlet as an adjective meaning "flagrantly offensive", and another definition references the word scarlet as sinful. Though scarlet (or just red in general) is generally viewed as an evil color, I didn't expect the word scarlet itself to be connected to flagrant offense and sin in its actual definition.
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I was wondering about his choice of scarlet too. I think I researched this early on in the reading, but I'm pretty sure scarlet woman was already an accepted term. If this is the case then there is a pretty good chance he was connecting the letter with the word for an adulterous woman. Another theory (I also used the ever-reliable Wikipedia) is that scarlet was chosen for its representation of flame and fire. On its lovely Wikipedia page, it mentions crimson is blood and scarlet is fire. If scarlet actually stands for fire, then we can look at it as standing for a variety of things including hell, cities, burning, devil etc.
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