Nathaniel Hawthorne
American · 19th century
American novelist and short story writer best known for The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, exploring themes of guilt, sin, and Puritan morality.
Connection to Taylor Swift
Taylor alludes to his novel The Scarlet Letter in Love Story ('I was a scarlet letter'), using the theme of illicit love and social ostracism as a parallel to the forbidden romance in the song.
Notable Works
- The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, Young Goodman Brown, The Birthmark
Appears in the Archive
Context within the Archive
The Scarlet Letter
“'Cause you were Romeo, I was a scarlet letter”
Hester Prynne is the central character of The Scarlet Letter, the named figure with whom the song's speaker is analytically equated by the chorus's first-person identification ('I was a scarlet letter'). Where the parent literary_reference for The Scarlet Letter marks the textual allusion at the author level, this row marks the character-level identification that does the song's thematic work: the speaker casts herself as Hester, a young woman whose love crosses her community's boundary and who is punished by the social order for crossing it.
The Scarlet Letter
“'Cause you were Romeo, I was a scarlet letter”
Angela & Uncle Jerry identify 'I was a scarlet letter' as an allusion to Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel about illicit love with Hester Prynne. Uncle Jerry calls it 'an obvious allusion to Hawthorne's story about illicit love' and notes the thematic parallel: the father disapproves of the relationship, the family disapproves, and it's 'a story of love that created social outcasts', Hester becomes a social outcast just as the speaker and Romeo would have to leave town. He imagines Taylor reading The Scarlet Letter in high school English class, as 'everybody does,' and calls her use of it 'an appropriate use' though 'a little obvious.' He appreciates that she's combining two different works, Romeo and Juliet and The Scarlet Letter, in a single mashup line, calling that 'very clever stuff.'
The Scarlet Letter
“We show off our different scarlet letters Trust me, mine is better”
Angela & Uncle Jerry identify this as an allusion to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Uncle Jerry notes that the scarlet letter was supposed to be an image of Hester Prynne's flaw, but in the song the allusion is an acknowledgement, 'we'll show off our scarlet letters', meaning 'we've got our flaws, but we're all damaged, we're all used, don't dismiss that.' The scarlet letters become the bricks thrown at the speaker that she builds her castle from.