Hester Prynne
17th century (fictional setting)
Central character of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850), a Puritan New England woman condemned for adultery and compelled to wear a scarlet A on her chest as a public mark of her transgression. Hester becomes the archetypal figure of illicit love punished by social ostracism in the American literary tradition.
Connection to Taylor Swift
The speaker of Love Story directly identifies herself as 'a scarlet letter' in the chorus, casting herself as Hester Prynne: a young woman whose love crosses the boundary her community has drawn and who is punished by the social order for crossing it. Where Hawthorne marks the textual allusion at the author level, Hester is the character-level figure with whom the song's speaker is being analytically equated, the woman condemned for forbidden love and made into a public sign of her own transgression.
Notable Works
- The Scarlet Letter (1850)
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.