The letter A was the beginning ...

Dear fellow readers, the first meeting of the Last Wednesday Book Club (LWBC) will take place on March 25th. We will discuss The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne—a canonical adultery novel focused on social punishment and moral hypocrisy.

Here is a list of questions for each book in the series we could discuss. I am curious to see how our answers will change from book to book.

1. What is marriage in this novel? (erotic partnership, economic arrangement, social performance, sanctuary, …)
2. What triggers the affair? (love, desire, loneliness, boredom, revenge, ambition, curiosity, … )
3. What does the affair promise to the heroine? (trouble, love, freedom, amusement, status, revenge, escape, meaning, … )
4. How much agency does the heroine have? (choices available and choices taken)
5. How are the men—the husband and the lover—framed? (predator, victim, fool, romantic, … )
6. Is there a punishment? If yes, where does it come from? (family, society, religion, law, fate, self, … ) Who bears the punishment and who escapes it?
7. What is “faithfulness” in this novel? (sexual exclusivity, emotional loyalty, duty, honesty, … )
8. Does the novel imagine a workable alternative? (divorce, open marriage, reinvention, solitude, social exile, … )
9. If we assume that the author uses affair as a ‘symptom’, what ‘illnesses’ does it reveal?

Feel free to bring your own questions and thoughts you would like to discuss and share!

*We could also briefly discuss the novel's movie adaptation of 1995 featured Demi Moore and Gary Oldman. I am definitely going to watch it after finishing the book since it's a special pleasure to criticize adaptations. ^-^'

**Since I was not able to find a better option (except for the Eindhoven Public Library, for which I suspect a special arrangement is required), I borrowed the meeting spot from the Eindhoven Low Key Book Club. Let's see how our first meeting goes. Maybe together we will figure out a more suitable place for our future meetings.