I have only read the two stories, not the critical esssays, I'm keeping those for class :) The Scarlet Letter was beautifully written, and I loved the irony and the pointing out of the hyphocricy of most of the characters. There were some things that made it very obvious it was written quite a while ago, and that made it all the more interesting. And the whole story was very believable, too, that a woman who had a child while her husband had not been with her for the past two years were to be punished, first by a jail sentence, then to stand by the scaffold with her baby, and having to wear the scarlet letter A on her breast for the rest of her days didn't even seem to be too much.
It is kind of scary that some people who left Europe for America did so in order to avoid prosecution for their religious beliefs, however, some of those puritans must have been a lot worse than those religious zealots cleaing up in Europe? And throughout the whole book, I had one phrase stuck in my mind : the one who has never sinned should cast the first stone.
