Title: The Scarlet Letter
Content:  The major theme of The Scarlet Letter is shaming and social stigmatizing, both Hester's public humiliation and Dimmesdale's private shame and fear of exposure. Notably, their liaison is never spoken of, so the circumstances that led to Hester's pregnancy, and how their affair was kept secret never become part of the plot. Elmer Kennedy-Andrews remarks that Hawthorne in "The Custom-house" sets the context for his story and "tells us about 'romance', which is his preferred generic term to describe The Scarlet Letter, as his subtitle for the book – 'A Romance' – would indicate." In this introduction, Hawthorne describes a space between materialism and "dreaminess" that he calls "a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbues itself with nature of the other". This combination of "dreaminess" and realism gave the author space to explore major themes.
Title: American literature
Content:  the continuation of the slave narrative autobiography. In 1837, the young Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) collected some of his stories as Twice-Told Tales, a volume rich in symbolism and occult incidents. Hawthorne went on to write full-length "romances", quasi-allegorical novels that explore the themes of guilt, pride, and emotional repression in New England. His masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter (1850), is a drama about a woman cast out of her community for committing adultery. Hawthorne's fiction had a profound impact on his friend Herman Melville (1819–1891), who first made a name for himself by turning material from his seafaring days into exotic sea narrative novels. Inspired by Hawthorne's focus 
Title: The Scarlet Letter
Content:  The Scarlet Letter: A Romance is a work of historical fiction by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in 1850. Set in Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony during the years 1642 to 1649, the novel tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter through an affair and then struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. Containing a number of religious and historic allusions, the book explores themes of legalism, sin, and guilt. The Scarlet Letter was one of the first mass-produced books in the United States. It was popular when first published and is considered a classic work today. It inspired numerous film, television, and stage adaptations. Critics have described it as a masterwork, and novelist D. H. Lawrence called it a "perfect work of the American imagination".
Title: Arthur Dimmesdale
Content:  Arthur Dimmesdale is a fictional character in the 1850 romance The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. A Puritan minister, he has fathered an illegitimate child, Pearl, with Hester Prynne and considers himself unable to reveal his sin. Next to Hester Prynne herself, Dimmesdale is often considered Hawthorne's finest character. His dilemma takes up a significant portion of the novel, bringing out Hawthorne's most famous statements on many of the concepts that recur throughout his works: guilt and redemption, truth and falsehood, and others. Dimmesdale faces a problem that is both simple and paradoxical: the knowledge of his sin, his inability to disclose it to Puritan society, and 
Title: The Scarlet Letter (miniseries)
Content:  is doomed to live with the consequences forever. Hawthorne's themes, the nature of sin, social hypocrisy, and community repression, still reverberate through American society. Hester Prynne (Meg Foster) is a young, Puritan woman who commits adultery while her husband is in Europe, and, upon the birth of her illegitimate child, is subsequently condemned to wear a scarlet "A" for the rest of her life. Her secret partner, the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, (John Heard) writhes in private torment as he deals with hiding his sin. The person of Hester's husband, Roger Chillingworth (Kevin Conway) completes this grim triangle as the mysterious situation leads to a shattering climax. The story follows the main characters as they grapple with sin, forgiveness, and redemption.
Title: Badge of shame
Content:  In Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic 1850 romance novel The Scarlet Letter, set in 17th century Puritan Boston, the lead character Hester Prynne is led from the town prison with the scarlet letter "A" on her breast. The scarlet letter "A" represents the act of adultery that she had committed and it is to be a symbol of her sin for all to see. Originally intended as a badge of shame, it would later take on different meanings as her fictional life progressed in the story. The 1916 silent film The Yellow Passport, starring Clara Kimball Young, was also known as The Badge of Shame when it was reissued in 1917. In the 2006 film, Pirates of the 
Title: The Scarlet Letter
Content:  as later the beautifully embroidered scarlet "A" will be held out in part as an invitation to find "some sweet moral blossom" in the ensuing, tragic tale and in part as an image that "the deep heart of nature" (perhaps God) may look more kindly on the errant Hester and her child than her Puritan neighbors do. Throughout the work, the nature images contrast with the stark darkness of the Puritans and their systems. Chillingworth's misshapen body reflects (or symbolizes) the anger in his soul, which builds as the novel progresses, similar to the way Dimmesdale's illness reveals his inner turmoil. The outward man reflects the condition of the heart; an observation thought inspired by 
Title: The Scarlet Letter
Content:  deterioration of Edgar Allan Poe, whom Hawthorne "much admired". Another theme is the extreme legalism of the Puritans and how Hester chooses not to conform to their rules and beliefs. Hester was rejected by the villagers even though she spent her life doing what she could to help the sick and the poor. Because of the social shunning, she spent her life mostly in solitude and would not go to church. As a result, she retreats into her own mind and her own thinking. Her thoughts begin to stretch and go beyond what would be considered by the Puritans as safe. She still sees her sin, but begins to look on it differently than the 
Title: Roger Chillingworth
Content:  Roger Chillingworth is a fictional character and primary antagonist in the 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. He is an English scholar who moves to the New World after his wife, Hester Prynne. Chillingworth, a doctor and student of alchemy, attempts to emigrate from England to Puritan Boston. He sends his wife ahead to set up in Boston, but he is delayed by problems at sea and then held captive by Indians. When he finally arrives in Boston, he finds his wife on a scaffold, being shamed for committing adultery. Meeting Hester in jail, Chillingworth presses her to divulge the name of her partner in adultery, but she refuses. Searching without her help, he eventually discovers that her lover is the town minister, Arthur Dimmesdale. Using his position as a doctor, and under the guise of treating Dimmesdale's unexplained sickness, Chillingworth manipulates Dimmesdale into insanity and a confession of sin before the entire community before dying. Chillingworth then also dies. Throughout the book Chillingworth is referred to as "the leech", which at the time was a term for a doctor, and then dies once he no longer has a victim to harm.
Title: Roger's Version
Content:  The novel's structure, characters and themes are based somewhat on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, with Roger Lambert representing Roger Chillingworth, his wife Esther as Hester Prynne, Dale standing for Arthur Dimmesdale, and Paula a version of Hester's illegitimate daughter Pearl. The review for Publishers Weekly said the novel was focused on longstanding themes of Updike's work: "reason versus faith; science versus religion; belief versus any of the forms of unbelief." The New York Times review by novelist David Lodge described the novel as having five major thematic areas: theology, eroticism, domesticity, physical description and science. All of these themes are mediated by the narrating character Roger, which Lodge describes as at times "over [the reader's] head, at least on first reading."

Question: what is the theme of scarlet letter by nathaniel hawthorne?
Answer: Dark romanticism.