It is a truth now universally known that the scarlet letter on Hester Prynne's chest designates much more than her adultery. In fact, one might argue that every post-World War II reading of the novel has, albeit in strikingly different ways, been dedicated to consolidating the notion that the A signifies anything and everything but Adultery: Able, Artist, Angel, Antinomian, Admirable, Apathy, Ambiguity, Author, Allegory, and America are just a few of the possible meanings that critics have offered. This anti-literalist style of reading the letter has developed into the current critical consensus that the A is an indefinite article, an impossibly overdetermined figure that ultimately represents nothing but the dynamics of representation itself. According to this account, Hawthorne's letter, rather than specifying anything in particular, connotes the “inconclusive luxuriance of meaning,” the “constitutive uncertainty” of language. Indeed, it has been precisely by claiming that the A is indeterminately polysemic that critics have successfully redescribed Hawthorne as an ironist rather than a moral absolutist, as a proto-modernist rather than a superannuated Puritan, as a complex symbolist rather than a dogmatic allegorist. The Scarlet Letter's congeniality to modern criticism, in short, has been directly proportional to the degree to which the scarlet letter has lost its official meaning and gained an ambiguous, symbolic one – or, to put this another way, this congeniality increases in direct proportion to the ways the scarlet letter has come to constellate the modern assumption that “personhood” is a fundamentally abstract identity category, one in which both embodiment and the material markers of identity are rendered inessential and contingent.