In the frame story of The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne discovers a package containing an ancient piece of embroidery that he identifies as the letter “A,” along with a brief narrative, written by a predecessor in the Customs House where he works, about the woman who created and wore that “character.” By beginning with the character A, Hawthorne reminds us that the foundations of literary character, the fictional person, are in the written and the interpretable. The Scarlet Letter is a novel about a character, the intensely memorable character of Hester Prynne, but it's also a novel about what character means.

The long Customs House prologue introduces the first of many meanings of “character.” Conversationally, a “character” is an eccentric, an oddball, known by sight throughout a community, and the prologue takes the form of a “gallery of Custom-House portraits” (21), a description of the odd people with whom Hawthorne works, among them the man who has lost his entire family but thinks of nothing but cheerful gourmandizing. These are indeed “characters” in the colloquial sense. And this first meaning of character matters because the narrator initially imagines Hester Prynne as a character of this type.