Fan Casting

In 19th-century Boston, Massachusetts, a nameless man and the novel's primary narrator works as a surveyor at the local customhouse. In the attic, he discovers a bunch of documents, with a manuscript imprinted with a large, red "A" on the front cover, that depicts the life of a woman named Hester Prynne that occurs long before the man's current time. After he loses his job at the customhouse, the narrator writes and retells the story from the manuscript. 200 years earlier, in Boston in the late 1630s, Hester Prynne was led from her prison cell with an infant in her arms during the Puritan settlement. She stands on the town scaffold when she is publicly humiliated and punished by the townsfolk for committing adultery, resulting in her child's birth. She was condemned to wear a bright letter "A" patch on her breast as a sign of her crime. While on the scaffold, she was repeatedly asked the name of her baby's father, but she refused. She spots an older man she recognizes in the crowd. He is her estranged husband, who she thought was lost at sea but had arrived in Boston and changed his name to Roger Chillingworth.