【导读】 《红字》是美国浪漫主义小说家纳撒尼尔·霍桑的代表作品。女主人公海丝特跟丈夫从英国移居到美国的波士顿，途中丈夫被印第安人俘虏。只身来到美国后，海丝特被青年牧师丁梅斯代尔诱骗怀孕。虚伪的清教徒社会视此事为大逆不道，为此州长亲自主持了对海丝特的审讯。作为惩罚，她要终生佩带象征耻辱的红色的A字并游街示众。在受尽屈辱的处境中，海丝特孤苦顽强地生活着，她唯一的支柱是女儿珠儿……
The PrisonDoor(Excerpt)
A throng of bearded men, in sadcoloured garments, and grey, steeplecrowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognised it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.In accordance with this rule, it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prisonhouse somewhere in the vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burialground, on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel.Certain it is that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weatherstains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetlebrowed and gloomy front.The rust on the ponderous ironwork of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New World.Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era.Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheeltrack of the street, was a grassplot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, appleperu, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilised society, a prison.But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rosebush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.
This rosebush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it—or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson, as she entered the prisondoor—we shall not take upon us to determine.
Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers, and present it to the reader.It may serve, let us hope, to symbolise some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.
