Finished But Never Forgotten

Although we are done reading The Scarlet Letter in class, I believe that this will not be the last that i'll hear of its everlasting lessons. Despite The Scarlet Letter being such an old novel, many instances in our recent day and age has the novel used as a basis for many television shows, novels, and movies to flourish off of. I have already spoken of one example of a modern rendition of the novel being the movie Easy A, which conveyed a similar, yet, different form of the novels message. Recently I stumbled across a show called Faking it, which is obviously based off of The Scarlet Letter; it portrays one of the novels key lessons perfectly, that no one should be judged for what they wish to do. The show takes place at a high school in Texas that's called Hester High, ironically named after the main character of The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynn. Hester High is not your average, modern high school; The students at the school express themselves freely and are even encouraged to not be ordinary. However, in this effort to encourage everyone to be different has caused normal to be unwanted, which causes the protagonists of the show, Amy and Karma, to fake being a lesbian couple in order to fit in, hence the title, Faking it. The show takes the theme of The Scarlet Letter and reverses it into a sort of parallel universe where being different is better than being normal or ordinary, which, in reality, is the same situation that Hester faced. The show conveys that it is impossible to escape judgement, which is one of the everlasting messages that The Scarlet Letter will continue to tell.