Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter offers a lot of food for thought.

You could focus on the major themes of the novel: adultery, authority, absolutism, America, etc. Or you could focus on one character and follow their evolution over the course of the novel. Write an argumentative essay that takes a position on the subject matter.

Compare the America in "The Scarlet Letter" to America in the 21st century. Use examples such as feminism, equal rights, the normalization of single mother parenting, the advances in medicine such as birth control, abortions, Plan B pill. Talk about how in "The Scarlet Letter", how Hester Prynne was shunned because of her sin of adultery and relate it to the Catholic religion how nowadays, many women in the catholic religion have gone and committed such sin and is normalized now or much more common.