THE SCARLET “A” stood for Adultery in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s transcendentalist novel of Puritan America. The heroine, forced to wear the stigmata letter of shame, proudly flaunts it as a red badge of courage. She finds her freedom in an inner landscape of defiance, which mirrors the untamed nature of the new world around her.
“A” dultury lost its aura of scandal with the advent of abortion rights.
Reynolds’s sketchbook “Scarlett Letters” presents a new body of work, her first to examine the anatomy of live models. The mosaic of models find their freedom in the landscape of the letter.