<P> All the contradictions of Hester Prynne--guilt and honesty, sin and holiness, sex and chastity--make her an enduring heroine of American literature . She is flawed, complex, and above all fertile . The idea of Hester Prynne, the good woman gone bad, is a cultural meme that recurs again and again--perhaps because we as a culture are still trying to figure out who Hester really is and how we feel about her . </P> <P> According to popular tradition, the gravestone of Elizabeth Pain in Boston's King's Chapel Burying Ground was the inspiration for Hester Prynne's grave . Scholar Laurie Rozakis has argued that an alternate or additional source for the story may be Hester Craford, a woman flogged for fornication with John Wedg . Another story claims that Hester was the modeled after Mary Bachiler Turner (4th wife of well known Colonial minister Stephen Bachiler) whose life in colonial Maine bore a striking resemblance to Hester's tale . </P> <P> In various film adaptations of the novel, Prynne has been portrayed by actresses such as Lillian Gish, Sommer Parker, Meg Foster, Mary Martin, Sybil Thorndike, Senta Berger, Demi Moore and Emma Stone . In the cult television series Twin Peaks the name was also adopted as a pseudonym by the character Audrey Horne . Another literary figure using the surname Prynne is a woman who had an adulterous relationship with a pastor in the novel A Month of Sundays by John Updike, part of his trilogy of novels based on characters in The Scarlet Letter . In the musical The Music Man, Harold Hill refers to Hester Prynne in the song "Sadder but Wiser Girl". He sings that he wants a girl "with a touch of sin", remarking "I hope, and I pray, for a Hester to win just one more' A' ." </P>

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