The Scarlet Letter
Matthew Netardus
Phelps, Honors 11, 1B
Throughout The Scarlet Letter, a novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne based during the first days of American colonization by the British Puritans, the reader is presented with example after example of Hawthorne’s blatant respect and support for the growing feminist movement in America. One of the main reasons Hawthorne wrote this book was as a way to use hiss obvious literary skills to create apparent bias against the formerly accepted views of patriarchy, discrimination and oppression against women. This insight into the double standard commonly used for men and women greatly helped the feminist cause because as a literary piece, it was available to many. Thus, the book was read, spreading the ideas that perhaps this patriarchal system in which women were discriminated and oppressed was not the best system to adopt in a land which preached endless possibilities and freedoms.
In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne uses Hester Prynne, a beautiful yet headstrong Puritan that has been married into a relationship to which she held no love for, and had been forced by her elderly husband to travel to America to prepare for his arrival shortly after. Not to long after Hester had arrived in America however, she was informed that unfortunately her husband had not survived the perilous journey to the New World, leaving her all alone as a Puritan women in a very unforgiving, and indifferent society. Two years after Hester was informed that her husband had perished on his journey; the society discovered a chilling fact, Hester’s pregnancy. However much it may be acceptable for a woman to become pregnant after 2 years as a widow in today’s world, in the Puritan society, it was law that a woman must wait 7 years after the death of her husband before remarrying, while the men did not have to wait at all to remarry. This created a problem for Hester. In the callous society which she now found herself in, with no friends to speak of save for her male lover, she was now in blatant disrespect of the traditional Puritan religious and political laws. Sentenced to jail for an unrevealed period of time, Hester gave birth to a beautiful young girl she named Pearl. Although Hester’s prison term drew to an end, her punishment would not end then. Forced to walk through the village with her little girl in her arms, and a brilliant scarlet letter A on her chest, she had to mount the town scaffold for 3 hours. During this time, the town’s preacher, Reverend Dimmesdale, attempted for several minutes to get Hester to reveal the name of her male partner so that he to could be punished. She refuses, and one cannot help but notice a sense of placidity sweep over Dimmesdale as she refuses to name her lover. Throughout the next 7 years, Hester is required by law to wear her scarlet letter A on her chest at all times, to remind her and her fellow townspeople that she was a sinner. Many years after Hester originally commits her great sin, her lover is revealed to in fact be to town’s preacher Reverend Dimmesdale. They plan to escape this hypocritical Puritan society in several days to an undisclosed location in Europe. However, on the day the two lovers and their child are supposed to escape, Dimmesdale apparently feels that he is going to finally die of the undiscovered physical ailment which had been affecting him ever since the mysterious Roger Chillingworth had appeared. By the end of events, both Chillingworth and Dimmesdale are dead of natural causes, leaving an unmistakable pro-feminist mark on the reader as in fact it is the woman who outlives both men, showing her strength. With this basic plot, and the mistreatment of Hester by the entire Puritan community, Hawthorne forms a basis from which to counter the commonly held idea of patriarchy through several different and clever ways.
In the days of the early Puritan settlers, and even in the days of Hawthorne himself, it was a commonly held idea that man was mentally, spiritually, and physically superior to women. It is these standards that Hawthorne challenges in The Scarlet Letter. Throughout the novel, Hester Prynne works diligently to prove herself a religious and steadfast Puritan within the community. Indeed although she tried as much as humanly possible to prove herself saintly to the community, her efforts are not enough to override their distrust of a sinner. While a man would soon after be forgiven, even years after Hester’s original sin she would still receive the blunt end of each townspersons anger as she tried and tried to help them “None so ready as she to give of her little substance to every demand of poverty, even though the bitter-hearted pauper threw back a gibe in requital of the food brought regularly to his door, or the garments wrought for him by the fingers that could have embroidered a monarch's robe.” The role of Hester as a women sinner meant that she would never again enjoy the religious equality that would soon be given back to the man after he sinned. The eagerness of the Puritan population to disregard the sin of a man can easily be seen in the end of the book when even after Dimmesdale confesses to his sin, the townspeople reverse what they did to Hester, and instead the revere Dimmesdale even more for what he said, at the same time while they were scorning Hester for the same sin. Physically, it is easy to pinpoint how Hawthorne rejected the notion that men were physically stronger then women. The fact that throughout the novel neither Hester nor Pearl contracts a single physical ailment, while throughout the entire novel Dimmesdale is suffering from a mystical ailment would also be peculiar in a novel at that time period. Dimmesdale’s weakness physically is used by Hawthorne to exemplify that strength isn’t embodied in an entire gender, rather to individuals that can be either male of female. Mentally Dimmesdale’s weaknesses are easy to find. When he is in the forest with Hester, after he learns that she had withheld the secret of Chillingworths he immediately turns to sadness and puts on a frown, to which Hester comes to the rescue as “she could not bear to see a frown on Dimmesdale’s face.” In this situation, it is the women, as the symbol of strength that comes to the rescue and helps emotionally “save” Dimmesdale from his depression. Through various examples and situations, Hawthorne builds his main character, Hester Prynne, into the dominant figure both mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually in the relationship between herself and Dimmesdale.
Hawthorne also takes great pains to bring to light the fact that Hester Prynne was discriminated against, and oppressed due to the fact that she was a woman. Throughout the story the scarlet letter “A” upon her chest attracted the illicit stares and gawks of nearby townspeople. The town’s leaders even convened to determine if, “Hester Prynne was worthy enough to continue to raise her child.” While Hester was exiting the prison, the women in the crowd part as to not touch the “cursed” women. During her hours upon the scaffold, Hester not only endured interrogation in an effort to discern her male counterpart, but was continuously verbally abused by the jealous women in the crowd; originally for the scarlet representation of her adulterous sin, then later on because they women in the crowd were jealous at how delicately embroidered the scarlet letter A had become thanks to Hester’s unmistakable skill with a needle. This jealousy, coupled with the fact that the male’s in the crowd were encouraging the degradation of this woman as an example to all women who would “dare to question the authority of the laws” of that hypocritical Puritan society. During her required years wearing the scarlet letter, the society time after time proved its oppression of headstrong or independent women. Hester and Pearl couldn’t even pass through the marketplace without attracting the stares of dozens of villagers to the chest of Hester Prynne. However much Hawthorne creates this hypocritical society in The Scarlet Letter to show his world the presence and senselessness of discrimination and oppression based on gender, he also shows that Hester was a strong enough woman to get through all of this and overcome the bias to still lead a successful and productive life.
Throughout Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne’s feminist viewpoints intrude upon even the most basic parts of the novel. From the way Hester Prynne is treated every day in the streets, to the way she handles herself in emotionally devastating situations, Hawthorne creates a woman who is in every way superior to her male lover and counterpart Dimmesdale. Hawthorne allows sexist characters in the novel to exemplify the worst in American society, and yet he had his main character, a female, rise above these hardships to remain a saintly and strong person; and in the end gaining the respect and admiration of her fellow Puritans, even getting them to state that the A no longer meant adulterer, but “angel” or “able.”
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