Elke Van Cassel
English III Acc.
Mr. Edwards
28 September 1992
Can Hester Prynne's struggle with the Puritan patriarchs be seen as a woman's struggle for emancipation and in what sense does Hester liberate herself socially, psychologically, economically and sexually?
Socially, Hester's place within the Puritan community changes throughout the romance, and so does her relationship towards the Puritan patriarchal authority. Hester does not defy all authority. The authority she does not adhere to is automatic male authority and the laws made by men. In the long run, Hester does not submit to anyone or anything but her own inner laws. This can be seen as the realization of true emancipation. There is, however, some ambiguity in the way Hester appears to react to male authority and the way she actually does react. The narrator presents Hester as submissive and well-aware of her guilt in accepting her punishment. However, the act of adultery itself, the scene in the governor's hall where she stands up for herself and her right to raise Pearl, and the forest-scene are evidence to the contrary. In the end "the world's law was no law for her mind" (164).
Hester's isolation, imposed upon her by the Puritan patriarchs, means she has to give up the most important things a seventeenth century woman's life revolves around; marriage and a home. Yet her place outside of the community is also the cause of her psychological liberation from the stern Puritan norms. "The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set her free. The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread" (199).
Hawthorne plays with the characteristics of gender. He plays with the narrator's and the reader's perception of men and women by switching male and female traits of character. Throughout the text, Dimmesdale develops a sensitivity and a submissiveness which are not at all manlike, while Hester takes charge of the situation. She is the one who decides they will leave Boston, and she is the one who is going to make all necessary arrangements. It is as if Hester and Dimmesdale have switched roles. Hester is, without question, the stronger one. Dimmesdale even calls her his "better angel" (201). This mental alteration in the two main characters is complemented by a physical alteration. Dimmesdale's health is on the decline throughout the romance. Hester gradually becomes unattractive to men. "Some attribute had departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman" (163). If she is no longer a woman, what is she? She has adopted some very masculine qualities, which can be interpreted as a sign of psychological emancipation.
The fact that Hester lives under a higher law is another proof of her psychological liberation. She refuses to sell out and lower herself by revealing the name of the father. She takes the punishment because she cannot lower herself. Dimmesdale, on the other hand, is untrue because he refuses to confess his crime. His worst sin is betraying his love for Hester. This proves that, in the eyes of the narrator, men and women are on a different level. Hester is not only the stronger one, but also the morally better one. This connects to nineteenth century ideas about women as morally superior to men.
There is a lot of inequality in The Scarlet Letter. Traditionally adultery was a worse crime for a woman than it was for a man. Moreover, when a woman gets pregnant it is a physical sign that makes the promiscuity a known fact. Men are not connected to the act in any visible way. Hester pays a different price because she is a woman. Hester, as a woman, takes all the blame, while Dimmesdale, as a man, does not get punished, at least not by man-made law. This illustrates the inequality between the two.
Hester is very self-sacrificing. There seems to be a pattern in her relationships with men who cannot give her as much as she gives them. Her marriage with Chillingworth was characterized by inequality from the start. Chillingworth illustrates this by stating: "And so, Hester, I drew thee into my heart, into the innermost chamber, and sought to warm thee by the warmth which thy presence made there!" (74). The relationship was not only unequal, but Chillingworth also married Hester under false pretences: " mine was the first wrong, when I betrayed thy budding youth into a false and unnatural relation with my decay" (74-5). The narrator affirms this view by stating:
Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their miserable fortune, as it was Roger Chillingworth's, when some mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as the warm reality" (176)
Hester's marriage obviously could not bring her fulfillment, but neither can her relationship with Dimmesdale.
By committing adultery, Hester defies her moral obligations towards her husband. When he arrives in Boston, however, she affirms her submissiveness to him by promising to keep quiet about his true identity. After seven years, when she sees what Chillingworth is doing to Dimmesdale, she will no longer keep quiet. Hester decides to go against Chillingworth's wishes, and thereby achieves full independence from her husband. "She determined to redeem her error, so far as it might yet be possible. Strengthened by years of hard and solemn trial, she felt herself no longer so inadequate to cope with Roger Chillingworth . . . She had climbed her way, since then, to a higher point" (167). So in the end she is not submissive to Chillingworth, just like she is not submissive to the Puritan authorities in the long run because she adheres to a higher law.
"The scarlet letter had not done its office" (166). It was supposed to reduce Hester and put her in her proper place, but instead it has made her a revolutionary.The inequality she experiences causes Hester to speculate on the existing balance of power. It makes her want to find alternatives to traditional patriarchal society. This is another aspect of her psychological liberation. "She assumed a freedom of speculation . . . which our forefathers, had they known of it, would have held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the scarlet letter" (164). Hester foresees a revolution concerning gender:
[A woman] discerns, it may be, such a hopeless task before her. As a first step, the whole system of society is to be torn down, and built up anew. Then, the very nature of the opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit, which has become like nature, is to be essentially modified, before woman can be allowed to assume what seems a fair and suitable position. Finally, all other difficulties being obviated, woman cannot take advantage of these preliminary reforms, until she herself shall have undergone a still mightier change; in which, perhaps, the ethereal essence, wherein she has her truest life, will be found to have evaporated. A woman never overcomes these problems by any exercise of thought. They are not to be solved, or only in one way. If her heart chance to come uppermost, they vanish. (165-66)
Hester is a revolutionary in a world that is not ready for revolution, which is why she becomes its apostle on a small scale. The narrator states that it is Hester's "firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness" (263).
Another form of revolution which takes place within Hester's own life is a revolution concerning her economic status. Hester's place outside of the community forces her to become socially and economically self-reliant. This self-reliance could be perceived a sign of emancipation, if it were not for the fact that the source of her self-reliance was a very feminine one. "It was the art - then as now, almost the only one within a woman's grasp - of needle-work" (81). This can be seen as another sign of the narrator's ambiguity.
Yet another expression of sexual revolution can be found in the act of adultery itself. Hester chooses to sleep with Dimmesdale out of her own free will, and in doing so she defies both her moral obligation towards her husband and the Puritan law. The connection between sexuality and womanhood is an important theme in The Scarlet Letter. Sex, however, is nowhere mentioned in The Scarlet Letter and the narrator tries to distance Hester from her act by presenting her as dignified and overcome by feelings of guilt. Her behavior when she is in the forest, however, proves that Hester does not feel as guilty as she appears to:
"The stigma gone, Hester heaved a long, deep sigh, in which the burden of shame and anguish departed from her spirit. O exquisite relief! She had not known the weight, until she felt the freedom! By another impulse, she took off the formal cap that confined her hair; and down it fell upon her shoulders, dark and rich, with at once a shadow and a light in its abundance, and imparting the charm of softness to her features. There played around her mouth, and beamed out of her eyes, a radiant and tender smile, that seemed gushing from the very heart of womanhood." (202)
When she is in the forest, Hester is liberated from her sexual repression. She is also liberated from her feelings of guilt, which she emphasizes by stating that what she and Dimmesdale did "had a consecration of its own" (195).
As becomes clear from the examples used above, all aspects of The Scarlet Letter are colored by ambiguity. The scarlet "A" might as well stand for "ambiguity" or "ambivalence." The narrator, who is not the same person as the author, is very ambiguous in his telling of the story. I think this is because his own nineteenth century views on womanhood interfere with his perception of the history. He seems to perceive seventeenth century women as strong, bold and altogether man-like, in contrast to nineteenth century women, who he percieves as delicate, frail, submissive and morally superior to men.
The age had not so much refinement, that any sense of impropriety restrained the wearers of petticoat and farthingale from stepping forth into the public ways, and wedging their not unsubstantial persons, if occasion were, into the throng nearest to the scaffold at an execution. Morally, as well as materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old English birth and breeding, than in their fair descendants. (50)
He seems to be struggling, throughout the romance, with the question whether Hester is a heroine or an antiheroine. He describes her as follows: "She was lady-like, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those days; characterized by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace, which is now recognized as its indication" (53). Because of this ambiguity of the narrator, it is hard to determine whether The Scarlet Letter can be called a feminist romance. It is also hard to determine whether the ambiguity of the narrator is a representation of Hawthorne's own insecurity, or a pose he assumes. Given his personal life, in which he was familiar with the work of Margaret Fuller, who was also an acquaintance of his. In her time she was considered, by her followers, a prophetess of sexual revolution. In addition, Hawthorne's use of both sexual and economic liberation in his romance seems to be deliberate. Therefore, Hester can be seen, not only as a symbol of liberation from man-made law in general, but also as a symbol of women's liberation from male dominance in particular.
Work Cited
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, Edited with an Introduction by Brian Harding. Oxford, England: Oxford
University Press, 1990.