Nathaniel Hawthorne and Hester Prynne: Breaking the Rules

I first read  Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter when I was fourteen or fifteen.  Having been raised on Little Women from the age of eight, I had no problems with nineteenth century writing style and focused my energies instead on the book’s themes and the outcomes of the characters’ actions: sin, atonement, revenge, legalism, the fact that no one—save Pearl, perhaps—gets a happy ending.  I was torn between dissatisfaction born of my desire for a fairy tale outcome and a decidedly delicious blend of fascination and pleasure in the story’s fatality and coldly appropriate justice.  Everyone sins.  Everyone suffers.  The end. 

I’ve learned a lot since that first reading, so perhaps it’s not surprising that during this past week I was struck by something new—to me and to its own time—in The Scarlet Letter.  Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter in 1850, a time in which the United States experienced a great deal of social change.  The status of women was one of the most striking issues in flux at the time, and women writers were laying down a foundation of budding independence, albeit most usually cloaked in socially acceptable guises and wording, in an effort to stretch the boundaries of traditional propriety without having those boundaries snap back upon them violently.  Women writers were usually fairly careful in what they wrote, to maintain the appearance of soft hearts, deference and obedience to men, commitment to feminine duties at home, modesty, and contentment with their lot as women.  That women in the nineteenth century would begin seek a more equal footing with men is not surprising to me, but I was surprised at Hawthorne’s depiction of his heroine, Hester Prynne.   

Hawthorne creates Hester as an exceptionally strong character, but her strength is not entirely a feminine one in the traditional sense. In the forest with Dimmesdale, she’s the one who takes initiative to suggest running away together, and he very much  depends on her to be his strength in this scene, as well as on the scaffold during his night watch earlier in the novel and after his Election sermon near the novel’s end.  Hester does not depend on Dimmesdale or any other man for support, either financial or emotional, for the entire novel.  In fact, although she could remarry after Chillingworth’s death when she travels back to England with Pearl, she chooses instead to return to New England and to her solitary life, dependent neither on husband nor on the sender of her occasional gifts, who is assumed to be a now-married and happy Pearl.  At one point in the story, the narrator reveals that Hester would possibly been the kind of soul who would have broken her society’s assumed role for women because of the theories and thoughts that she harbored regarding the uselessness of the system of prejudice to which the people of her world clung.  She would likely have been a prophetess or the founder of some scandalous new religious sect, the narrator tells us, were it not for Pearl and her need to temper her own nature in order to help Pearl learn to contain hers. 

Hester is a sympathetic character, yet  Hawthorne gave her traits—restlessness, rebelliousness, a strong mind and will, an emotional reserve which she is capable of employing as a shield in public, even while a passionately wild nature burns beneath—that the people of his time would have seen as decidedly inappropriate in a woman.  Granted, he tempers these traits by giving her Pearl as a check and anchor on her nature, since in order to raise Pearl, she must train the child (whose nature is as wild as Hester’s own) to observe the expectations of her society, but even so, penning a female protagonist as strong in will and mind (the traditional domain of men) as in heart (a more womanly realm) and succeeding so wildly at it (the book was a sales success and praised highly), is quite an accomplishment for the time.

The 19th Century Comes Together

Never before have I begun to piece together various issues, events, and literary works during a given time period as I have recently. What used to be a 19th century jumble of abolition, women’s rights, spiritual revival, travel literature, educational reform, and those wild Transcendentalist fellers has now begun settling into an intricate web of cause and effect that links these together tidily, so that they make sense as a whole. I think one of the most visible threads that connects the whole would have to be the pronounced religious fervor of the time, as it seems to have worked its little tendrils into just about everything else. The Second Great Awakening and its religious fervor tied into and influenced an expanding sense of the world, as people, especially people with financial means, began traveling to Europe and in some cases beyond Europe, scribbling out travel literature which was all the vogue. An emphasis on missionary work to bring the gospel to less “spiritually advanced” peoples was the result now that such races could be physically reached, an emphasis that reinforced for people of white Christian cultures, the idea that people of less technologically advanced cultures and were heathens. Such beliefs would have made marginalization of these people a natural result; the practices of slavery and relocation of Native Americans like the tribes of Chief Seattle onto increasingly smaller and more remote land parcels would have been a short step and an entirely defendable one in the eyes of the 19th century white American.

The influence of religious revival can also be traced—ironically so—to the abolitionist movement (which cited Christian compassion as cause for freeing one’s fellow man) as well as its proslavery opposition (which claimed a concern for the black slave’s soul and well-being, which could only be protected and guided properly by white masters and mentors).

The strong religious movement also served as a check, though not a total deterrent, to those pesky women like Lydia Sigourney and Fanny Fern, who having once discovered their own power to move heaven and earth in defense of worthy causes like abolition and educational reform, began applying that power and methods of reform on their own behalf, despite the admonitions of church, family and society to settle down and behave like the self-sacrificing, nurturing, mild, obedient, sentimental creatures the good Lord had seen fit to create them. Pesky women. Sunday schools, created to ensure that children would have the ability to read scripture and as a training ground in Christian morals, values, and behavior, became part of a bigger educational reform movement, as an effort was made to increase education for the poor and for children in remote areas of the frontier. Here, too, women provided a strong push for change and improvement, especially in the cities, where large populations of factory workers with very few financial or social resources were seen to be in need of lifting up through education and Christian charity provided by their sisters.

I’ll never be able to look at the 19th century again as a piecemeal scattering of events and literature, I’m afraid, since now I can see that 19th century social concerns (educational reform, the role of women), political issues (abolition vs. sanctioned slavery, Native American relocation) and geographical expansion (both visiting foreign lands and the American expansion westward) were all linked inextricably to each other, tangled like a woman’s knitting basket visited by a litter of kittens.

I’ve focused here on how the tendrils (or tentacles—you choose your metaphor) of the Second Great Awakening permeated the 1800’s. For an overview of how the woman question did the same, try watching this YouTube video by John Green.

Source:
Green, John. " Women in the 19th Century: Crash Course US History #16." Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 23 May. 2013. Web. 7 June. 2014.