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.
