Lit Research Paper Source and Notes

Seabrook, Andrea. \"Hester Prynne: Sinner, Victim, Object, Winner.\" NPR. 2 Mar. 2008. Web. 18 Feb. 2015. .

Van Arsdale, Hannah, and Samantha Rodriguez. \"Feminism and The Scarlet Letter.\" High Tech High. 29 Oct. 2011. Web. 19 Feb. 2015. .

Baym, Nina. \"Thwarted Nature: Nathaniel Hawthorne as Feminist.\" Hawthorne In Salem. Web. 19 Feb. 2015. <http://www.hawthorneinsalem.org/Literature/Hawthorne&Women/ScarletLetter/MMD2400.html>.

1 Hester Prynne, protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne's masterwork The Scarlet Letter, is among the first and most important female protagonists in American literature.

1 \"The drama is really the drama of the patriarchial society's need to control female sexuality in the most basic way,\" says Evan Carton, literature professor at the University of Texas, Austin. \"This classic male anxiety: How do you know for sure whether your baby is yours? If you don't know if your woman and your child are actually yours, then you have no control over property, no control over social order, no control over anything — and that's the deep radical challenge that Hester presents to this society.\"

1 America was in the midst of a growing feminist movement when Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter. Professor Jamie Barlowe, of the University of Toledo, says that Hawthorne — living in Salem, Boston and later Concord, Mass. — \"was very, very aware of the growing feminist insurgence. Women's rights were a part of the cultural conversation.\"

1 The first women's-rights convention at Seneca Falls, N.Y., was held in 1848, two years before The Scarlet Letter was published. Strong women like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were gathering other women to talk about science, politics and ideas. For the first time in America, women were challenging the firmly established male patriarchy.

2 Most people identify Feminism as an anti-male movement hell-bent on making women the dominant gender, but this is not the case. In this novel, The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne executes these ideas by overcoming her public humiliation and rising up against the predetermined ideas that her Puritan town holds for her. She is a perfect example of what a feminist should be, which is a real treat considering the time period and the fact that Nathaniel Hawthorne really had no inspiration for his radical ideas. The Scarlet Letter is \"accidentally\" a feminist novel because of the way Hester stands up against the Puritans' harsh criticism, and because of the fact that Hawthorne's ideas of women empowerment ahead of his time.

2 Hester could be seen as a feminist because of the way she brazenly goes against the Puritan's ideas of how a woman's life should be lived. The \"tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set her free.\"(137) She no longer has to subscribe to the same set of rules as the other Puritan women. Hester has obtained a \"passport into regions where other women dared not tread.\"(137) By having this \"passport\", or scarlet letter, it makes it adequate for her to not have the regular life; slaving over her children and her husband, and putting up with everyone in town. She is able to pass through the forest, the town, or anywhere! She no longer has boundaries because she has nothing to lose, and can also cross the boundaries between men and women. Because her whole life has been strewn out for people to see, she has let everything go; all her reservations, expectations, and inhibitions.

2 One of the main reasons behind questioning if this is a feminist novel or not is the fact that Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter before feminism really took off. So it makes one wonder: where did he get these feminist ideas? Who influenced him? Was he influenced at all, or was it the spirit of Hester that brought these ideas out of him? I would side with the latter and say that Hester as a character is so strong, womanly, passionate that she herself has challenged some of the ideas of Puritan life. Hawthorne even presents the idea that we should \"let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart!\"(121)

2 Granted, this is not to say that men should be seen as less than women or need to grovel to win our hearts; no, that is not the aim of feminism. Feminism strives for equality, and that's just what Hawthorne gives us; or, gives Hester and Dimmesdale at least. Additionally, Hawthorne brings up the idea that once you reach happiness and love for yourself, then you may be equal. Once Hester takes off her cap and letter and becomes herself again, she has a revelation and claims that \"she had not known the weight, until she felt the freedom!\"(139) This is a seriously liberating moment for her because she truly can be herself, as a women, without the judging eyes of the Puritans.

3 By detaching her from the social milieu that defines and supports the concept of motherhood, Hawthorne is able to concentrate on the relation of Hester to her child without any social implications. In fact, society in this instance wishes to separate the mother and child. By giving her a recalcitrant daughter as child, Hawthorne has even more cleverly set his depiction of motherhood apart from Victorian ideology. What remains is an intense personal relation that expresses Hester's maternal nature in a remarkably role-free way.

3 Therefore, what Hester means by \"sacred love\" is really \"sexual love,\" and she looks forward to the time when sex and love can be united by men in one emotion, a time when somehow women can heal the split in the male psyche. As Freud, writing later in the century, was to observe the male inability to feel passion and tenderness toward the same \"object,\" so Hawthorne not many decades earlier found the male's revulsion and fear of sex leading him to separate from women and incapable therefore of love. Hester's letter represents not merely adulterous sex but all sex, and the image of divine maternity becomes even more telling than it seemed at first.

3 Cautiously, Hawthorne advances the notion that if society is to be changed for the better, such change will be initiated by women. But because society has condemned Hester as a sinner, the good that she can do is greatly circumscribed.

3 There is more to be said about Hester than space allows; let me confine myself to two points: first, the relative insignificance of her relation to Dimmesdale in comparison with her relation to Pearl-the supersession in her portrait of sexual love by maternal love.

1 \"First she throws away the scarlet letter,\" Updike recalls. \"Then, quote, '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.'

So, just as Hester is a vessel for the feelings and actions of the men who surround her in the book, she's also a mirror, revealing the true feelings of the reader about the role of women in society. At the end of her life, Hester Prynne chooses to live in Boston and to continue to wear that red letter \"A\" on her breast, long after she has fulfilled her punishment.

1 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 Women's Rights Movement, 1848-1920 | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives.\" The Women's Rights Movement, 1848-1920. Web. 25 Feb. 2015. .

Anamaria, Samantha. \"Feminist Views on Scarlet Letter and Madame Bovary.\" Feminist Views on Scarlet Letter and Madame Bovary. Web. 25 Feb. 2015. .

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. In John Updike's words, \"She is a mythic version of every woman's attempt to integrate her sexuality with societal demands.\"

Hawthorne does not cooperate in the masculine egotism that he excoriates in The Blithedale Romance by making Hester a mere event in the great sum of man. Hester is a self in her own right portrayed primarily in relation to the difficulties in her social situation, in relation to herself, and in relation to Pearl.

The downplaying of her passion for Dimmesdale means that--although she continues to love him, and remains in Boston largely on his account-her goodness and her essential nature are not defined by her relation to a man.

Her achievements in a social sense come about as by-products of her personal struggle to win a place in the society; and the fact that she wins her place at last indicates that society has been changed by her. Might there be in the future a reforming woman who had not been somehow stigmatized by society? Although in his later works Hawthorne was to answer this question negatively, in The Scarlet Letter the possibility, though faint, is there.

Every child testifies to the sexual experience of its mother and is, in a society that finds sex shameful, a shameful object. For Hester to try to return to Dimmesdale by \"undoing\" her letter is to return to him incompletely, in a manner that denies sex, denies her child. It is no wonder that Pearl objects.