International Journal of English, Literature and Social Science (IJELS) Vol-4, Issue-6, Nov – Dec 2019
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On Hawthorne’s Feminist Ideas Reflected in The
Scarlet Letter
Li Guanghua
Institute of Foreign Languages, Shandong University of Technology, Zibo, Shandong, China, 255049
Abstract—Hawthorne was a feminist forerunner, which is largely due to the influences exerted on him by women
who were close to him. By examining his fictional portrayal of Hester in The Scarlet Letter, the author finds that
Hawthornemade a subversive woman his spokesperson voice his feminist ideas and refute the concept of
manhood and masculinity of his day.
Keywords—feminist ideas, Hester, manhood, The Scarlet Letter.
I. INTRODUCTION
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), the great literary
genius in American literature during the Age of
Romanticism, earns his fame mostly through his fiction:
The Scarlet Letter.
It is well known that Hawthorne was a
feministforerunner, who exposes his sympathy for women
in The Scarlet Letter, the most powerfully feminist fiction
in the 19
th
century America.
When Hawthorne was brewing his writing of The
Scarlet Letter, the Feminist Movement was building up to
an unprecedented height in America. Inspired by some
radical feminist advocates, particularly by Margaret
Fuller,aninfluential feminist theorist, Hawthorne
luckilyaccessed the most profound feminist ideas. His
mounting awareness of women’s rights gave rise to his
new sensitivity to women’s right, and Hawthorne began to
express great sympathy for women victimized by wrongs
against their sex in his works.
II. SOME INFLUENTIAL WOMEN IN
HAWTHORNE’S LIFE
Nina Baymonce saidthat:“…the question of woman is the
determining motive in Hawthorne’s work”,(1)which can be
best interpreted by the significant roles played by women
throughout his life and his career as well. Hawthorne had
been writing successfully for extraordinarily talented
women of letters whose creative minds had helped him
shape his own works. It would have been incredible if
Hawthorne had not understood and penned the great
variety of women around him who inspired and urged him
to make their concerns a visible reality in his works.
Hawthorne’s father died when he was four years
old,and he had to spend his boyhood in his mother’s
extended family, growing up among various talented and
supportive females. They were Hawthorne’s first-handed
source of good literary material, productive collaborators,
faithful readers, rigorouseditors, fair-minded critics and
emotional and financial supporters.
Hawthorne’s aunt Mary Manning, though
uneducated, helpedhim become the first college graduate
in the family and started him on his career as a
professional writer.
His mother Elizabeth Hathorne, though highly
cultivated by reading, had to depend on her relatives
financially after her husband died young, whichmanifested
the cruel reality toHawthorne: women had no legal right of
inheritance, and thus had to live at the mercy of men.
Hawthorne started his lifelong pattern of writing for
women when he was thirteen. In his early literary activities,
Hawthorne teamed his sisters, who were both colleagues
and collaborators in his efforts to become a successful
writer.
Before getting married, Hawthorne spent most of his
days writing and walking and chatting with his elder sister
Elizabeth who played a leading role in his developments as
a writer. Elizabeth, an educated writer by extensive reading,
was not only an intelligent and sophisticated reader of
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Hawthorne’s literary creation but also his competitor
spurring him on to his early publishing attempts.
Hawthorne lived in Salem after he graduated from
college during which he made acquaintance with more
capable and intelligent women, Susan Ingersoll who was
his friend and potential social activist hiding runaway
slaves. Susan Burley who attracted men of letters with her
literary salons in Salem, to mention just a few, all
offeredHawthornefascinating women to know about and to
write for.
The womenfrom Peabody family in Salem – Mrs.
Elizabeth Peabody and her daughters, Elizabeth, Mary, and
Sophia- were all as interested in Hawthorne’s literary
careers as the women in Hawthorne’s own family. In
addition, they, the first three in particular, were radical
feminists and educators as well, who went even further as
to set up schools to educate women. Their imprint of
feminist ideas on Hawthorne can be detected in
Hawthorne’s later works.
Hawthorne’s wife, Sophia Peabody, was his assistant
and critic in his later literary career. Hawthorne always
read his manuscripts to her before he sent them off to be
published. No wonder Hawthorne regarded his wife’s
grievous headaches as triumphant success when he read
the conclusion of The Scarlet Letter to her.(2)
With so many talented, active and supportive
women with him, Hawthorne automaticallyfelt quite
positive about women. He saw these women as his first
and most valued readers and portrayed their lives first
sympathetically, approximately until the time of his
marriage. In his early stories such as Young Goodman
Brown, the female characters represent important values,
but they are seen from the outside, their inner worlds are
not of any concern to Hawthorne.
However, after Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody
and became a lot closer to Elizabeth Peabody, and to their
friend, Margaret Fuller, he aquatinted the women of Salem
and Boston, radical advocates of Women’s Right
Movement. Female figures under his pen became
increasingly complex as he knew women better and
became aware of what feminists were fighting for and
dreaming of.
When Hawthorne’s friendship with Fuller deepened,
Fuller began toexercise more power over Hawthorne’s
imagination which he would struggle with much of his life.
In fact, during Fuller’s five-year friendship with
Hawthorne, she played a very significant role in
Hawthorne’s opinion about women and in his literary
creation of women. Witnessing the injustices imposed on
women andwomen’s changing lives, Hawthorne
graduallychanged his point of view on women’s issues and
even came up with the idea that if society is to be changed
for the better, such change will be initiated by women.
III. HESTER’S MISFORTUNES
Hawthorne’s sympathy for women in his own life finds its
way into the shaping of characters inThe Scarlet Letter, in
whichhelent much sympathy to his heroine, Hester Prynne.
By depicting Hester’s tragic life and her fighting,
Hawthorne refutes the concept of manhood and
masculinity of his day.
When her story unfolds in “The Market Place”, she
is sentenced to wear the shameful scarlet letter A on the
bosom of her dress, exposing her sin to the merciless
public.Thetortureis sohumiliating that few human beings
can ever bear.As the story advances, Hawthorne says that
legal as Hester’s marriage, it is completelyunreasonable
for Hester is young and elegant, while her legal husband,
Roger Chillingworth, old and deformed. Roger
Chillingworth, a magician on the verge of modern science,
has an old, intellectual belief in the dark science. He is
neither Christian, nor selfless aspire,but the representative
of male authority who has nothingbut intellectual belief in
himself and his male authority.
“But one can not keep a wife by force of an
intellectual tradition”,(3)therefore, Hester is doomed to fall
in love with another man worthy of her love.
As Hawthorne presents at the prison interview, it is
Chillingworth, instead of Hester, who acknowledges the
injustice imposed on Hester.
“Mine was the first wrong, when I betrayed thy
budding youth into a false and unnatural relation with my
decay…”(4)
What Hawthorne wants to convey is that Hester’s
marriage is not based on mutual love. As Hester admits
that “thou knowest that I was frank with thee, I felt no love,
nor feigned any”,(5) she had beenlured to marry her beauty
to Chillingworth’s fortune before she was able to
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understand the meaning of true love.
Hester’s marriage might be a perfect match in the
eyes of the public in the 17
th
century New England. But
only Hester knows it means nothing but misery to her. Her
sin,to a great extent, is the unavoidableconsequence of her
ill-matched marriage.
According to the male authority then, the
relationship between husbands and wives was similar to
that between God and the puritans, so a wife’s betrayal of
her husband was similar to a puritan’s betrayal of God. In
addition, wives, the private possessions of their husbands,
should live at the mercy of their husbands. In Hawthorne’s
opinion, since Chillingworthadmitts his sin, he is supposed
to show understanding and sympathy to Hester and
Dimmesdale. But Hawthorne, determined to make
Chillingworth the worst sinner ever, has Chillingworth
abandon his lawfully wedded wife, withdrawhis name
from the roll of mankind and practice the outward forms of
the local religion with no inward conviction. … In one
word, Hawthorne makes a fiend out of a learned, not
unkind scholar.In doing so, Hawthorne dumps his disgust
on the fiendish victim of the adultery, the defender of the
dying moral norm, and the maintainer of male authority.
Since Hester violates the 7
th
Commandment, she has
to be subject to the punishment of the male authority and
the condemnation of the public. The male authority was a
group of old males represented by the Governor which
surrounds itself with displays of power. Hawthorne seems
to speak highly of the old ruling males when he says it was
a period when the forms of authority were felt to possess
the sacredness of Devine institutions, but his conclusion
betrays him. With the development of the story,
Hawthorne’s satire of the ruling males escalates.
Hawthorne makes a sharp contrast between the dying, old
system represented by the Governor’s residence and the
irresistible growth of new things represented by the
pumpkin.The residence of Government Bellingham,
imposing as it is, is dying irresistibly.To Hawthorne, the
male rulers are hypocriticalin that in their private life, they
are not whatthey pretend to be in public.
So it is Hester’s tragedy to be subject to the trial of
the male rulers, theleastqualified to judge human passion.
It’s heartbreaking for readers to witnessHester’s loss or, to
be more exact, her intentional concealmentof her naturally
female beauty.
The worse misfortunecomes from Hester’s true
loverDimmesdale. It seems that Dimmesdale’s youth,
knowledge, fame and social status is a perfect match for
Hester’s youth and elegance. But it is the very true fact
that makes Hester’s suffering even more unbearable for
Hester loves a man who devotes himself to God instead of
her.
Although Hawthorne is not hesitant to show his
sympathy for Hester and goes further to speak in defense
of her love, to Dimmesdale, Hawthorne shows more
condemnation thansympathyby contrasting the fragility of
a devalued male with the toughness of a powerful female.
Dimmesdale,a brilliant young minister with a great
expectation, is destined to be suppressed by a community
possessing the qualities of aging public males. In order to
make himself a pet of the oligarchs, Dimmesdale has to
hold back his flaming passion inside. His sin is nothing but
an impulsive release of self-disciplined energies against
the restrictions imposed on the young by the aging rulers.
What he does is human nature, and nothing is wrong. But
the problem is Dimmesdale is more pious to his God than
he is faithful to his lover. He is a coward, and a hypocrite,
too. Unlike Hester, who never doubts the sacredness of her
love and is ready to protect her lover at any price,
Dimmesdalefirmly believes that he betrays his God forhe
breaches what he preaches. But henever screws up his
courage to stand on the scaffold with his beloved and their
daughter to face the public condemnation, let alone go
back into town with his family, hand in hand.
Dimmesdaleis sinned to try hard to conceal his sin,
therefore, it is his fate to be constantly tortured
physicallyandspiritually. Throughout the romance, there
are some occasions on which the distracted young minister
is empowered to redeem himself from his sin. But the
self-aware sinneris never willing to seizeany opportunity.
For him, if the end of his life has meant anything, it must
have meant eternal joy achieved through a righteous union
with his God, his people, and the things of this universe.
Throughout Hester’s seven solitary years,
Dimmesdale is addicted to his self-reflection and
self-torture, satisfied by indulging himself in lashing his
own white, thin, spiritual savior’s body. It never occurs to
him what his lover and his daughter might be suffering.
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Hawthorne speaks ruthlessly the hypocrisy of
Hester’s lover, unveiling the destructive effect of Puritan
belief, which is, in essence, the root cause of Hester’s
tragic romance.
At the end of the story, the godly minister is at the
verge of breaking down physically and spiritually. But
when Hester comes to his rescue unexpectedly and urges
him to flee to a new country to live a new life,
Dimmesdalerefuses for he thinks he is too weak to go
alone. And he believes that there is no new country, no
new life waiting for him. What’s worse,Dimmesdale dies a
glorious death, leaving a speech killing Hester’s hope for
brand new life, and changing Hester’s 7-year waiting into
nothing.In sharp contrast to the weak man, Hester stands
out as a tough woman who survives the public
condemnation, and exerts great influence upon her
hypocritical and cowardly lover.
Hawthorne’s stand is self-evident: the cowardice and
hypocrisy of manhood contribute to Hester’s tragic
romance.
IV. HESTER’S REBELLION
In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne takes the wholly original
step of fashioning a “fallen” woman, a dark heroine, who
stands in sharp contrast to the so-called learned, virtuous
males. If Hester is guilty, she must be a feminist criminal
bound by a link of mutual crime with a man whose
cowardiceonly serves as a foilto her brevity. She is a
sensual woman who has, in Hawthorne’s words, “a rich,
voluptuous, oriental characteristic and who is bold enough
to whisper to her lover:“ ‘What we did had a consecration
of its own.’”(6)
Hester is a sinner at the beginning, and a feminist
exemplar in the end, who dares to brood over women’s
wrongs and dreams of revolutionizingthe relationship
between men and women. She eventually dismantles the
stigma andwins the respects of her fellow puritans by her
angelic quality and the practical ability to help others as a
charity worker and an adviser. She is, in one word, a
feminist in advance of the season.
1. Hester’s Meditation on her Misfortunes
When Hester Prynne’s begins,she emerges from her prison
cell holding her newborn baby, the product of her “sin”,
with the humiliatingletter A upon her breast.Although
Hester behaves as best a woman might under
themountingstress of a thousand unrelenting eyes fastened
upon her bosom, she feelsgenuinelyguilty in the presence
of her legal husband, Chillingworth, and therefore, allows
him to conceal his real identity in order to track down
Hester’s fellow sinner.
As the story advances, while Chillingworth
isconverting himself into a real sinner, Hester is growing
in meditation on women’s right. Hawthorne makesgreat
changes take place inside Hester. In light of her
soul-marriage to Dimmesdale, her sexual relationship
withChillingworth, in Hester’s eyes, is a degrading
experience.She concludes that she is nothing but the victim
of an ill-conceived marriage.
She says bitterly: “it seemed a fouler offense
committed by Roger Chillingworth, than any that had
since been done him, that in the time when her heart knew
no better, he persuaded her to fancy herself happy at his
side”. “Yes, I hate him!” “He betrayed me!” “He has done
me worse wrong than I did him.” “Be it sin or no, I hate
the man!”(7)
By describing Hester’s increasing awareness of her
own ill-conceived marriage, Hawthorne shows growing
concern to women’s issues as a whole.While speaking
pitifully of a less guilty wife, Hawthornecondemns
pitilessly a more sinful husband.
In her early years of solitudes, Hester is targeted for
verbal abuse and scorn by the clergy, the town folks, and
children as well. At the very beginning, she is tortured by
the sting of punishment inflicted on her. But time
witnesses gradual changes in her. Outwardly, she becomes
willing to wear the humiliatingletter. Inwardly, she lives in
her speculations, her solitude, her quiet hours with her girl
and her needlework… And by needlework, she wins
self-relianceand independence of any man, which
separates her from other women of her time. It is the
veryscarlet letter that serves as her passport into realms
where other women dare not to tread.
Hester’s meditation goes beyond her own tragedies.
Whenshe spends more time on reflection and introspection,
she develops her own way of thinking, whichempowers
her todetect the root of her tragedies, andto declare her
rejection of public law and morality. She makes a big step
toponder on women’s lot in life, wonderingwhetherlife is
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worth accepting even for the happiest.
She dreams of a brighter period, when the world
should have grown ripe for it, the whole relation between
man and woman will be established on a surer ground of
mutual happiness. (8)
It is self-evident that Heater is Hawthorne’s
spokeswoman who becomes a radical thinker engaged in a
revolutionary fight against an established male authority.
Her revolutionary thought sheds light on the possibility of
the overthrow of government, ancient prejudice and
ancient principle.
2. Hester’s Fighting in Action
Hawthorne’s characterizationof a subversive woman is
achievedby her rebellious thought and martial actions.
Hester first confronted with Governor Bellingham to
defend her right to raise her baby who is everything to her
for the baby isthe only treasure purchased with all she had,
and the only thing to connect her parents forever.
When words reach her ears that some of the leading
inhabitants have decided to deprive her of her child simply
because they can notentrust such an immortal soul as Pearl
to the guidance of a woman who has stumbled and fallen
amid the pitfalls of the world.Hester steps out of her
solitary cottagewithout any hesitation, confronting the old
puritan magistrates with extraordinary courage and
rebellious spirit.Shehas long been isolated from her fellow
human beings, and she is very conscious that it is an
unequal match between the Puritan magistrates and herself,
but she wins her indefeasible rights to take care of her own
baby.
Hester’s second rebellious action is to
exposeChillingworth’s true identity, which signals her
maturity.Seven years earlier, Chillingworth tried making a
deal with Hester in prison which would allow him to cover
his true identity. Since bothDimmesdale’s life and fame
were in the hand ofChillingworth, there seemed to be no
alternative for Hester, but to acquiesce in his scheme of
disguise. She agreed only because she was not in the right
position to find a better way toprotecther lover. Moreover,
at that time she didn’t have the faintest idea of
Chillingworth’smotive. But when she witnessed the
suffering her lover struggled against, or, to be more
accurate, had stopped struggling against, and saw that he
wasat the edge of lunacy, she took immediate action to
stop Chillingworth from hurting Dimmesdale any moreat
any price.
Hester’s third rebellion is to urge her lover to start a
new life with her in the wildness. Dimmesdale, a pious
minister, thinks that he can go nowhere for he is wretched
and sinful andcan drag on his earthly existence only in the
sphere where Providence has placed him. To strike light
into the dark world of Dimmesdale, Hester, without the
least hesitation, tears the scarlet letter off her bosom and
throws it away, and next, she heaves a long, deep sigh, in
which shame and anguish departs from her soul. When she
eventuallytakes off the ugly cap defying the established
norm of the Puritan society, her sex, her youth, and the
whole richness of her beauty all come back to life.
V. CONCLUSION
In conclusion, influenced and inspired by women close to
him, Hawthorne grew aware of women’s sufferings and
was, therefore, sympathetic to woman. In The Scarlet
Letter, Hawthorne made a subversive woman his
spokesperson who dares to challenge manhood and dares
to dream of a society in which men and women are equal.
REFERENCES
[1] Nina Baym, Thwarted Nature: Nathaniel Hawthorne as
Feminist. In: American Novelists Revisited: Ed. Pritz
Fleischmann. Boston: G. k. Hall, 1982. 36.
[2] Henry James, Hawthorne 1879, In The Scarlet letter, Text,
sources, Criticism.Ed. Kenneth S. Lynn. New York:
Harcourt, Brace & world, Inc., 1961. 175.
[3] D. H. Lawrence, Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet
Letter 1923, In The Scarlet letter, Text, sources,
Criticism.Ed. Kenneth S. Lynn. New York: Harcourt,
Brace& world, Inc., 1961. 192..
[4] Kenneth S. Lynn (ed.), The Scarlet letter, Text, sources,
Criticism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & world, Inc., 1961.
41,91,144,92.
