Scarlet Letter Feminist Essay

In the Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne is convicted of adultery and condemned to wear a scarlet “A” and suffer essential excommunication from society. Hester and her young daughter, Pearl, find themselves outcasts in the Puritan society of seventeenth-century Boston. On the surface, this novel’s tale is the opposite of proto-feminist, a term applied to works that show the emergence of modern feminist concepts. Via the actions and characteristics main characters, or perhaps heroines of the novel, Hester Prynne and her daughter Pearl, Hawthorne is able to contrast them with society’s expectations, showing them to be proto-feminist characters within a proto-feminist novel. In Puritan society, gender roles are distinct,
Hester’s actions are not isolated to her character, but spread to throughout the novel, to Pearl, to create an ultimately proto-feminist novel. Pearl is wild and reckless, far from the obedient and passive image that Puritan society conjures. Despite this, both Hawthorne and the characters in the novel, with the exclusion of the Puritans, show admiration for her. For example, the sailors gaze “wonderingly and admiringly at Pearl” (391), due to her wild nature. Hawthorne too, describes Pearl as having a “rich and luxurious beauty” with a “fire in her” (122). Hawthorne seems to be gushing with praise, in sharp contrast to his typical condescending tone when referring to society or people. This singles his approval of her being an outlier, a proto-feminist within society. Despite not carrying the stigma of the scarlet letter, Pearl is arguably a greater outcast than Hester from society when considering traits of each character and comparing them to Puritan society. She is showing the emergence of traits that will be later attributed to feminism, the ability to act as an equal and to not be contained by society’s expectations. This makes Hawthorne’s approval of her significant, and puts Pearl as a proto-feminist character with a proto-feminist