Men and Women in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter

One of the things I find continually interesting is how Hawthorne deals with women in his short stories and novels. Obviously, we have the character of Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter - the abandoned woman who stands alone but tall under the scornful scrutiny of her brethren - but his short works are also rife with strong, noticeable female characters who overshadow their weaker male counterparts.

In many of his short works, Hawthorne has painted men as inferior beings, prone to obsession or excesses of pride, weak in heart and spirit, drunk with righteous, religious fervor, or in some cases plain evil. The May Lord in May Pole of Merry Mount is not all that bad, but even then - it is his love for his new May Queen that spurns him to offer up his life in her defense.

Hester Prynne seems like such an odd character for Hawthorne to create, but in many ways I think she's emblematic of his grappling with not only his Puritan background and what he truly believes, but his occupation as a writer. Here's this woman who must bear a lifelong mark of shame for her adultery - for selfishly indulging in her passions, her desires, much as Hawthorne fulfilled his passion to write - standing as the very epitome of what's considered to be evil and godless by Puritan thought, especially given her refusal to name her comrade in lust, and her continued assertion that Pearl is a gift from God, rather than a product of her mortal sin.

Hawthorne goes and turns her into a heroine, clearly the strongest character in the book, possibly the only one with any virtuous strands whatsoever. Dimmesdale, her partner in adultery, is fundamentally weak, unable to expose himself and join his family in shame, even when little Pearl takes him in hand, asking him to join them the next day there on the judgment stand at noon for all to see. He cannot stand and bear his sin in front of the whole town while Hester bears it daily for both of them, not even for his own flesh and blood.

Chillingworth has been warped by his thirst for vengeance into something less than human, his lust for the "truth" corrupting him, much in the same way Goodman Brown's obsession with the "truth and hidden sin" corrupted him - only in this case, Chillingworth is made of much sterner stuff, cast as an aggressor, while Goodman Brown turned into a cranky, crazy old man who saw nothing but evil everywhere, even in his "Faith", the one he loved most. Governor Bellingham carries himself with the utmost piety, yet surrounds himself with the best luxuries and fineries one can have.

There are too many parallels and similarities between these characters, male and female, to ignore. Hester Prynne...with the exception of religious fervor as the driving force of her passion...bears more than a passing resemblance to Catherine from The Gentle Boy, although she's inarguably a better mother; Dorothy from the same story is the first to stand up in church and accept Ilbrahim as their own while Tobias waffles by her side, (you can almost imagine Dorothy standing there, kicking her husband's shins under the pew), Aylmer's wife accepts her husband's misguided, prideful ministrations with grace and humility, proving to have a stronger inner coil of the two while he gives into his obsession with his vision of perfection and his hunger to control the uncontrollable, and Rapuchinni's daughter is easily far superior character to her father and would-be husband - a father who once again has tampered with nature and cares nothing for her past making her deadly, and a betrothed who had not even the courage to stand with her to the end.

Robert Martin had some interesting things to say in his essay, "Hester Prynne, C'est Moi: Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Anxieties of Gender", providing fertile ground to explore in perhaps a paper later on. Martin proposed that part of this focus on women came from Hawthorne's conflicting feelings about what was happening to women in general - a conflict between what his strict Puritan upbringing said a woman should be, what they were rapidly becoming in society, especially with the advent of such popular women writers as Emily Dickinson, Susan Warner or Maria Cummins, and the "even playing field for all" that Transcendentalism proposed for everyone.

Martin also suggested this caused a conflict within Hawthorne concerning his own "masculinity" - not in a purely sexual, erotic sense, (eschewing rumors of him sleeping with Melville for the moment), but simply about the worthiness or manliness of his attempts to make a living as a writer. He agonized over what his forefathers would think in his introduction in The Scarlet Letter, calling himself a "scribbler", a "degenerate story-teller" that might as well have been a "fiddler". According to the essay, his Puritan upbringing also recoiled at the dramatic reordering of priorities within society that made it possible for him to become a success with his "scribblings".

I think what I liked the best about this essay was actually not focusing on homo-erotic hints that perhaps Hawthorne was a closet homosexual or had issues with touching or having sex with women. Plenty of that imagery certainly exists, but given - as pointed out in other essays this year - that Hawthorne was overly bent allegorical tales and moralizing his stories from a Puritan point of view, we need to look at those symbolisms in context. I liked seeing this different perspective - yes, Hawthorne had anxieties about gender and these anxieties found their way into his characters and writing, but it was more about what women and men were supposed to be in the rapidly changing world he lived in according to their gender roles, not necessarily an erotic bedroom issue.

Also interesting is the idea that like his conflicting feelings about Puritanism, he may never have come to a conclusion about the proper role of women either. It was noted in the essay that Hawthorne repeatedly created attractive, vibrant, strong female characters - Hester Prynne, Dorothy, Aylmer's wife, Rapuchinni's daughter - but also felt bound to create plots that would ultimately suppress them, putting their fates in the hands of lesser, inferior men.