Misogyny, Conformity, and Obsession: A Feminist Criticism of The Scarlet Letter “And do you not know that you are Eve? God’s sentence hangs still over all your sex and His punishment weighs down upon you, she who first violated the forbidden tree and broke the law of God… Woman, you are the gate to hell! ” (Tarico). If even Quintus Tertullian, the “Founding Father of Latin Christianity” (Tarico), vehemently preached and ingrained the concept of womankind’s inferiority in society, how could Puritan women hope to shatter 2,000 years’ worth of unquestioned misogyny?
Throughout The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne narrates the life of a Puritan woman, Hester Prynne, who experiences social rejection for committing adultery and continues to raise her daughter in the same community. Despite the “natural dignity and force of character” (50) she exhibits, Hester eventually conforms to the sexual stereotypes found in “The Cult of True Womanhood,” a nineteenth-century ideology that claimed a woman’s role in society rested on four fundamentals: piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness (Welter 152).
Using Hester, Hawthorne demonstrates a misogynistic outlook by portraying that women carry no significance, live to serve, and yield to conformity. In doing so, he illustrates how the repression of women impedes selfdiscovery and begets a shared existential crisis, burying the female psyche in dehumanizing, machinelike insanity. Hawthorne emphasizes the insignificance of women when expressing the state of Hester’s virtue and gravestone, ultimately stressing their inferiority to men.
For instance, after Roger Chillingworth confronts Hester about the identity of Pearl’s father, she asks him whether he plots “the ruin of [her] soul” (74), to which Roger Chillingworth responds that he cares “Not [for] thy soul… No, not thine!… His fame, his position, his life… will be in my hands. Beware! ” (74). Although Hester violates sacred marriage vows in the process of committing adultery, Roger Chillingworth’s fury bypasses her for the “other man. ” presuming that she forcibly surrendered to Dimmesdale’s advances because of the common belief that women struggle to “maintain their virtue [as] men… ry to assault it” (Welter 155). Because “a woman [who] withstand[s] man’s assaults on her virtue… demonstrate[s] her superiority and her power over him” (Welter 155), Hester’s inability to reject sexual activity reinforces the imagery of female inferiority. Likewise, towards the end of The Scarlet Letter, Hester’s death establishes “a new grave… near that old and sunken grave… one tombstone served for both… [a] simple slab of slate… around… monuments carved with armorial bearings” (258).
Monuments” tower above Hester’s “simple” grave, crafting a state of insignificance which death permanently sets in a “slab of slate. ” “Armorial bearings” – which typically consist of capes, shields, crests, and helmets – highlight the masculine quality of the graves surrounding Hester’s legacy-lacking gravestone, once again presenting the unimportance of women in a male-dominated society. While “one tombstone served for both” Dimmesdale and Hester, implying an ultimate equality between women and men, Dimmesdale’s “tremulously sweet...
Voice” (65) and habit of keeping “his hand upon his heart” (66) instead brand him as an honorary woman in death. Thus, perpetually overlooked by men throughout life and death, Hester embodies the namelessness all women from her time period suffered, no matter the feats or crimes they may have executed. Namelessness aside, Hawthorne indicates that Hester’s existence in society – like that of all women – depends upon her fulfillment of familial and societal duties, thereby limiting the regime of her individual desires.
For example, after fighting Governor Bellingham to keep custody of Pearl, Hester encounters Mistress Hibbins and refuses the witch’s offer to meet the Devil because she “must tarry at home, and keep watch over my little Pearl. Had they taken her away from me, I would willingly have gone with thee… ” (113). Pearl saves Hester from falling into “Satan’s snare” (114) by grounding her to society with duties of “motherhood… anchor[ing] her even more firmly to the home” (Welter 171). Without Pearl, Hester would have lacked a family member to serve and consequently ceased to exist in proper society.
Going beyond familial duty, Hester returns to dwell in the community that condemned her, only to “give up her individuality” and “become the general symbol at which the preacher… might point… teaching the young to look at her… with the scarlet letter flaming on her breast… as the reality of sin… ” (76). The scarlet letter “flaming on her breast” consumes Hester’s identity, making her sinful existence symbolic to the point of dehumanization. This state of dehumanization seems justified because “without [purity] she was, in fact, no woman at all, but a member of some lower order.
A’fallen woman’… ” (Welter 154). Being a “member of some lower order,” transforms Hester into a servant of society who teaches “the young” not to follow in her footsteps, unwittingly compelling them to conform. In essence, the process of contributing more to society and less to individual needs dehumanizes Hester, likening women to machines. Yet, if women parallel machines, then society resembles a factory; Hawthorne shows that women submit to societal conformity by exemplifying female nurturing instincts and guilt complexes.
Towards the end of the novel, when Dimmesdale confesses his affair with Hester during the Election Sermon, he “sank upon the scaffold! Hester partly raised him, and supported his head against her bosom” (251). Hester figuratively nurses Dimmesdale by holding “his head against her bosom,” selflessly assuming the True Woman’s role of “nursing the sick, particularly sick males [because]… women were only happy when their husbands were ailing that they might have the joy of nursing him to recovery” (Welter 164).
Thus, in conforming to feminine roles such as “nursing,” women inexorably draw pleasure from performing them. Long after Dimmesdale’s death and upon her return to New England, Hester “paused… on the threshold – turned partly round – for, perchance, the idea of entering… the home of so intense a former life, was more dreary and desolate than ever she could bear. But her hesitation was only for an instant, though long enough to display a scarlet letter on her breast” (256).
Although her “hesitation” gives the illusion of free will, the way it stays “only for an instant” denotes how effectively society quells the individual’s desires. Hester’s continued possession of the scarlet letter reveals her shackles to a past of ingrained traditions. Named a sinner once by society, she harbors an undying guilt in the dark corridors of her mind, and while Hester may believe “she had returned… of her own free will” (257), it is this guilt that punitively drives her to dwell in “the home” of her “dreary and desolate” nightmares.
Hence, from happiness-evoking nurture to guilt-inducing adultery, societal conformity not only dominates women’s physical reality, but irrevocably twists the female psyche. Painting his protagonist in the colors of his own sister’s “brilliant and dangerous” (Kenney 1) character, Hawthorne by no means mocks the innate nature of women. Rather, he mocks what Puritan society has groomed them into. If a society submerges itself so deeply in misogyny that it becomes the norm, how can it possibly recognize that misogyny exists?
Similarly, instead of eliciting indignant righteousness, the excessive repression of women throughout the nineteenth century fashioned their acceptance of a numb, monotonous existence. In the long run, Hawthorne employs women’s conformity to mock the human mind, perpetually prone – as proven by Chillingworth’s pursuit for revenge and Dimmesdale’s quest for redemption – to fanatically following “one track. ” Perhaps it is this susceptibility to single-minded obsession – initiated by Eve’s desire to pluck the forbidden fruit – that ultimately lures mankind into the pit of sin.
