Femaleness in Society

Table of Content

At the same time Charlotte Bronte was shaping and revising the figure of Diana to mold a dynamic female hero for British literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne was envisioning and creating the first female hero of America. He also engaged in a fresh vision of this woman as a new woman for, literally, a New World. By the end of his novel, the hero herself engages in visions of a radically different future and world for humans. Hester Prynne-type is always complex, a hybrid two cultures, the Christian and Classical. The sum of creative powers Prynne inherits make her, as they make Eyre, a prime actor, shaper, and illuminator in her world.

Lastly, the child whom the visionary Prynne gives birth to is not a male saviour, the traditional Christ-type of her Puritan community, but Pearl. She is, like Bronte’s Jane Eyre, the heiress and future bride of her world, and her name derives from the perfectly round, white, and opaline stone symbolic of the moon, the one stone that Jane Eyre wore throughout her arduous quest. Importantly, Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne is mortal and passionate woman, erring and wandering, and guided by cold spirituality, glass reflections, and inner fires. The goal of heroic woman’s struggle is that of all inward romantic quests: to realize the potential of the soul, the heart, the spirit.

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Hawthorne uses the image of the human heart for the paradisiacal grail of his questors, and this points to another Romantic element in his text. In the “Custom-House,” Hawthorne states that the “singular woman” Hester Prynne was sought after in olde Boston for advice in matters “of the heart” (p. 1686). The minister praises Hester in the opening scene: “Wondrous strength and generosity of a woman’s heart!” (p. 1704). Prynne’s hear, however, in the grey landscape of olde Boston, grows “sick and morbid” (p. 1709). The novel centers on the possible healing and regeneration of her sadly “tomb-like” heart (p. 1762).

Gustafson notes that our culture experiences “turmoil” when confronted with the “ambivalence” (p. x). This truth – of the poetic power of the dark side of the feminine and the turmoil it causes in our society – manifests itself in The Scarlet Letter. In doing so, it points to reason why Hawthorne may have favored alchemy as the science of his text. This nature was an opening beyond “the patristic allegories” in which the Western world’s overriding “masculine judgement” engaged in a lopsided over-evaluation of the white side of the “beauteous bride” at the expense of her three-sided nature as Triformis. The scarlet- and blacknatured Prynne, as a type of this alchemic Luna, is this kind of puzzling antithesis to the Puritan fathers and their lopsided judgements (p. 175). Importantly, this bewitching Hester Prynne, can offer in her wholeness and her powers a “healing force” to societies that are overly “rational and masculine” (Gustafson, p. xi). The grey Puritan community of olde Boston is in need of such healing, and it is a sad comment that the fathers exile Prynne to a thatched cottage on the outskirts of their society.

Once again we see the dilemma of the Hester -hero: where shall she find a home for herself in our world? When the tale begins, Hester Prynne is literally in a prison. She could leave olde Boston, but she voluntarily makes a small “space” for herself in a cottage that is an emblem of her banishment. Later, she urges Dimmesdale to flee with her, only to discover that there is no escaping the past. Her old husband Chillingworth will accompany them. After Dimmesdale’s death, Hester seeks freedom in the rest of the world. She ultimately returns, however, for the emotional reality of her life lies in Boston.

Her return may indicate her acceptance of her life, but it is an unsatisfactory end for she lives in her cottage once more, such a small and isolated structure for a woman who possesses great gifts. Hester has embraced her role in our world, an act full of courage for she knows that her role is a constricted one. Hester’s gifts are still imprisoned by her society, which allows her speech to flow freely only within the limits of a small structure, a cottage that exists outside the limits of that society. Her quest ends with her located on the fringes of our civilized world, and nearby the natural world of the ocean and the forest. Thus, Hawthorne locates Prynne geographically in a manner that echoes her spiritual role in the novel, that of a mysterious angel exiled and earth-bound. The parameters given for her expression are small indeed. Her “magic circle” shall remain small (p. 1789).

There is also evidence that Hawthorne’s scheme in The Scarlet Letter, which places the dark forces of the witch in contrast to the cold powers of the male lawgivers, derives at least partially from Greek archetypes. A study of the images of Hecate, Circe, Pandora, and Prosperina in Hawthorne’s A Wonder-Book and Tanglewood Tales lead McPherson to conclude that Hawthorne shaped these women as a “Dark Lady,” a figure that surfaces and re-surfaces in Hawthorne’s major works; these are dark and fecund types of whom Hester Prynne is one.

In addition, scarlet also points to Prynne’s transformative nature. The prison that Prynne enters for her black sin is called civilization’s “black flower,” and this image, both mysterious and blossoming, is repeated in another outside the prison door, the “wild rose-bush” whose roses “offer their fragrance and fragile beauty…of Nature” (p. 1693). The image of “wild” red roses blooming beside the “black flower” gains deeper ambivalence when the reader learns that it sprung from the footsteps of “sainted” Anne Hutchinson. Eventually, Prynne’s soul, like the heroic soul of Hutchinson and like her “wild” roses, will be refined until it comes to “symbolize some sweet moral blossom” in Hawthorne’s dark tale (p. 1694).

Moreover, the richest heiress of the novel, the grown-up Pearl, is called the “Red Rose” of the novel. She tells the Puritan fathers that she was “plucked” by her mother off the wild rose-bush at the prison door (1725-26). She, too, will undergo a process of refinement. Her creative nature reaches its own apotheosis. She becomes her society’s richest heiress and bride. The rose imagery links Pearl, Prynne, and Anne Hutchinson in a manner that renders it a symbol of the promise of feminine salvation, however misperceived initially by the community.

In The Scarlet Letter, the image points to the mortification of the feminine powers. The Puritan fathers falsely decode it as a pure equivalent of frailty and sin. They exile the scarlet flowers of their community, banishing the scarlet Prynne and her child, the “Red Rose” (p. 1725). They have forgotten that Christ took the scarlet woman into his fold, an act which enabled her transformation into a glorious saint. The Puritans focus solely on the story in the Bible of the Scarlet Whore of Babylon. In essence, they do not accept the scarlet side of feminine nature, as did Christ within limits, but they single out its scarletty to condemn it.

Hawthorne, on the other hand, constantly conflates and makes inseparable the three colors that are symbolic of Prynne’s heterogeneousness. When we first see Prynne upon the scaffold, Hawthorne likens her to “the image of Divine Maternity” (p. 1698). He writes that Prynne calls to mind “that sacred image of sinless motherhood, whose infant was to redeem the world.” Yet, this allusion to a pure white nature Hawthorne simultaneously blends in her character with strong elements of red and black. Hawthorne writes that Prynne has the “taint of deepest sin,” and the world is “darker for this woman’s beauty” (p. 1698). And, she bears the scarlet letter. Thus, Prynne from the first is a mixed image of (1) the Virgin Mother, the white Moon of the Church, (2) the Scarlet Whore of Babylon, and (3) Hekate, the dark witch of the forest. All three aspects constitute Prynne’s feminine nature, in all its ambivalent powers.

Hester’s fate, as the black-eyed Bride, is one of loneliness and yearning. In this context, Hester can be perceived as a symbol of the earthly state of the Church, who must yearn after her groom, Christ. Traditionally, the Church is a type of “widow” for she “lacketh a husband, lacketh a man.” Her bridegroom has not yet come. Indeed, exploration of this theme in the text reveals the exact manner in which Prynne holds the promise of poetic transformation.

Hester Prynne leaves behind the “stainless maidenhood” of virgin brides (p. 1709), but such purity is also identified negatively with the “cold snow” of the frigid bosoms of the Puritan matrons (p. 1713) and with the heavenly but “cold” moonbeams devoid of any “human tenderness” (p. 1688). Hawthorne does allow the Puritans’ cold and hard law to triumph over the pagan force of nature, but he condemns the Puritans for failing to come to terms with this force, and he paints Nature in such brilliant colors that it, like Hester, can signify profound beauty as well as profound wildness in earthly life.

Prynne is, even moreso than her daughter Pearl, touched by earthly grief, and so she is a poignantly humanized a hero. Her beauty and her vulnerability are key to her heroism. Critics have noted that The Scarlet Letter is “so deep, so dual, and so complete” like no other book, particularly in the figure of Prynne, whose “dual role as sinner and saint” makes possible the peak of her heroic and artistic development, of her becoming “[e]very inch a woman” (Male, p. 90).

From the start, Hawthorne focuses on Prynne’s heroic and creative nature, and on the consequences she suffers for this in the New World. In the first scenes, Prynne is labelled “haughty” (p. 1697), but she is also in her pride likened to the “sainted” Anne Hutchinson. That reference condemns the Puritans more than Prynne, for Anne Hutchinson was a gifted woman banished by the narrow-minded Puritan governors. The opening remarks of the Puritan matrons, who wish to see Hester wince in pain, to bear the “brand of a hot iron” and even “die,” further condemn the vein of sadism and misogyny toward a proud “woman” like Prynne or Hutchinson (p. 1695).

Hawthorne constantly alludes to this idea that Prynne is condemned in part because of her proud and gifted nature is less acceptable to her society when found in a woman. The link between Anne Hutchinson and Hester Prynne is repeated. He writes that Prynne could, with her active intellect, very well have been a similar “prophetess” or “foundress of a religious sect” (p. 1754). Prynne’s life in general is similar to Hutchinson’s: “a spiritual counsellor to Puritan women, interpreting to them the best of the male theological mind; now a prophet in her own right, giving voice to a new spirit of freedom and embodying within herself a new awareness of female intelligence and social power” (Colacurcio, p. 22). One of the main movements for Prynne is from undisciplined private speculation to unsanctioned public prophecy. The reader leaves her when she has found a way to make public, quietly, her ideas about sexual justice (p. 22).

Moreover, Prynne’s potential as an agent of change, as a seer – like Jane Eyre – of a newer, better order, is made in The Scarlet Letter to be equally powerful to a man’s. In addition to Prynne’s links to Anne Hutchinson, Hawthorne links her to male prophets. In her transcendental ideas contrary to the Puritan ethic, she is said to be like the censored Luther (p. 1719). Prynne herself ponders that her fate has come to her as a female, for her genius presents a “dark question…with reference to the whole race of womanhood” (ibid). Chillingworth notes that Hester’s “spirit” has a “strength” that bears the burden of sin and the scarlet letter better than Dimmesdale’s (p. 1757). He sees that even in her despair she has a “quality almost majestic,” and he cries, “Thou hadst great elements!… I pity thee, for the good that has been wasted in thy nature” (p. 1758). In short, Prynne has all the makings of a hero, and indeed she is heroic, but that role is neither allowed her nor acknowledged by her society.

Prynne’s figure is interwoven with allusions to yet another Western female icon, Mary, the Moon of the Church. She is “the image of Divine Maternity” (p. 1698), however shadowed. Critically, the “rose-bush” outside the prison door is sprung from the footsteps of the sainted Hutchinson (p. 1694). The rose and rose-gardens in Christianity and in alchemy symbolize Mary, the most sainted female, as the locked prima materia, and by analogue the rose can be seen as the symbol and link of Christian female saints to the grand idea of Mary. This rose, however, is a dualistic phenomenon, for while it embraces human beauty and virtue, its very beauty creates lust and must be guarded.

Such dualistic imagery of the archetypal Black Madonna and of Hawthorne’s dark image of Divine Maternity is parallel in their costumes, too. The clothes of each are emblems of the transformative powers and process of these dark queens. Prynne wears a fiery scarlet letter embellished with glittering gold flourishes, and the Black Madonna of the Finsterwald wears a rust color dress with gold hems and a gold belt (Gustafson, p. 46). In alchemy, in medieval literature and elsewhere, the transfiguring Luna bears this fiery dress, with its gold flourishes pointing toward the golden pavement of Jerusalem, for her sovereignty is of the heart, red and alive, and filled with feelings, especially ones inconsistent or beyond the scope of the narrow letter of the law (p. 57).

Vivan goes on to discuss Prynne as a heroic woman-artist:

Hester is a woman and her magic tool is the needle in Hawthorne’s eye, a symbol of the feminine condition–; her pattern of experience might therefore be read as the path of suffering and transformation of women, historically bound to reach a new status, a new nobility which will redeem the destiny of humanity as a whole…. Hester’s role also includes a reference to the mission of the artist. She creates art in the only possible way for a Puritan, by redeeming experience and making it a type of biblical heroism. Her very name, Hester, shows her as the type of feminine saviour in the New Canaan, like Hester was in the Old Testament (p. 86).

For Prynne to accomplish the revelation, an internal process must take place, transforming and refining her heroic nature. Not only does it occur, but it mirrors the one that her daughter experiences. Just as Pearl, an elfish child, eventually takes a place in the community, Prynne also moves from exile to participation in her community. Initially, Prynne’s natural passion brings upon her the community’s banishment and scarlet letter, which turns Prynne’s life to “thought” (p. 1753). The result, a refined blend of her natural passion and subsequent knowledge, raises Prynne to the heroism of resistance and vision. She ends returning this to the misguided Puritans in Boston, and they, particularly the women, seek her out for counsel. This process of Prynne, Pearl, and the Boston women constitutes one on-going and expanding process of feminine rebirth and transformation in society.

Works Cited

Colacurcio, Michael J. “‘The Woman’s Own Choice’: Sex, Metaphor, and the Puritan ‘Sources’ of The Scarlet Letter.” New Essays on The Scarlet Letter. Ed. Michael J. Colacurcio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Gustafson, Fred. The Black Madonna. Boston: Sigo Press, 1990.

Gustafson, Fred. The Black Madonna. Boston: Sigo Press, 1990.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter: A Romance. In George Perkinset al, eds., The American Tradition in Literature, vol. one, pp. 1688-1804. 7th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Pub. Co., 1990.

Male, Roy. Hawthorne’s Tragic Vision. New York: W.W. Norton, 1957.

Vivan, Itala. “An Eye into the Occult of Hawthorne’s Text: The Scar in the Letter.” Quaderni di lingue e letterature ( 1983), 8:71-107.

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