I reread this again this year, which makes it two years in a row for a reread. However, each time I read through this I gain new knowledge or ‘see’ something I had not seen or considered before. There are layers and layers and layers to this book. It still reminds me of the extreme hypocrisy of religious people, their rigid religiosity and pious behaviour. It reminds me of my town, my high school I attended and sadly people I attend church with. However it makes me more motivated to be grace to people every single time I read it. I have read recent articles about whether Hester was a feminist or not. I personally think she was. She has sex for enjoyment, she refuses to name the father of her baby, whom she has without being married, to a panel of all men who make and govern the rules. Hester is a working single mother who supports her child Pearl, with her own talents, and without help from others. She is independent as she answers to no one, she thinks freely and sees the patriarchy as controlling for controls sake. She asserts her free will by tearing off the scarlet letter and lets her hair down, symbolizing her rejection of society’s attempts to control her. While the scarlet letter is a punishment designed specifically for her, any respectable woman of the era would have worn a cap, so Hester is rejecting all of the ways that women are subjected to patriarchal control: “Her sex, her youth, and the whole richness of her beauty came back.” She later choses to wear the letter, return to home and sets free other women held captive by control in the place that ostracized her. This, to me, is a true fighting feminist.
The Scarlet Letter: A Romance, an 1850 novel, is a work of historical fiction written by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is considered his “masterwork”. Set in 17th-century Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony, during the years 1642 to 1649, it tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter through an affair and struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. Throughout the book, Hawthorne explores themes of legalism, sin, and guilt.
On its publication, critic Evert Augustus Duyckinck, a friend of Hawthorne’s, said he preferred the author’s Washington Irving-like tales. Another friend, critic Edwin Percy Whipple, objected to the novel’s “morbid intensity” with dense psychological details, writing that the book “is therefore apt to become, like Hawthorne, too painfully anatomical in his exhibition of them”. English writer Mary Anne Evans writing as “George Eliot”, called The Scarlet Letter, along with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1855 book-length poem The Song of Hiawatha, the “two most indigenous and masterly productions in American literature”. Most literary critics praised the book but religious leaders took issue with the novel’s subject matter. Orestes Brownson complained that Hawthorne did not understand Christianity, confession, and remorse. A review in The Church Review and Ecclesiastical Register concluded the author “perpetrates bad morals.”
On the other hand, 20th-century writer D. H. Lawrence said that there could not be a more perfect work of the American imagination than The Scarlet Letter. Henry James once said of the novel, “It is beautiful, admirable, extraordinary; it has in the highest degree that merit which I have spoken of as the mark of Hawthorne’s best things—an indefinable purity and lightness of conception…One can often return to it; it supports familiarity and has the inexhaustible charm and mystery of great works of art.”
The Scarlet Letter has been banned over and over since the day it was published. The reason: The author was TOO KIND to Hester. Adultery is portrayed. Sadly although 168 YEARS have passed since this was published….people STILL want the WOMAN punished and NOT the man. Still have no grace for ‘certain’ things and STILL consider some actions unforgivable sins….sigh.
WE ARE BETTER THAN THIS.
PEACE.
