Scarlet Letter
(Nathaniel Hawthorne)

The Role of Women

The novel contains both subtextual and explicit parts where the role of women in Puritan society is questioned. The most identifiable place is when Hester is described in chapter XII. After years of estrangement from Puritan society, Hester moves into a more thoughtful life. This results in her examining how women live in her day and age. When she asks herself if “existence [was] worth accepting even to the happiest among [women].” she knows that it isn’t to her. She realizes that women are in an unequal social position, and that equality would only be reached by a tear down of society.

A more subtle allusion to the role of women are the references to Anne Hutchinson. Hutchinson was a puritan woman who in the first half of the 17th century offered a slightly different theological ideology that led to her banishment from Boston. The narrator is not as interested in the subtleties of Hutchinson’s theology as he is what she represented: an independent woman who stood by her ideas. This is the quality that the narrator alludes to when pointing out the rose bush in front of the prison in chapter 1 then explicity points out in chapter XIII.

Criticism of Puritan Society

The tone of the book is one of criticism of Puritan society. Even during the first scene, the narrator notes that the men who stood in judgement of her- while possible the best of Puritans- were wholly incapable of being able to do so. This is noted again when it’s described that by being forced to wear a scarlet letter herself, Hester notices the scarlet letters that everyone she runs into should be wearing.

The Puritans hypocrisy is also something brought up a few times. While they gladly cloth their dead, newborns, and leaders in her work, they won’t let a bride where it to her marriage. Her charity work is accepted, but those who take also look down on her.

When the narrator describes how taking Pearl away from Hester is a ‘public discussion’ in the town, he looks down upon the activity as nothing more than a bored people attempting to fill their time with and putting their noses in business that it doesn’t belong to.