This paper examines the contradictory impulses of Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, forecasting a sense of authorial attempt to play within existing discourse of identity in New England. While Hester chooses to wear the red badge and subscribe to the Puritan ideal of redemption through suffering, she also does not hesitate to advise the old minister to live a life of the redeemed preacher in the very land they have left behind, thereby questioning the very definitive impact of religion upon the identity of the individual in a certain geopolitical space.
The notion of the Puritanical family in the novel functions to depict Hester’s own situation. As Amanda Porterfield points out in Female Piety in Puritan New England, the idea of a pious marriage rested on the notion of submission of the wife and children to the husband. Hester’s unwillingness to expose the misconduct of her husband displays a certain sense of fidelity which in Puritanical discourse would only be rendered an ‘excess’. At the same time, she raises her daughter in the absence of the father, positing a veritable challenge to the Puritanical construction of family life.
The sympathy generated for Hester stems from the fact that while her individual will pines for acceptance and liberation, there is no agency to be exercised on her own part. Hawthorne’s own troubled remembrance of his ancestral past is a cause of his sympathy for the protagonist. The conversation between Hester and Pearl about the implications of the scarlet letter represents a crucial instance of role-reversal. Pearl’s untameable curiosity represents individualism pitted against social control.
The different landscapes presented in the novel share a very conspicuous presence. While it is necessary for the settlers of New England to demarcate a space of Christian civility from the pagan wilderness, there is no easy way to get rid of the latter. Mrs. Hibbins’s presence symbolically testifies to the intermingling of spaces that are supposed to remain separate and distinct.
Hester Prynne is pitted against social forces and conditions whose relationship with her exists not simply in terms of resistance or difference. It is this vacillation that projects her subversive image. Hawthorne, with his nineteenth-century hindsight, shows how the once-diffident facet of Puritanism had to be subjugated to the avaricious will to dominate and control, and the individual in the novel exposes this through her travails on the thorny road of survival and existence.
Works Cited
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- Porterfield, Amanda. Female Piety in Puritan New England: The Emergence of Religious Humanism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Print.
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