Hester Prynne In The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel Hawthorne

The novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is a dark romantic novel, in which feminism is highly supported. The Puritan society during the early settlements in the Americas were highly restricting, especially to females. This novel surrounds the story of a woman, Hester Prynne, who committed the sin of adultery, and how she copes with the shame and punishments put on her by the society, but her actions and the way that Nathaniel Hawthorne has brought life to this character clearly has a feminist touch to it. Examples of this is pervasive throughout the novel, for example, her pride and prowess while she stands on the scaffold in the beginning of the story, the way she continues to live alone on the edge of town without the help of anyone else on the edge of town, which is a hard task at the

She admits to her sin, and she admits that what she has done may be wrong, but she still carries a certain pride and power in her steps. The narrator in chapter three describes Hester, “ It was whispered, by those who peered after her that the scarlet letter threw a lurid gleam along the dark passage-way of the interior”(72). Although she has just been publicly shamed by all the ministers and men and every citizen in the town, Hester has no shame. She has a “so what if I committed a sin” attitude, indicating that she has no regrets to what she has committed, and even if anyone brings her down for having given birth to an illegitimate child, she will still continue to live and raise that child. This sense of pride can be described as a feminist notion because, back then, during the Puritan times, it was hard to come back from a sin that one has committed, especially if you were a female because women were considered even more inferior than they are today, and her pride and her willingness to continue fighting and not stop swinging further strengthens this feminist theme in the