Hester Prynne, of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and Margaret Fuller, Themid-nineteenth-century Campaigner for the Rights of Women

Hester Prynne, of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and Margaret Fuller, Themid-nineteenth-century Campaigner for the Rights of Women

"Endowed in certain respects with the sensibility of Margaret Fuller, the great campaigner for the rights of women, Hester Prynne is as much a woman of mid-nineteenth-century American culture as she is of seventeenth-century Puritan New England."

Is this an accurate assessment of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter?

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) was an author, critic, editor and teacher who "possessed more influence on the thought of American women than any woman previous to her time" [1]. She contributed significantly to the American Renaissance in literature and to mid-nineteenth century reform movements. A brilliant and highly educated member of the Transcendentalist group, she challenged Ralph Waldo Emerson both intellectually and emotionally. Women who attended her "conversations" and many men of her time found Fuller's influence life-changing. Her major work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century published in 1845, profoundly affected the women's rights movement which had its formal beginning at Seneca Falls, New York, three years later.

Hester Prynne is the protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne's romantic novel, The Scarlet Letter, which is set in seventeenth-century Puritan New England. As a young woman, Hester married an elderly scholar, Roger Chillingworth, who sent her ahead to America to live but never followed. While waiting for him, she had an affair with a Puritan minister named Dimmesdale, after which she gave birth to Pearl. Found guilty of adultery (through the absence of her husband and the birth of Pearl), Hester is punished by being forced to wear a scarlet lette...

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...on, 1996

4 The Scarlet Letter, p.263

5 Puritanism in Early America, edited by George M. Waller, p.6

6 The Scarlet Letter, p.53

7 Ibid. p.144-5

8 Ibid. p.195

9 Ibid. p.165

10 Ibid. p.86

11 Ibid. p.263

12 Charles Capper, in An American Romantic Life. p.ix.

13 The Scarlet Letter, p.165.

14 Ibid. p.263

15 Ibid. p.263

16 An American Romantic Life, p. xi

17 The Scarlet Letter, p.94

18 Ibid. p.263

19 Ibid. p.263

20 Margaret Fuller, Julia Ward Howe, 1889

21 The Scarlet Letter, p.113

22 Ibid. p.117

Bibliography

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. History of Woman Suffrage, 1881

Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Scarlet Letter, Oxford World's Classics, 1990

The Concise Oxford Dictionary, Ninth Edition, 1996

George M. Waller, (Ed). Puritanism in Early America

Charles Capper. An American Romantic Life

Julia Ward Howe. Margaret Fuller. 1889