How Is Hester Prynne's Role In A Patriarchal Society

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When Hester Prynne refuses to name the father of her child she sets herself apart from every other woman in puritan society. Nathaniel Hawthorne paints Hester Prynne as a feminist icon by making her a woman who makes a choice that goes against the moral code of her society. By using a female lead in his novel the scarlet letter Nathaniel Hawthorne illustrates his understanding of the disadvantage women are given in a patriarchal society. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel, The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne is portrayed as a woman whose every move is met with mockery and adversity and is able to keep her head up regardless as she is used as a figurehead of the feminist movement of her time.

“Throughout them all, giving up her individuality, she would become the general symbol at which the preacher and moralist might point, and in which they …show more content…

He even says as much in a letter to his mother a year or so before he enters college. “Oh how i wish i was again with you with nothing to do but go a gunning. but the happiest days of my life are gone . why was i not a girl that i might have been pinned all my life to my mother’s apron” (Hawthorne, N. letters, 1;117 ). Nina Baym says “Given the conspicuous gun image Hawthorne is not complaining about his gender but about the rules that force a boy.. into the cold patriarchal world.” (Baym, N., Feminism and American Literary History, 45). This is to say that Hawthorne recognized and understood that men and women were held at two different standards and expected to do two different things. Hawthorne portrays his character Prynne as woman who breaks against one of those standards by 0questioning the virginity equals worth theory which is disproven by the end of the story which shows that the town’s people accept Hester despite the lurid circumstances of her

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