Similarities Between The Scarlet Letter And The Crucible

Analysis of The Scarlet Letter and “The Crucible”

The Feminist theory is an important part of many pieces of literature. With it, people are able to analyze the way the women are treated and how they were expected to act over hundreds of years. The stories that are going to be analyzed using this theory are, The Scarlet Letter and “The Crucible.” The Scarlet Letter is a novel written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1850 that discusses the effects of a woman having a child out of wedlock with an unknown man. “The Crucible,” written in 1952 by Arthur Miller on the other hand, is about a group of young girls who are accused of witchcraft and decide to take it to the extreme and get the whole town involved to cover their own butts. Applying the Feminist

Theory to these two works enables one to analyze how women in the puritan society were thought of as lesser and, in a sense, had their freedoms heavily restricted.
“The Crucible” has a multitude of possible interpretations that allow for the reader to choose for themselves what the meaning of the narrative as a whole means. One method of doing so is through the Feminist Theory. The first step toward discovering a hidden meaning for one’s self is to know how feminism was used in the 1800s. According to Charles E. Bressler’s Literary Criticism,
Such female in significance did not first appear in the 20th century, declare feminists such as Jane Tompkins and others. Long before the existence of our present day, male dominated world, societies have been governed, for the most part, by males. These patriarchal societies, say the feminists, have simply passed down their erroneous beliefs from generation to generation, culminating with the predominant Western assumption that women are less than, not equal to, men. Arbitrarily using the male as the standard, these societies apparently agree with Aristotle's assertion that “the female is female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities.” Or they quote and support St. Thomas Aquinas’s conviction that all women are simply imperfect men (Bressler).
Based on this quote, it can be determined that for as long as people can remember, women have been seen as less than men. This leads straight into the scene from “The Crucible” in which the Reverend Parris walks in on a group of the girls brewing a “love potion.” He is the head pastor of the town and is very serious about his job. As he approaches, he has almost no expressions on his face. This indicates that he is not at all surprised by the fact that these girls were supposedly being “controlled by the devil.” He truly views them as lesser beings. This is not just important on its own though, later has no problem believing them when they say that they, along with almost every other woman in town, were in fact talking to the devil (even though the whole was a lie). There are two ways to look at this, one being that he believes them because he respects them, but this is unlikely because they try to tell him that they had nothing to do with the devil for a long time before changing their story. The other possibility is that he believes them because they are so much weaker than he is, which means that the devil can get to them with no effort at all.
There’s no stopping there though. “The Crucible” is filled with instances of feminism, the next is a direct attack from John Proctor. He says “She thinks to dance with me on my wife’s grave! And well she might, for I thought of her softly. God help me, I lusted, and there is a promise in such sweat. But it is a whore’s vengeance” (102). This particular shot was made to make it seem like Abigail is unable to control her desires. This in turn makes the idea that she was controlled by the devil more likely. And while this is a very bad thing for most, it may have had an unintended effect because she is trying to make sure the everyone believes that she was controlled by the devil, even though she really wasn’t. This also lines up with a statement about the first form of feminism in literature made by O’Connor. She said, “In this early stage of feminist criticism, critics consider male novelists' demeaning treatment or marginalisation of female characters.” What this saying is that the writers did what they could to make it seem like the women in their stories were less than the rest of the male characters. In the context of this scene, it makes a lot of sense why Miller would add a quote like this.
While “The Crucible” has many scenes that can be picked apart using the Feminist Theory, it isn't the only story from the puritan era that has serious anti-women intentions. The other story that immediately comes to mind is The Scarlet Letter. The simplest example that can be easily explained is how Hester Prynne (the main character) is completely outcast from society for making the mistake of having sex out of wedlock. It could be argued that she was not outcast because she was a woman, but because she was breaking some major laws. But, if this is the case, how is she the only person in the entire town that has done something wrong. On top of that, men from this time that are found to have committed the crime of adultery are put to death. This is a one time punishment and they are not forced to live the rest of their lives with a symbol that shows everyone that they have sinned. This leads to a difference between this novel and “The Crucible,” the author of The Scarlet Letter actually made Hester have some real character, meaning she was willing to accept that she did something wrong and decided to live with the consequences, whereas Abigail from from “The Crucible” instantly gives up her values to get what she wants.
So, immediately jumping into Hester’s situation, it can be seen that she is treated very differently from how a man in her situation would be treated.

The example of this shared in the paragraph before is that she is not put to death, like a man would be, but she is instead forced to wear a symbol of her sin with her for the rest of her life. This direct quote from John Winthrop tells of how adultery is to be punished, “At this court of assistants one James Britton, a man ill affected both to our church discipline and civil government, and one Mary Latham, a proper young woman about 18 years of age, whose father was a godly man and had brought her up well, were condemned to die for adultery” (Price). This means that the treatment of Hester is even worse than most other women! They thought of her crime as so much worse that they decided to create a new and more degrading punishment just for her. Because of how they decided to deal with her, it can be said that they definitely had some bias against women in this particular part of the new world. They must see women, or at least her, as people who need to be shown that they are lesser and the best way for them to do this is to find new and more embarrassing ways to punish

them.
Another aspect of Hester’s story is different from one of a man is with her child.

The Puritans are extremely religious and want to make sure that every person follows their guidelines as closely as possible. The thing that is odd about this in Hester case is that they allow her to keep her child. There is a scene in which Pearl, Hester’s child, is asked to recite the Christian Catechism. The result is not great and this is an excerpt from a talk that Reverend Wilson had with Hester after the fact, “Speak thou, the child’s own mother! Were it not, thinkest thou, for they little one’s temporal and eternal welfare that she be taken out of thy charge, and clad soberly, and disciplined strictly, and instructed in the truths of heaven and earth? What canst thou do for the child in this kind?” (Hawthorne). The quote depicts the two of them fighting and how Wilson thinks Pearl should be taken because she is a soul that should be made into a Puritan. Hester, in the end, is able to keep her, but the theory is that she was allowed to do this only because Pearl is a girl. If this is the case, then it only further proves that they devalue the lives of women. One must imagine how they church officials would have reacted if this child was a boy. Puritan men can grow up to be leaders and ministers, and this means that they must all be raised in the most strict and Puritan way possible. Women, on the other hand, don’t have the same ‘career paths’ as men. They are mostly left at home and

have little say in anything related to the community. Because this is the case, the officials of the church likely said something along the lines of “this child will turn out to be nothing of importance anyway, let her be tainted by her corrupt mother.” This is just another glaring example of how the Puritan community was undeniably anti-woman.
The last and final point to make is on a much more positive note and shows that the author has respect for women. It is that Hester is by far the strongest character in the story and this is shown time and time again. The first time this is made obvious is with how she altered her letter. She knew that she would have to deal with this for the rest of her days and decided to find a way to make it better, but the examples don’t stop there. Later she is told that she is not a good enough parent to keep Pearl, but she talks the Reverend into allowing her to keep Pearl and teach Pearl. Even after that, when the end of the novel comes around, it is revealed that she never left her home in the new world and never removed the letter because she knew that she had sinned and was willing to accept that. A quote from Bell emphasizes this, “In the end, Hester could have lived out her life in freedom in distant England. But by returning alone, Pearl having grown up and married, she can recover the prophetic mission she once put aside for her small child's sake.”
In closing, Hester’s life as a puritan was very difficult because she had to deal with many people who thought of her as not because of one small mistake that she made. On the flip side of that, Abigail was able to make her life go in a way the better benefitted her because of how little smarts women were assumed to have. The two characters are very different, but in both stories they are oppressed by the men and are forced to fight for every ounce of respect that they had.