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LI. Hawthorne's Hester and Feminism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

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Extract

When G. P. Lathrop wrote his A Study of Hawthorne (1876) he found it necessary, in discussing the interpretation of The Scarlet Letter, to protest against the identification of Hawthorne's own beliefs with those given to Hester. Lathrop's protest—which has not much affected subsequent criticism—was directed against a violent review by Arthur Cleveland Coxe, one of three early reviews which mark the beginning of a persistent misapprehension (as it seems to me) in the interpretation of The Scarlet Letter. It has almost become a convention to insist that Hawthorne means to advocate a new standard of sex morality in passages like Hester's words: “What we did had a consecration of its own. We felt it so ! We said so to each other!” Austin Warren has found sufficient reason to point out again that Hawthorne is careful to characterize the rebellion of Hester as the rebellion of one who “had wandered without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness,” and that Hawthorne careful to say that “Her intellect and heart had their home ... in desert places.... Shame, Despair, Solitude ! These had been her teachers ... and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 54 , Issue 3 , September 1939 , pp. 825 - 827
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1939

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References

1 G. P. Lathrop, A Study of Hawthorne (Boston, 1876), pp. 214–222.

2 George B. Loring, Massachusetts Quarterly Review, iii (September, 1850), 484–500; Orestes Brownson, Brownson's Quarterly Review, new series iv (October, 1850), 528–532; Arthur Cleveland Coxe, “The Writings of Hawthorne,” Church Review, iii (New Haven, January, 1851), 489–511. Lathrop incorrectly says (op. cit., p. 222) that Loring's review followed and answered Coxe's but it seems likely that Coxe's attack was in reality inspired; by Loring's review. See Coxe, loc. cit., p. 503 and M. D. Conway, Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne (London, 1895), p. 130. The difference between the two reviews is not a matter of interpretation, but one of attitude.

3 The Scarlet Letter, p. 234. (References are to the Riverside edition of Hawthorne.) For examples of the identification of Hester's words and Hawthorne's own attitude see Conway, op. cit., pp. 130–131; George E. Woodberry, Nathaniel Hawthorne (Boston, 1902), pp. 197–198; Lloyd Morris, The Rebellious Puritan (New York, 1927), pp. 229–230; Carl Van Doren, The American Novel (New York, 1933), pp. 90–92; John Erskine, C.H.A.L., ii, 26–27. Morris's discussion is an extreme example.

4 The Scarlet Letter, pp. 239–240. See Warren, Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York, 1934), p.xxxiv.

5 Warren, p. xxix.

6 Transcendentalism in New England (New York, 1876), p. 175.—The actual movement for women's political and economic rights seems to have grown more immediately out of the antislavery movement See C. R. Fish, The Rise of the Common Man 1830–1850 (New York, 1935), pp. 270–271. Of course feminism was not entirely new in the forties.

7 The Scarlet Letter, pp 198–201.

8 Hawthorne (Boston, 1929), pp. 188–189.

9 Hawthorne compares Hester to Ann Hutchinson (p. 199). In “Mrs. Hutchinson,” one of Hawthorne's early essays, he says: “We will not look for a living resemblance of Mrs. Hutchinson, though the search might not be altogether fruitless. But there are portentous indications, Changes gradually taking place in the habits and feelings of the gentle sex, which seem to threaten our posterity with many of those public women, whereof one was burden too grievous for our fathers” (Sketches, p. 217). The question recurs in Hawthorne's last period, and in Septimius Pelton he makes Sibyl Dacy speculate upon what she will do for women in the aeons of existence Septimius promises her. But at the end of her questioning she finds no answer: “And then if, after all this investigation, it turns out—as I suspect—that woman is not capable of being helped, that there is something inherent in herself that makes it hopeless to struggle for her redemption, then what shall I do? Nay, I know not” (p. 406). Compare Hawthorne's remarks on women novelists, Caroline Ticknor, Hawthorne and his Publisher (Boston, 1913), pp. 141–142.

10 The Blithedale Romance, pp. 456–457.