Text 1: Nina Baym's "Revisiting Hawthorne's Feminism" In this essay I swim against the tide to argue - again - for Hawthorne as a feminist writer from The Scarlet Letter onward. ... My readings have been contested, debated, revised, extended; the idea of Hawthorne as a feminist has been overwhelmingly rejected. In what follows I'll describe my original positions, summarize the important critical challenges to them, and finally - in view of these challenges - propose the idea of a feminist Hawthorne anew. ... I proposed that as the fiction increasingly centered on sympathetic women characters struggling against a murderous male authority, Hawthorne frequently contrasted such characters to an alternative female type. This structure deployed the traditional literary contrast between "dark" and "fair" ladies. ... In proposing Hester as the novel's protagonist ...I was not offering a new reading but reviving an approach... The "Miller" line understood Hawthorne to be writing about Puritan theology from a perspective close to Puritans themselves, and criticizing his own culture for foolish optimism about human nature. This approach assumed that Arthur Dimmesdale was The Scarlet Letter's protagonist. If The Scarlet Letter retold Genesis, Hester was the temptress Eve; if it retold Puritan history, she was Anne Hutchinson. ... Hester was no more than a sexual and doctrinal temptress whose scheming led poor Arthur Dimmesdale, the novel's beset hero, astray. Having interpreted the novel as a story about Hester... I then reread "The Custom-House" as an autobiographical allegory about a blocked artist breaking out by identifying with an imaginary, stigmatized woman ("The Romantic Malgre Lui," 1973). When "Hawthorne" wanders into the upper floors of the Custom-House, finds the letter, puts it on his chest, and feels it burn, he is saying in several senses, "this is my character." He associates the creative flood that sweeps him out of the Custom-House backwater with the life force inhering in this admirable woman. For, as the novel unfolds, the letter intended by the Authorities to signify something entirely different - able, admirable. ... I interpreted Arthur Dimmesdale as Hester's foil - weak, orthodox, conventional - and as her temptation rather than his. As an actor in his own story, Dimmesdale, like so many other Hawthorne male characters, rejects the woman at his cost as well as hers. In The Scarlet Letter, oppression or rejection of women, rather than the surrender to them, led to male downfall. Text 2: Donna D. Simms' "Be True: Moral Dilemma in The Scarlet Letter" The appeal of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter rests to a large degree on his psychological portraits of the adulterous lovers, Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale. ...after Arthur has confessed his sin on the scaffold and is about to die, we see his and Hester's radically different interpretations of a shared experience. They have loved one another unlawfully and suffered as a result; but Hawthorne makes it clear that they each understand their love differently and that, moreover, there is no way to resolve their conflict. Hester's " 'surely we have ransomed one another' " shows that she clings to the possibility of a relationship, if only in the afterlife; Arthur, on the other hand, having finally confessed, holds fast to principles that forbid a relationship with Hester. ... Gilligan's theory of two moral orientations, and its elaboration by Lyons, is clearly applicable to Hawthorne's protagonists. In the scaffold speeches... , Hester's expectation that they will " 'meet again'" and her fear of abandonment are pitted against Arthur's obsession with the " 'law [that] was broke'" and his fear of this threating relationship. It is Hawthorne's master-stroke in The Scarlet Letter not only to have based his case study in moral decision making on adultery, but to have localized this conflict in the relationship between the lovers themselves. The fact that Arthur only sees the broken law and Hester only sees the broken relationship illustrates just how "judgment depends on which way the problem is framed" (Gilligan 167). Clearly, the one character most fears what the other most desires. As one would expect, given the Patriarchal Puritan setting, Arthur's voice is dominant in this dialogue, and his " 'hush'" carries into eternity his negation of their connection. Hester is left with only the discouraging crumb of his " 'maybe' " to give her hope. Text 3: Andrea Seabrook's "Hester Prynne: Sinner, Victim, Object, Winner" Hester Prynne, protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne's masterwork The Scarlet Letter, is among the first and most important female protagonists in American literature. She's the embodiment of deep contradictions: bad and beautiful, holy and sinful, conventional and radical. At first glance, Hester may seem more victim than heroine. The adultery she committed when her husband was thought lost at sea leads Boston's Puritan authorities to brand her with the bright red "A" of the 2 title. She's forced to stand in shame before the mass of Puritan citizens, enduring their stares, their whispers and their contempt. In the self-righteous eyes of the townspeople, she is the ultimate example of sin. Hester Prynne is also the object of a cruel and shadowy love triangle between herself her minister lover, Arthur Dimmesdale, and her husband, now called Roger Chillingworth. "The drama is really the drama of the patriarchal society's need to control female sexuality in the most basic way," says Evan Carton, literature professor at the University of Texas, Austin. "This classic male anxiety: How do you know for s don't know if your woman and your child aHawthorne's protagonists. In the scaffold speeches... , Hester's expectation that they will " 'meet again' " and her fear of abandonment are pitted against Arthur's obsession with the " law [that] was broke' " and his fear of this threating relationship. It is Hawthorne's master-stroke in The Scarlet Letter not only to have ' case study in moral decision making on adultery, but to have localized this conflict in the relation the lovers themselves. The fact that Arthur only sees the broken law and Hester only sees the bi 3 of 3 relationship illustrates just how "judgment depends on which way the problem is framed" (Gilligan 107). Clearly, the one character most fears what the other most desires. As one would expect, given the Patriarchal Puritan setting, Arthur's voice is dominant in this dialogue, and his " hush' " carries into eternity his negation of their connection. Hester is left with only the discouraging crumb of his " 'maybe' " to give her hope. Text 3: Andrea Seabrook's "Hester Prynne: Sinner, Victim, Object, Winner" Hester Prynne, protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne's masterwork The Scarlet Letter, is among the first and most important female protagonists in American literature. She's the embodiment of deep contradictions: bad and beautiful, holy and sinful, conventional and radical. At first glance, Hester may seem more victim than heroine. The adultery she committed when her husband was thought lost at sea leads Boston's Puritan authorities to brand her with the bright red "A" of the 2 title. She's forced to stand in shame before the mass of Puritan citizens, enduring their stares, their whispers and their contempt. In the self-righteous eyes of the townspeople, she is the ultimate example of sin. Hester Prynne is also the object of a cruel and shadowy love triangle between herself her minister lover, Arthur Dimmesdale, and her husband, now called Roger Chillingworth. "The drama is really the drama of the patriarchal society's need to control female sexuality in the most basic way," says Evan Carton, literature professor at the University of Texas, Austin. "This classic male anxiety: How do you know for sure whether your baby is yours? If you don't know if your woman and your child are actually yours, then you have no control over property, no control over social order, no control over anything - and that's the deep radical challenge that Hester presents to this society." American was in the midst of a growing feminist movement when Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter. Professor Jamie Barlowe, of the University of Toledo, says that Hawthorne - living in Salem, Boston and later Concord, Mass. - "was very, very aware of the growing feminist insurgence. Women's rights were a part of the cultural conversation." The first women's-rights convention at Seneca Falls, N.Y. , was held in 1848, two years before The Scarlet Letter was published. Strong women like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were gathering other women to talk about science, politics, and ideas. For the first time in America, women were challenging the firmly established male patriarchy. Hester Prynne can be seen as Hawthorne's literary contemplation of what happens when women break cultural bounds and gain personal power. In The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne may seem a victim and an object, but she also shows great personal strength. She survives. Hester builds a small business doing embroidery-work. She raises her daughter, Pearl, by herself, fighting to keep her when authorities try to take the child away. Over the year, Hester gains the respect of other women in Boston, becoming something of a quiet confidant for them. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John Updike says the book still makes him cry. He describes a scene where Hester meets Dimmesdale in the forest and implores him to run away with her. "First she throws away the scarlet letter," Updike recalls. "Then, quote, 'By another impulse, she took off the formal cap that confined her hair; and down it fell upon her shoulders, dark and rich, with at once a shadow and a light in its abundance and imparting the charm of softness to her features.' "How wonderful, the power of the hair," Updike says. Updike wrote three novels of his own based on the characters of The Scarlet Letter; they're often called Updike's Hawthorne Trilogy. The final one, titled simply S., is the story of a 20th century version of Hester Prynne. Updike says Hester is "fun to write about, because she was so irrepresible." "She's such an arresting and slightly ambiguous figure," he says. "She's a funny mix of a truly liberated, defiantly sexual woman, but in the end a woman who accepts the penance that society imposed on her. And I don't know, I suppose she's an epitome of female predicaments." Professor Barlowe says that how a reader feels about Hester Prynne "will have something to do with how that individual person sees women as functioning, or ways they should function." So, just as Hester is a vessel for the feelings and actions of the men who surround her in the book, she's also a mirror, revealing the true feelings of the reader about the role of women in society. At the end of her life, Hester Prynne chooses to live in Boston and to continue to wear that red letter "A" on her breast, long after she has fulfilled her punishment. "Never afterwards did it quit her bosom," Hawthorne writes. "But, in the lapse of the toilsome, thoughtful, and self-devoted years that made up Hester's life, the scarlet letter ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world's scorn and bitterness, and became a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence too." It becomes a symbol, in other words, that throughout her life she wore her sin bravely, out in the open, on her chest. All the contradictions of Hester Prynne - guilt and honesty, sin and holiness, sex and chastity make her an enduring heroine of American literature. She is flawed, complex, and above all fertile. 3