Hester's Rebellion And Return In Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

Hester Prynne is the heroine in The Scarlet Letter written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of the most significant writers of the romantic period in American literature. In the story Hester rebels courageously against the Puritan patriarchal society; but the influence of Puritanism on her mind forces her to return to the traditional social mores in the end. Hester's experiences of rebellion and return reveal the author's ambiguity and even ambivalence towards the feminist consciousness represented by Hester in the then male-centered culture.The story is set in the 17^th century colonial Boston ruled by the Puritans. The heroine Hester attempts to seek for true love and rights at the risk of violating her loveless marriage vows and in defiance of the Puritan moral laws. Her bold conducts are tolerable in no way in the society that was stern and repressive with little room for individualism. Inevitably Hester has had to pay great price for her transgression and is punished severely and condemned to wear the scarlet letter "A" on her chest as a permanent sign of her sin. However, during her long-time lonely existence, the feminist sense in her mind becomes intense increasingly so that she transcends her personal tragedy and comes to think about the change of society. Her goal is to subvert the conception of binary oppositions of man and woman in the male-dominated culture. But it is a pity that she lives in a dark society like that in the Middle Ages; she is brought up in a Puritan society and has been instilled in the puritanical code of law and Puritanical beliefs; it is impossible for her to be the precursor of breaking free from imposed constraints and constructing the new social institutes. Paradoxically, on one hand, she is in her persistent pursuit of her romantic goal; on the other hand, she cannot but go close toward the Puritan ideas about human nature and life. Finally Hester, after she leaves America for a time, returns to the place where she was punished and willingly resumes the imposed symbol of her guilt and shame. This suggests that she succumbs to the Puritan community. Hester's return, in my view, marks the end of her life-time struggle against the Puritan patriarchy.Hester's struggling process from rebellion to return indicates that the author is extremely perplexed while portraying the conflicting character Hester. It betrays clearly between the lines. Living in a period when capitalism was developing rapidly and the social structure was undergoing great changes, the author Hawthorne extols Hester's rebellion and sympathizes with her sufferings; meanwhile Hawthorne is influenced by Puritanism, Transcendentalism and mysterious philosophy and he adheres to patriarchal ideology and Puritanism about the original sin, he cannot get rid of his own deeply-rooted thought of patriarchy, evaluating women from a male perspective and emphasizing unconsciously Puritan morality. In a sense, the coexistence of the dynamic women's liberation movement for freedom and the repressive intellectual climate of his time contribute together to Hawthorne's hesitation at dealing with the opposite relationship between maintaining social order and pursuing individual freedom. It is just Hawthorne's ambivalence that produces the tragic description of Hester's rebellion against the conventions and return to it once again.Hawthorne supports women in regard of true love and rights and protests against discrimination and inequality against women while he endorses women's submission, renunciation and devotion. The present paper will explore Hawthorne's ambivalent attitudes to feminism presented by Hester in The Scarlet Letter.