The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel Hawthorne - 1641 Words

The Scarlet Letter is a story about a woman, Hester Prynne, who painfully lived her life in shame because of the adultery she committed in a1840s American colony. The way she and the other characters conducted themselves after the reveal of Hester’s baby all show a deeper meaning into what kind of person each character was, which can be interpreted in many ways. The story was written by a man named Nathaniel Hawthorne, only about a decade after his story took place, which meant that society in his time and in the time of the novel were nearly identical. Hawthorne was born in 1804 and lived in Massachusetts for his whole life. He began writing when he was in college and became known for novels like The Hollow of the Three Hills, An Old†¦show more content†¦Men dominated the household, went to school, and had many more rights than the women did. They could own property, while the women could not. Women were raised on the idea that their purpose in life was to get marrie d, serve their husband, and birth many children. If she remained single, she would be ridiculed by society. Even when a woman would marry a man, he had rights to all of her inheritance and everything the woman owned. Women also didn’t really get the privilege of an education unless they were a higher-class woman, and they would only be trained in the basics. Men could do basically anything they so pleased and women could get in trouble for simply speaking out of line. The life of a woman in the 1800s could be thought of as slavery in some eyes, and this affected how each character conducted themselves in The Scarlet Letter. The most prominent character was Hester Prynne, and she acted more like a civilized, masculine person than any of the actual men in this novel. Her actions and thoughts could almost be considered proto-feministic. On e piece of evidence of this was the way she mothered Pearl; Hester was her mother and her father because of Dimmesdale’s lack of prese nce, and she was strong and stood up for her baby, who the townspeople accused of being the devil. She took the role of the mother, the father, and the protector of her child. This is significant because out of all the women in