Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) was an author, critic, editor
and teacher who "possessed more influence on the
thought of American women than any woman previous to her
time" [1]. She contributed significantly to the
American Renaissance in literature and to mid-nineteenth
century reform movements. A brilliant and highly educated
member of the Transcendentalist group, she challenged
Ralph Waldo Emerson both intellectually and emotionally.
Women who attended her "conversations" and many
men of her time found Fuller's influence life-changing.
Her major work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century
published in 1845, profoundly affected the women's rights
movement which had its formal beginning at Seneca Falls,
New York, three years later.
Hester Prynne is the protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne's
romantic novel, The Scarlet Letter, which is set
in seventeenth-century Puritan New England. As a young
woman, Hester married an elderly scholar, Roger
Chillingworth, who sent her ahead to America to live but
never followed. While waiting for him, she had an affair
with a Puritan minister named Dimmesdale, after which she
gave birth to Pearl. Found guilty of adultery (through
the absence of her husband and the birth of Pearl),
Hester is punished by being forced to wear a scarlet
letter 'A' (which stands for Adultery) on her bosom for
the rest of her life. This transforms Hester into "a
living sermon against sin" [2]. Hester is
immediately ostracised from the stern community and
endures years of shame, scorn and loneliness. Hester is
passionate but also strong and equals both her husband
and her lover in her intelligence and thoughtfulness. Her
alienation puts her in the position to make acute
observations about her community, particularly about its
treatment of women.
So, is there a link between these two women? Hester is a
fictional character, from a novel set in seventeenth-century
Puritan New England who is shunned from her community as
punishment for her adulterous crime/sin. Margaret Fuller
was a highly educated writer and critic who played an
important role in the American Renaissance in literature
and to mid-nineteenth century reform movements. The
similarities are not initially apparent, so it is
necessary to take a closer look at these two women. The
purpose of the central part of this essay is to determine
how far Hester Prynne is as much a woman of mid-nineteenth
century American culture as she is of seventeenth-century
Puritan New England. How far ahead of her time were her
actions?
In the statement which forms the sub-title of this essay,
it is said that Hester Prynne, in certain respects, is
endowed with the sensibility of Margaret Fuller. A
definition of the word "sensibility" may be
useful in our understanding of the question: "Sensibility:
1a) Openness to emotional impressions, susceptibility,
sensitiveness (sensibility to kindness) b) An exceptional
or excessive degree of this. 2a) Emotional capacities or
feelings b) a person's moral, emotional, or aesthetic
ideas or standards (NB It does not mean "possession
of common sense, reasonableness.)" [3]. We know that
Hester possesses these qualities because they are
displayed in her kind deeds, for example, we are told
that
as Hester
Prynne had no selfish ends, nor lived in any measure
for her own profit and enjoyment, people brought all
their sorrows and perplexities, and besought her
counsel . . . Hester comforted and counselled them,
as best she might. [4]
She is forced
to suppress her own emotional needs because there was no
room for this kind of expression in the strict community.
Life was centred on a rigid Puritan society in which no
one was able to divulge their innermost thoughts and
secrets:
Puritanism
was not only a religious creed, it was a philosophy
and a metaphysic; it was an organization of man's
whole life, emotional and intellectual, to a degree
which has not been sustained by any denomination
stemming from it. [5]
As stated
above, Puritans were noted for a spirit of moral and
religious earnestness that informed their whole way of
life. In the New England Puritan colonies, law and
religion were entangled without any clear distinction
between the two. A "hard-featured dame" says of
Hester Prynne:
This
woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die.
Is there not law for it? Truly there is, both in the
Scripture and the statute-book. [6]
Hawthorne
believed that man, to establish and enjoy a normal
relationship with his world, must live in harmony with
his fellow beings and with nature. If man does not
respect the bond of love crucial to coexistence and
accept the view that all men are united in a brotherhood
of imperfection, and if he does not adopt nature as an
inspirational and stabilizing force in his life, he lives
a sub-human existence - so self-centred as to be at odds
with other people and with external nature. Hawthorne's
religious enthusiasts (Puritans), conscious only of their
spiritual goals, violate the bond with man and nature
essential to living a normal life.
Every human being needs the opportunity to express their
feelings, otherwise the emotions are bottled up until
they become unstable. It is almost as if the possessed
physician, Roger Chillingworth, has trapped a volatile
chemical (the secret of Dimmesdale's adultery) inside a
vial (Dimmesdale) and now waits for the inevitable
explosion (the revelation). Reverend Dimmesdale's pent-up
feelings of guilt and shame became hazardous to his
health,
In Mr.
Dimmesdale's secret closet, under lock and key, there
was a bloody scourge . . . his brain often reeled,
and visions seemed to flit before him. [7]
Unfortunately,
Puritan society did not permit any kind of emotional
expression, thus characters had to seek alternate means
to relieve their personal anguishes and desires. Luckily,
for at least four of the main characters, Hawthorne
provides a sanctuary in the form of the mysterious forest.
In the deep, dark portions of the forest, many of the
pivotal characters bring forth hidden thoughts and
emotions. It provides an escape from the strict mandates
of law and religion, to a refuge where men, as well as
women, can open up and be themselves. It is only here
that Hester and Dimmesdale can openly engage in
conversation without being preoccupied with the
constraints that Puritan society places on them. The
forest itself is the very embodiment of freedom. Nobody
watches in the woods to report misbehaviour, and Hester
takes advantage of this, when Arthur Dimmesdale appears.
She openly talks with Dimmesdale about subjects which
could never be mentioned in any place other than the
forest. "What we did . . . " she reminds him,
"had a consecration of its own. We felt it so!"
[8]. This statement shocks Dimmesdale, and he tells
Hester to hush, until he realises that he is in an
environment where he can openly convey his feelings. The
forest also brings out the natural appearance and natural
personality of people. When Hester takes off her cap and
unloosens her hair, we see a new person. We see the real
Hester, who has been hidden for years under a shield of
shame. Her eyes grow radiant and a flush comes to her
cheek. We recognise her as the Hester from Chapter One.
The beautiful woman who is not afraid to reveal her dark,
flowing locks and display her beauty. This dramatic
transformation of Hester after she discards the
constricting shackles of law and Puritanism and embraces
the liberation provided by the natural world shows how
harsh and crippling Puritan society could be to one's
inner self.
On a more positive note, the suffering which Hester went
through qualified her as spokesman of the frustrations
and joys of human relationships: "She might, in one
of her phases, have been a prophetess." [9]. Working
from the definition of a prophetess as simply one who is
gifted with extraordinary moral insight, Hester's gospel
was nothing more hopeful or pessimistic than the
existential "endure". We do not have a record
of her specific counsel to suffering women, yet it would
seem that her role in the community of tormented souls
was to inspire by her presence (and therefore, her
survival) rather than her oratory an awareness that human
experience has in it an element of suffering, and that
conflicts between self and community, between personal
will and moral law, are inevitable.
This sentiment of nature being in opposition to religion
was echoed in the twentieth century by the revolutionary
Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis,
Sigmund Freud, who was no friend to the religious impulse
in human beings. Freud felt that the only way for society
to progress was to recognise and acknowledge its
libidinal and aggressive impulses. He believed that
civilisation - the sum total of all our complicated
structures of culture, law, religion and society - arose
through the learned repression of individual instinctual
urges, and that these individual desires are always at
odds with the regulations, institutions and laws of
society which force them to heel. In Freud's account the
civilised 'moral' human being is obviously a repressive
formation. People are, in reality, bubbling cauldrons of
violent and sexual desires waiting to boil over.
Civilisation is imagined as holding back, rather than
moving forward. The Scarlet Letter appears to
adhere to this theory - we are told that:
Hester
fancied . . . that the scarlet letter had endowed her
with a new sense. She shuddered to believe, yet could
not help believing, that it gave her a sympathetic
knowledge of the hidden sin in others' hearts. [10]
In addition
to this, we learn, towards the end of the novel, that
"women, more especially, - in the continually
recurring trials of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced,
or erring and sinful passion, - or with the dreary burden
of a heart unyielded, because unvalued and unsought,-
came to Hester's cottage, demanding why they were so
wretched, and what the remedy!" [11]. So, Hester was
not the only sinner of the village, yet she was the only
person punished, and was made to feel alienated and
abnormal. It was this alienation that put Hester in a
unique position. She was able to look upon society from
its precipice, and make acute observations about the
community, particularly about its treatment of women.
Margaret Fuller is described in a similar way by Charles
Capper, in An American Romantic Life:
A
seemingly ubiquitous, modern American intellectual
figure . . . a conflicted, alienated, avant-garde
thinker who, despite or because of her alienation,
looked hopefully to popular, world-historical
transformations. [12]
In the space
of a few years, she became America's female intellectual
prophet, challenging the whole "masculine"-"feminine"
dichotomy on which the official gender culture was based.
The life of Margaret Fuller was the kind of life that
Hester Prynne dreamed of living. Given her situation,
however, she deemed the revolution of society, and the
revolution of woman's place in that society "a
hopeless task before her." [13].
Towards the end of the novel, she no longer believes that
she is worthy to be that destined prophetess, since she
has,
Long
since recognised the impossibility that any mission
of divine and mysterious truth should be confined to
a woman stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or
even burdened with a life-long sorrow. The angel and
apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman,
indeed, but lofty, pure, and beautiful; and wise,
moreover, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal
medium of joy. [14]
Hester denies
that she can be a prophetess, reasoning that she is
burdened by her tarnished reputation and suffering. This
is ironic because it is the misery that she has endured
and her estranged position in the community that have
enabled her to examine society from a different
perspective, and make insightful observations, such as:
In Heaven's
own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to
establish the whole relationship between man and
woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness. [15]
Perhaps
Hester deserves the title of prophetess more than she
thinks. Who knows what she could have achieved for the
rights of women and social reformation had she lived in
the nineteenth century, and, like Margaret Fuller "spent
most of her waking hours reading, thinking, and writing"?
[16]. Obviously we will never know because there are far
too many 'ifs', yet I believe that in the right
circumstances, Hester Prynne could have been a
revolutionary. The tragedy of The Scarlet Letter
is Hester's repression by the Puritanical "intolerant
brood" [17]. Without these suffocating constraints,
her intellect could have blossomed. Just as women who
attended Margaret Fuller's "conversations"
found her influence life-changing, the women of Hester
Prynne's community came to her home for advice and
comfort in times of hardship and frustration at society.
With a little imagination, it is not difficult to see
Hester transformed several hundred years into our own
present, conducting something like a seminar in women's
liberation. Hester has learned how society deprives women,
and her advice for those who seek it is going to involve
woman's self-preservation and methods by which a
repressive society can be circumvented by true, if
unlawful, lovers.
At the end of the novel, when given the chance to discard
the scarlet letter which has brought her so much misery
over the years, she chooses to resume wearing it. This
seems like a very puzzling action, until we realise that
the scarlet letter "has ceased to be a stigma which
attracted the world's scorn and bitterness" [18],
and instead, has become a symbol of hope, endurance and
"reverence" [19] for the people of the New
England community.
Another parallel between these two women is the way they
placed their own best judgement before any religious
doctrine. It has been said of Margaret Fuller:
necessary
to her was the untrammelled exercise of critical
judgement, and the thinking of her own thoughts,
instead of accepting those of other people. We may
feel sure that Margaret, even to save her own soul,
would not and could not have followed any confession
of faith in opposition to her own best judgement. [20]
Hester Prynne
shows this defiant characteristic when Governor
Bellingham tells her that it would be in Pearl's best
interests if she were to be taken away from her mother,
"clad soberly" and "disciplined strictly".
She protests passionately, declaring: "Ye shall not
take her! I will die first!" [21]. Up until this
point, Hester has accepted the punishment chosen for her,
but to take Pearl away would be crossing the line, and
Hester stands up for herself and her belief that Pearl
would be better off with her mother, and indeed, that she,
Hester would be better off with Pearl ("Had they
taken her from me, I would willingly have gone with thee
into the forest, and signed my name in the Black Man's
book." [22]
I believe that Hester Prynne is as much a woman of mid-nineteenth
century American culture as she is of seventeenth-century
Puritan New England. If she had not been repressed by the
stringent society in which she lived, then the world
could truly have been her oyster. Of course, the question
of what she could have accomplished had she lived in a
different era is an impossible one, but there are signs
throughout the novel that Hester's ideas for social
reform are far ahead of her own time. We empathise with
the tragedy of her situation, but at the same time, it
would be possible to say that Hester is the
prophetess she aspired to be, and it is she who is
speaking words of her unworthiness, not Hawthorne. The
motif that suffering converted into insight can indeed
ennoble and make one wiser is recurrent in Hawthorne's
works. Despite their different backgrounds, Hester Prynne
and Margaret Fuller seem to have had similar characters.
Both suffered alienation during their lifetimes, and both
realised injustices in society as a result of this
isolation. The main difference between them was that
Margaret Fuller had the opportunity to express her ideas,
i.e. she had a voice in her society, whereas Hester, a
woman stained by sin, had no chance of becoming a
prophetess in the eyes of her village.
Endnotes
1 History of Woman Suffrage, Susan B. Anthony and
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1881
2 The Scarlet Letter. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oxford World's
Classics, 1990
3 The Concise Oxford Dictionary, Ninth Edition, 1996
4 The Scarlet Letter, p.263
5 Puritanism in Early America, edited by George M. Waller,
p.6
6 The Scarlet Letter, p.53
7 Ibid. p.144-5
8 Ibid. p.195
9 Ibid. p.165
10 Ibid. p.86
11 Ibid. p.263
12 Charles Capper, in An American Romantic Life. p.ix.
13 The Scarlet Letter, p.165.
14 Ibid. p.263
15 Ibid. p.263
16 An American Romantic Life, p. xi
17 The Scarlet Letter, p.94
18 Ibid. p.263
19 Ibid. p.263
20 Margaret Fuller, Julia Ward Howe, 1889
21 The Scarlet Letter, p.113
22 Ibid. p.117
Bibliography
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. History of
Woman Suffrage, 1881
Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Scarlet Letter, Oxford World's
Classics, 1990
The Concise Oxford Dictionary, Ninth Edition, 1996
George M. Waller, (Ed). Puritanism in Early America
Charles Capper. An American Romantic Life
Julia Ward Howe. Margaret Fuller. 1889
© April
2003, Emma Jones
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