“Between Passion and Sin: A postmodern Feminist Approach to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter”

Keeping aside all the established theories of genre traditions the postmodern feminist approach to woman’s attitude toward the social restrictions and religious canons, can be analyzed in order to find the real identity of nineteenth century American woman. Such restrictions have affected her passions; derived her real happiness and freedom beyond the man made moral and religious systems of marriage and post-marital life. Man’s systems of morality and hypocrisy tampered the womanhood and her privacy to choose a life beyond her tolerance and patience. The feminist approach to woman strongly opposes the socio-religious and Andocentric hegemony over woman’s natural choice of life. The postmodern feminist perspective of dividing woman from man created and stereotyped position. It can also be analyzed from a postmodern feminist argument.

Introduction:

Feminism is inseparable from postmodernism. Most of the research in social sciences was, in fact, carried out by feminists in the latter half of the twentieth century. Many feminists discarded the eighteenth century liberal feminism and responded to the fundamental philosophical discourses in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. In the postmodern period feminist observations and discourses have became prominent.

The postmodern feminists refused all the male centered theories related to truth, reality and traditions, etc. They do not accept the universality of ideals of philosophy, reason and theory that have been politically promoted against woman’s ideology. They consider them as theories popularized by men and woman’s experience, ideology and paradigms have never been part of all major established theories. They also deny modernism which has been projected by male centered in ...

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